So I as a budding star ship pilot had to seek out the best vendors in order to buy the right equipment to competitive.

There was a lot more to it but it was the complexity of the emergent gameplay that gave the psuedo randomness of some aspects a real role, and drove your personal story.

"I managed to find a vendor who has access to large amounts of high grade titanium, and he crafted me this engine with 10kj/s faster recharge time, which allowed me to escape that bounty hunter.." was a story that emerged and happened to me in the game, for example.

In some ways the randomness was abstracted away enough to not be obvious, and I think that helped sell the feeling.

I am going to have a procedurally generated tech tree in my MMO. I'll only know statistically that certain powerful combinations in crafting are possible, but even as the dev, I won't know precisely where they will be, what they look like, or exactly how to get the components for them.

That's totally not what I was getting at. It's more like, "do I castle kingside or queenside? Because if I castle queenside then my rook will be opposite his queen...?" The low inertial penalty is probably the rare (actually statistically, as opposed to "rare") quality of that particular item -- and it would still come with some other form of penalty. (Like a really PITA set of compatibility requirements and high fragility.)

unless the tradeoff over using a "Snargglemoofian power generator" is that your ship can no longer turn left or something.

I hadn't thought of "your ship can't turn left." It might be a great tradeoff for something that would otherwise be an overpowered weapon, combined with another kind of movement penalty. I have thought of things like a shield upgrade that gives you really high resists across 120 degrees of arc, but which isn't configurable. "Your ship can't turn left" might be a really good penalty for a high resist/partial arc shield augment that mostly covers your right side.

EDIT: An even better idea: you get high resists over a 120 degree arc, but then you also get a susceptibility penalty over the rest!

With chess, on the other hand, the choice of 1. d4 vs 1. e4 is a huge one with TONS of implications, none of which are immediately obvious at a glance, but which are so rich and diverse that you have players literally identifying themselves as "d4 players" or "e4 players".

I hate to keep leaning on chess examples but they're the easiest since almost everybody knows about chess. I'd have slipped in a Battle Line example but almost nobody knows about that!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lg8fVtKyYxY

TL;DW

"Calculations are decisions based solely on reason, with a clear correct answer." That'd be the decision to chose armour instead of cold resistance.

"Choice is overcoming internal conflict. Without conflict, there is no choice, only decisions." This actually is a good example for the "only turn left" gun, as there's a conflict between maneuverability vs firepower, which are rather incomparable.

Eve Online has emergent gameplay but most of that is space politics and metagaming - almost despite the game itself rather than because of it.

Heck, vanilla minecraft has incredibly complex outcomes from basic rules - vis a vis redstone and automation and so on.

I've played hella grindy Korean MMOs, they were just a case of spend x time get y thing. No real challenge, just a willingness to keep trying until complete. I'd strongly suggest highly complex systems restrict player innovation and emergence, in a way simpler rulesets do not.

One ethos of my game is going to to be "work smarter, not harder." The kind of player who feels entitled to succeed just because they've spent enough time mindlessly grinding resources, so feels entitled to have awesome stuff dropped -- I hope those people spend their time elsewhere.

The player will be able to find very pointed capabilities that come with big disadvantages. The point will be to improvise around those weaknesses while exploiting contextual advantages. Others may choose to exploit in-game scripting and manufacturing capabilities to automate the search for certain technology combinations, but this will entail maintaining installations and the combat force to defend them.