I played Roll though the ages a few weeks ago and I decided that it might be the solution to my game: Use a dice system to abstract many of the details of civilization management. The only difference is that I will have a map.
Now I designed a system lately and I just want some feedback. Each turn, players roll 5 dice of different colors. Each die represent a certain civilization field like: Civil, Military, Empire, Economy, Ressources, etc. (other ideas are welcomed). Players may roll up to 3 times but 1 die must be kept at the end of each roll. Each roll of 6 is equal to 0 and it trigger a disaster in that field (ex: civil desaster creates revolts).
Each field would also have a minimum value, which is the minimum you can roll on that die unless you roll a 6. For example, if your min economy is 3, a roll of 1-2 will be considered as 3. Min value can be raised with various upgrades through the game. Each field would also have a level. If you roll > than your level, your level increase, if you roll lower, your level drops and equal nothing happens.
Now once your rolls are done, each field has a series of actions that can be performed. For example, the military field might allow you to draft more soldiers, buy new ships, or increase the quality of your army with new unit types. Each of these actions will have specific requirements like: Military roll needs to be 5+ and Economy level needs to be at least 3 to add knights to your army. Or you can bring in play a number of soldiers equal to the value of your roll. Etc.
Some requirements will be paid value that you need to have once, while other values might be maintenance values that you must keep at all time or lose what you have acquired. For example, maybe you need to always have an economy level of 3 to keep the knight into play.
To avoid some disasters or low die rolls, you might be able to force a roll to drop to 0, or force a disaster, in order to increase the value of another die. This could be explained as: You are lacking of resources, you can pillage your own cities, to get the missing ressources you need.
Right now, the systems seems pretty neat because:
A- You can influence values in different ways: Increase die roll, min value, level, or give extra re-rolls. Very usefull to implement various special abilities.
B- The system is independent to the number of action because the value of the die is not split between multiple actions. For example, drafting, building ships and hiring use the same military value even if you do 1 or all the actions. This allows the game to be simplified or expanded at will.
c- The dice rolling force your to keep certain bad roll to be able to re-roll others but if you push your luck too much, disasters will occur.
What do you think?
Right now, you have to keep all 6 that has been rolled. I will have to reconsider the odds unless the disasters are not too disastrous. Consider that some special powers will give free re-rolls.
As for the victory conditions, I have much greater victory condition, but one of the condition will consist in maxing all levels.
The next part right now is how to define a price to everything that can be done in the game.