andrergsanchez

An example of what I mean, in terms of tax rates. Now, let me simplify this by having just one tax rate for the whole country, regardless of sector, and no other elements. Higher tax rates would bring more revenue to the government, but would impact growth. So you either have a 10% tax rate with 20% economic growth per year, or a 50% tax rate with negative annual economic growth. Now obviously in the short term, with 50% you have 5x the resources to spend on whatever you want to do (like war). However in the long run, you need to strike some sort of balance between growth and revenue in order to not get left behind, but also not become defenseless while you grow.

However integrating capital movement, migration, different growth rates for different sectors, a dynamic between different sectors that ensures you don't end up with tons of cars but no food (if too many cars are being made, profitability of farming goes up, making it more attractive for investment by private entities), international trade, etc, would help make the game very engaging. War would keep players from being too "liberal", while economic reality would keep players from being too "militaristic".

You need to create an actual economic and political model which the player influences through his actions (like lowering tax and interest rates). I realize this would be difficult for you, after all, practically no game of this kind has anything even resembling a good model and this requires a good grasp of economics, which most economists don't have. When I started making my own "geopolitical simulator" game, I started by figuring out a more or less realistic economic engine as NONE of the commercial games have one. I only stopped the project because I got very annoyed when trying to program the user interface and didn't feel like investing the time learning GM was worth it. I'm interested in working on something along these lines.

Thanks for the questions and answer everyone, keep them coming .

Were the questions I gave (Tamerlane and India) suitable? I can give more, but if they don't appeal to you I rather not waste the time.

But George Washington was not an incredibly important historical figure???

Anyway, I don't think it really has anything to do with the person's actual level of intelligence, it's probably just a fun little trivia game like so many game shows on TV.

Uh, yes, he was. That is my point. You don't even have to know who the current president is to be smart. Heck, you don't have to remember your own name.

Im not sure of any ideas for questions, but I dont think how smart someone is can be judged on how well they can answer questions about things they may never have heard about, like

Who was Tamerlane?

a: french philosopher
b: dutch king
c: muslim conqueror
d: swiss painter

Then you need to include only logic question and scrap the whole "History" section. Of course you can be a perfect genius and have no idea who George Washington was, however, Tamerlane (Timur, The Lame) was an incredibly important historical figure. Have you ever seen the Taj Mahal? Without Timur, it would not exist. I like the idea of a question and answer game that focuses strictly on logic, but based on the initial post, that didn't seem to be the case with this.