Why Seven Factions?

[MysticWind]

Just why are there seven factions, anyways? As opposed to eight, or nine, or six?

[Darrell01]

Yeah, might be kinda neat to have a variable number of factions. Wasn't Civ3 like that where you could choose 3 to 9 civilizations or something? MysticWind makes a good point here. Of course 7 factions might have been all Sid came up with that were viable factions at the time.

[gwillybj]

3-digit binary placeholder in the executable: 000.
Faction 000 (0) is Native Lifeforms.
Factions 001 (1) through 111 (7) are the players.

[Rubin]

From Velociryx' guide at Gamefaqs:

The number seven was not chosen at random, I do not believe. Five is regarded as optimal group size, but seven is optimal for game theory purposes, and the factions (their ideologies defined by a total of three major variables - Politics, Values, Economy) interact with each other to set up a matrix, where you cannot help but be diametric to at least two other factions at any point in the game.

- Early Game, Single Player Diplomacy

[Hydro]

My observation is that the game is designed to have 7 well crafted competing ideologies, so that is the number of ‘slots’. Remember that in the original SMAC there weren’t any choices for factions – you got the original 7, and that’s it. SMAX gave us options, and I expect they used the same architecture (and faction ‘slots’) and superimposed a selection system on it.

Just my 2 cents.

Hydro

[NanoDingo]

Re: Why Seven Factions?

Originally posted by MysticWind
Just why are there seven factions, anyways? As opposed to eight, or nine, or six?

The game designers considered it too counter-intuitive to completely separate Free Market economies from Wealth values and Police States from Planned economies.

[Dis]

because civ2 had 7 civs? 8 being the bit thingy and the 8th civ being the barbs.