Uhh, sorry, but popular usage of the term simulator/sim does not really match yours, especially in the context of computer software. SimCity (it's got "sim" right in the name!) is a city simulator; do you not consider it to be a game as well?
That really depends... there is a very thick grey zone between a simulator and a game. Duke Nukem is obviously a game, and so is Medal of Honor... but MoH skirts the sim realm. Hawks is obviously a game, but I would never call Microsoft Flight Simulator a game (at least not at the higher difficulties). The problem is that realism isn't always fun, there is a reason people play games and that is to get away from real life. Realism drives Paradox games, but I have never found it to be an over-the-top realism. Things eventually have to be abstracted. Stability is not just a number between -3 and 3, research is not just a slider to be set at max and never moved again. There is a lot more to real life, but I don't see all that getting argued for. Victoria and Victoria II are very, very realistic... but they are also more of a cult favorite. If games were made to be 100% realistic, they wouldn't be popular except with a very narrow band of people, which is not the point of a game company, really.
My suggestion is drop this non-sense, let Paradox come out with their inevitably simpler (and better) system for culture. Then YOU guys can program yours in. I seriously believe you will not get very far due to lack of support, lack of interest, and lack of ability to implement what you are actually discussing.
Personally I found SimCity to only be fun when the unrealistic things were happening, like alien attacks. Other than that I found it dull, tedious, and more often then not out-right boring. Even that has very little realism, building take weeks, not years to build; you never have to be elected, problems are solved either by throwing money at the problem or demolishing a few buildings. I hardly count that as realism. SimEarth was even less realistic (but a better game).
Though I guess a game is defined more by the person. I find math to be fun, probably more fun then most "games". If given the choice to program or play a first person shooter I'll program any day. But I guess that the recent gaming industry is having a problem with the whole "realism" thing.
Realism should never do the following:
- Decrease the fun of a game; games should be fun. I don't care if handballs are a foul, I play FIFA11 for fun, not because I secretly wish I had been a pro-baller.
- Cause the programmers to pull their hair out. If they come to loathe their project it will show in the final product
- Exist solely to exist. Realism is a nice thing to brag about in the press release, but honestly... EUII sucked. True it was fun to try to challenge history... but it was so predictable. Austria would always be the big baddies, Burgundy stood no chance, Spain would win all the HRE elections.
- Remain completely unattached. There needs to be a reason for this to exist! This is a combination of all three of the above. If a programmer is going to spend time on it, it should be there for a reason, and that reason should be making the game fun. This means balancing, this means expanding upon old ideas in proactive ways. It does not mean overly complicated ideas suggested solely to name characters or take the place of human interaction with the game. At some point it must end, some amount of realism must be left behind. Ahistoric realism and permutations are usually the first thing to go. The programmers can only take into consideration so many alternate histories, and usually the best way to be fair about it is to ignore them all together (for the good of everyone).
Here is how your idea violates all of those:
1) Having so many cultures will probably slow the game down, especially if they have some sort of relations between one another. Slow, buggy games are a huge ire to players and programmers alike. Check out the player reactions to HoI III and Vicky II in their early stages. Slow games are not fun, because they become frustrating.
2) This will cause people to pull their hair out, especially if applied in such a way other than naming characters. If you really want people to go through making name for permutations of different cultures, they will go nuts, and then the effect might not even be seen in the game anyways because Scotland might not conquer Africa to begin with.
3) I think this has been proven pretty reliably. People keep begging the question:
what good is your system? And stop saying realism. I am serious. We get that it is more realistic, why is more realistic better? And don't say because it is more realistic, that isn't a proper response. What about the realism makes it better? What is it going to be used for? What can we do with it? Why is it going to be more useful? Why not just simplify it?
4) Since you, nor any of your (few) supporters can even think of something this can do in game (other than be used for names), I have to assume that you idea violates this clause. What exactly stops me from just assuming some of these things? In my AAR Croatian crusaders conquer Edessa and manage to hold it, and later other traditionally Arabic realms through the modern age. I knew, as well as you do, that they would not remain Croatian for long... in game they eventually became Arabic, but I knew that they were actually "Qurats", or Croatian-Arab, I didn't need a stupid model, I didn't need a pop up or a premade culture system to tell me this. This, children, is role playing; and apparently it is a dying art.
