Re: Request For Comments...

> nothing is slanted to the small guy.

One idea I had was to make happiness and education
inverses, in the sense that you couldn't make both

Then you would have some units like saboteours
that could only be built by happiness being over
a certain level

So you would have some countries with high tech
kind of units, vs other countries with high happiness
kinds of units

Of course this would probably just end up making
clumps even stronger, with some members of the
clump providing saboteurs and others high tech
and others money or however they do it

I think the uniform resources may favor the clump approach
also, as you can have one country specializing in say food,
another in making shells, and others doing the fighting
investing in high research for damage, I dunno how they do it
of course.

If the game was more strategic in the sense that unit movement
was more like ships (say a unit could move at ship speed along
100% roads, slower off road, which is what I intended when
I first started trying to implement land units, and is more
realistic, since in real strategy movement by sea was often
faster than movement by land), then countries could have
secure areas, so would be less likely to be intimidated and
bullied into joining clumps, as it wouldn't be so easy to roll
over them with land units as it is now (the high mobility
land units which make the game more tactical than strategic,
also make the game more diplomatic than strategic, as
if countries couldn't be overrun so easily they would feel
more confident in being independent players, like real 
nations are. In real strategy it is not so easy to bully small
nations as it is in empire, so forming coalitions is much
more difficult)

In Diplomacy, or Grand Strategy, a group of inferior nations
can beat a superior general, as the coalitions against Napoleon
beat him, by surrounding him and nipping at his heels, then
retreating out of reach when he advanced against them. The
current empire is more like Grand Strategy than ordinary
strategy (in the sense of lines of communication); what made
empire great in the 1980s was that it had the right balance
and favored strategy as opposed to grand strategy, which no
other game has achieved. Most games are tactical, while
some are diplomacy oriented, only empire hit that point
where strategy was king

(on the sequence
 
     tactics - operations - strategy - grand strategy/diplomacy

empire hit the strategy point just right)

Now its tactics/operations/diplomacy that have taken over.
Along with economic micromanagement.

The good strategist is actually at a disadvantage, since the
road network which in a strategy game should favor the
defender, has become a liability to the defender as land units
can overrun it too quickly.

Fundamentally almost noone even understands the issue,
which is why empire went off the rails in the 1990s.