Yes. I'm very, very close to removing faction trees.
One player has written a program to read his turn report, constructing
the hierarchy for every units he sees, so he knows what units belong
to what players.
Unfortunately, while interesting, I don't think arbitrarily complicating
a report such that you need a program to untangle it for you makes for good
game atmosphere. A slightly strained analogy would be if I arbitrarily
encrypted some sections of the report. Those with caesar or Crypt Breaker's
Workbench handy could decode them; others would miss out on the info. Yuk.
I like the concept of known units vs. masked units. We can still have
this with flat hierarchies.
Also, having all unmasked units showing their player will make setting
attitudes and permissions much simpler for players.
-- Rich Skrenta <skrenta@rt.com>