Andy, John Galt, Lord Mndz,
My biggest problem with the game levels, are that the requirements they have to meet them don't actually lead to making a good nation.
1) Peaceful levels 5 and above require two nations and a CEO. If a player doesn't want to manage multiple countries, and a CEO, they are locked to level 4 maximum no matter how great their nation becomes. It's a hard lock preventing players making "better" rather than "more" countries.
2) The government index requirements, and financial index requirements are high. But there is no Consumption Quality index requirement at all. This means that the only way to reach high levels, is to purposefully over-inflate your indexes to unreasonable levels, and afford it by buying rock bottom quality government products. This causes shortages across markets, and a mis-match between the quality demanded, and the quality of goods produced.
3) Salary index requirements are ridiculously low. Even C3's run 300 wages as standard. Meanwhile, Peaceful game level 13 only requires 280 wages. While requiring completely wasteful indexes like 220 for Transport. This encourages players to waste all their money on getting indexes to levels that have no effect, while paying poverty wages, which results in poor Corp productivity, and further market shortages.
4) Peaceful game level 14 requires an average population of 110 million per country. Even though the GM's have already said that the birth rate system is designed to lower your population below 100 million. So people are being required to break the birth/death mechanics, and create unstable demographic imbalances, to meet the requirement.
5) Peaceful game level 12 requires at least 7 countries. But the game causes rolling revolts when an empire has 7 countries, to prevent blobbing. The Game Level mechanic actively encourages players to trigger the revolt mechanic.
All together meeting the requirements for game levels, will cause you to create an empire based on poverty wages, appallingly poor quality government product consumption, dangerous overpopulation, constant revolts from over-expansion, and contribute to the already large shortages in world market.
I'm all for game levels, but the requirements for those levels need to lead players to make good countries, that help balance the world. Instead of leading them to create unstable poverty nations, that drain products out of an already under-supplied market.
Signed President of DanNation on LU