>>1957623
>War is expensive, I've yet to play a game where this is the case.
The most costly I've ever seen war be portrayed as in a video game was in Seven Kingdoms 2, which is an RTS, not a 4X.

It's not "expensive" per se, in fact it's a decent way to make money. But it is costly in the sense that casualties are hard to replace because ot the population system. You've got your peasants who live in towns and are both the backbone of the economy and the army and you've got a very limited amount of them and their population growth is slow. You get your army by connecting a fort to your town and recruiting soldiers. You get your economy by connecting mines/factories/science buildings/temples to your town and recruiting workers. But you also need food so you need peasants who aren't recruited anywhere.

A starting town has like 60 peasants. You need 20 peasants for a full garrison of soldiers and 30 peasants to man all those other buildings. So if you attack someone and lose troops, they're very difficult to replace without crippling your economy. Also your fresh recruits suck at war so you wouldn't want to waste them on a rush. Idle time training in the fort increases their stats and survivability. But the same goes for others and the defender has an advantage because the forts put out good damage

The population of towns does grow, but it's slow. In most games you won't be able to replace more than a single war's worth of casualties. So if you get into more than one war before the endgame, you're fucked.

All that combined with a decent diplomacy system results in a game where it's in everyone's best interest to expand peacefully as long as they can and when the map is completely covered, do a bit of last minute diplomacy and then explode in an orgy of violence.

However this only applies if you're playing a game with more than two players, ideally a FFA. In 1v1 it's subject to the same metafagging every other RTS is. But most 4X games are technically a FFA anyway.

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How would you make asymmetrical warfare and playing as small nations without expanding work?