Yeah that's true, and I guess that's why so many games go for a historical (like those myriads of WW2-games) or for a totally futuristic (just think of Warhammer40k, which takes places 38 thousand years in the future) theme. The current world is moving so fast that it would be almost impossible to make a realistic world-scenario, cause there would be too many changes during the time of developement. Just take a look at what happened on a world-political scale during the last two years and you see what I mean. E.g. I just read yesterday that China shot down one of their satellites with a rocket launched from ground, which makes the world-political situation even more hostile than it actually is (anyone seen CNN yesterday? China want's to ban a starbucks coffee out a holy temple and the chinese ankerman wasn't very friendly towards that western tv station).

So I just went with that semi-realistic scenario so I don't have to adjust things on a weekly basis and to also be able to put in my own take on world-politics (which can bee seen as a satiric hint towards what's happening in reality). And other than the scenario there are so many considerations to be done on a game-design basis that having to deal with the above situation would leave you spending half of the day on tweaking and changing your game-design without actually getting anything done.

And to just give you guys out there a sample, yesterday I was working again on the tidbits of the army management feature, and here is just a partly list of what things I had to take into consideration while implementing just this single feature (note : it's still not 100% finished and things may and will change) :
  • How many divisions can be stationed in a single player-owned region?
  • How big can a division become? Or should it be unlimited in size?
  • If it's limited in size, should the limit be determined by the strength of the units in the division or just by their number?
  • What should be the maximum size of the unit building queue? Or should it be unlimited in size?
  • What happens to units that are deassigned from a division, should the player be able to directly assign them to another division or shall they be locked for one turn?
  • How is health regeneration handled? Does the region need a special building for that or will there be a "natural" regeneration over time?
  • Should each unit gain experience in battle, or should only the assigned (if one is assigned) general of the wole division gain it? The later would make the generals more valuable, the first one the units, so what way to go?
  • Should each nation get it's own pool of different units, or should the have the same units (or maybe just with different skins)? Or should there just be some units that are special to each nation with a basic unit pool that is same across all nations?
  • How to calculate damage caused by units? How to calculate this against defensive values of units?
    and so on...

And the above list is just an extract of what to take care about for just one single feature of the game. So as you can see the game design of such a big project is a huge undertaking.