Unpredictability is a difficult point in any game; You can't have too much of it or people will get frustrated, but you can't have too little of it either or people become bored. Cybernations derives much of it Unpredictability from interaction between the different power levels within the game (Sphere / Alliance / Nation) and there is very little in the game mechanics because of the KISS approach. At the moment the sole source of Unpredictability outside war is the occurrence of events.

At the moment there is very little you can do to influence your nation outside the physical inputs (military / wonders / improvements). There are set Defcon levels and a Religion and Government setting which is easily figured out and not hard to find a optimum in. One thing that would lend itself very well for this would be the Government position. At the moment you set in at the start of your nation (most beginners guides give you the best options) and you only change it when you get nukes.

My suggestion is to give people the option to define a broader set of positions for their government and broaden it to two tiers. The upper tier would be similar to the positions as they are, but they would be directly linked to the chosen government style. So changing your government needs tweaking of your government positions to take full advantage of the positive effects and gives the option to counterbalance negative effects. A discussion is needed to establish the weight of the effects but I would limit this to something in the range of 2 or 3 happiness and 10 to 20 percent on bill costs. The downside of these options is that they can only be changed every 10 days! The second tier would be less important decisions which could be changed directly or every 2 or 3 days. The second tier would give you the option to tweak your nation more towards war or economy whatever rock's your boat (again discussion needed about the weight, but it should be even lower than the first tier).

Needles to say that the list of options should be bigger and unpredictable, it would take a lot of tweaking to find the optimum setting which would keep us game-nerds happy for a while :lol:

Fixxx