Here is a tidbit of history on this project.
I started working in a major french video game company, name starting with U and ending with soft, almost twenty years ago. I was hired as a game designer - at the time there was no official training or degree in game design, so they were hiring any soul found on the block. I was playing a lot of warcraft II at the time, and so was the guy who conducted the interview. Might have helped.
Anyway, I joined a team of other fresh recruits, and we were given the task of developing a strategy game. We spent months writing dozens of concepts, and needless to say, most of them were crap. But a few ideas were actually good. We settled on a political conquest of a sim-city like game, where you had to manage, build and expand. It was awfully complex. But when you're inexperienced as we were, complex always seems better.
The concept got approved, and the project manager got sent to the chinese office to develop it (then it got canned six months later, as "election" really was an alien concept there). The rest of the team was scattered around, dismantled like a body in soylent green (or cloud atlas). I left the company a couple of years later (only to return some time later, but that's another story). I was left restless by this concept research, that we never quite tackled correctly. I was feeling bothered that it could have been a lot simpler.
As I was still thinking about political conquest, I thought it should be reduced to influence. You gather influence and then you use it, much like money. But it was still complex to modelize : conquer some guy or organization (how?), and then use to do something else (how and what for?).
Reducing the idea even further, as it's when you can't substract anything that you've arrived (that's from Saint Exupery), I built a small prototype where you simply moved a character around, got close to people, convinced them by standing next to them, with a delay depending on your social distance to them, and conquered districts one after another. I coded that in 2002, that's almost 14 years ago. You can see a screen here :
That's the very basic mechanism you find in Megalo Polis. The idea was taken out of the freezer about a year ago, and a team put together to develop it. They did an amazing job, and now we have a first version here on steam (which didnt even exist when I coded the prototype).
So if you feel like you have an idea worth exploring, keep it in your brain and play with it until you can flesh it out :)