Very heartily agreed. I wish more games (not just 4X) allowed for alternate strategies and forms of warfare, and as you've said economic warfare just never seems to work because there is rarely any appreciable shortage of materials to exploit. This is exacerbated by the fact that on higher difficulties one of the tricks developers use to give the computer an advantage is just to throw lots of extra resources at them.

You mention Distant Worlds, though in my own experience with the game it has the same problem. While the civilian sector makes things feel more alive and is a very cool idea (which I hope to blatantly steal asap) I never found that targeting civilian trade seemed more effective than simply waging conventional warfare. I haven't played a lot of it though, and might have just gotten a skewed view.

I think it's partially bound up in the fact that few games (again, not just 4X) allow for different kinds of objectives and conquests. In a realistic situation, you might not always WANT to completely annihilate your opponent and take everything they have. Sometimes you just want to rough them up a little but keep their lands and industry relatively intact so that you can trade with them afterwards. Sometimes you want to annihilate certain sectors of their economy in order to eliminate competition for your own. Etc etc. This lack of nuance permeates games: the player is given very limited options because the designers targeted very limited goals.

Yes I remember playing 4X games in what was back then LAN party (yes that long ago) where I often played a game I never played otherwise/before against 'bean counter' type players who knew every loophole and every detail about exactly what to do/build (And when). (when Im there looking at something saying 'What the Hell is This weird Thing and what does it do..."

But that made me think that what if a good part of "the game" was disrupting those expected/exact game mechanics and MAKING the player discover how things worked ?? (to make the game more variable)

Even with the same relationships/animations of those cute visuals and effects, you could randomly modify ratios of payoffs and costs in resources of the different 'buildings' and unit builds (and their production schedules) for each game run .... all just by changing some ratios/coefficients. The careful balancing of game mechanics isnt as much needed as its then upto the player to figure out (by playing that game run) what works and what isnt THAT efficient to do.

That way the player has to EXPLORE the economic system to figure out (without expensively adding multitudes of options of the various game objects). It forces the player to first do DISCOVERY of the system they will play with, and then use that for the strategies to play out the rest of the game.

Some care might be given to how much/patterns of the coefficient changes are to NOT make it TOO easy or TOO hard (but still a big part of the 'winning' IS figuring out how things work to then procede. And with the usual ramps of unlocked buildingsunits that discovery may continue in part through a good part of the game.

Yes, the bean-counters wont like it, but they have all those other games to play.