Age of Empires is great, but the little d00dz are running around ALL the time, and it can get stressful, and frustrating when you want to arrange something JUST so.
Somehow, I've got DF and Minecraft lumped together in my head as similar - set me straight or whatever...
Also in some genres, there's no improvement. Why should I put big learing curves into other 4X TBS games for instance? Nobody's done better than SMAC. Frankly most haven't done nearly as good. Even if one goes space opera / star systems rather than planet based, I think I got off the bus at GalCiv II. When you've paid enough galactic credits to subvert enough entire star systems, what more is there to do?
Good food for thought on what "narrative depth" means, and that SMAC lacks it once you get past the midpoint of the game. But I do not believe that MMOs are the answer. King of Dragon Pass (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_of_Dragon_Pass) addressed many of these issues 20 years ago. They're finally working on a spiritual successor called Six Ages (https://www.sixages.com/). It should be out this year.
I have often wondered what a KoDP style of SMAC would be. I have found it difficult to think about SMAC's faction leaders as real flesh and blood characters because they should all be dead of old age in 50 years. Trying to reason about characters on the timescale of SMAC is like counting mayflies. One answer is to greatly shorten the timescale of what is dealt with. For instance, all important wars could take place in a period of a few years, and that's more realistic from the standpoint of moving units around. But what happens to the glorious tech tree that's part of the genre? The narrative of human evolution fades out.
As for Eve Online, I've been put off to even trying. I've heard it's just like real life, all the incumbents have the advantages of capitol and you're not going to gain their advantages. Sounds to me like a gamer's griefing pyramid scheme. I might change my mind if I heard any credible tale of "upward mobility" within the game's terms, that didn't take forever to enact. Having fatcats available to push me down, is something I can very much do in real life already, for real money and career purposes.
My historical objection to claims of "emergence" is I never really saw any in games I played, nor do I believe they existed in most games that people talked about. Rather, all game phenomena could have been reasonably anticipated by a game designer and probably were. I don't think there are that many inarticulate "whooa duuude" game designers out there, although it's possible that production teams on tight deadlines, might end up behaving as such.
A game with as much simulation as Dwarf Fortress does change the calculus of what could conceivably emerge, but I don't have experience with it, so my jury is out. I'm not convinced that "you can kill a king" is revelatory. The usual problem with killing kings, historically, is one having to forfeit one's own life to do so. People who were willing to do that, jolly well just up and did it from time to time. I think killing things is one of the more basic kinds of simulation that a game typically offers. Why should it be regarded as emergent meaning or action? Wouldn't shock me if I can kill squirrels too.
But what is the notable exhibition of 'emergence' in MMOs? The MMOs I have tried are all quite shallow. Granted, I didn't stick with any of them long, but I did manage say 80 hours of gameplay demoing them. You can do that if you've got a 10 day trial and you're lifeless. ;lol Never saw any emergence. I saw predictable time wasting experiences designed to get the developers their subscription money.
If the PCs hunted all of the predators in an area, the prey population would explode.
Notch Perrson,