History XIV: Here I Stand (Summary)

I thought for a bit on how to present a total overview of the system (suggested by Ted), but there are so many moving parts. Still, it's good to sit down and think about it a bit.

This ought to help in keeping things straight. Or perhaps it makes it even more confusing.

It's clear there are several feedback loops: most notably that the city growth rate is affected by the overall tech level of the hegemony. This provides a significant obstacle to small starting cities, but gives a boost to established empires. The loops keep things interesting. In addition, many of these links involve some randomness, which means that things will generally tend in the same direction each time I run the whole simulation, but it's never going to be exactly the same.

Desirability is a value, expressed as a percentage, which describes how desirable a piece of land is for settlement. Each race prefers a different arrangement of terrain and weather. The desirability value will affect how large a settlement can arise in a hex, and also captures the number of resources available there (whether or not they are being totally utilized). Because the resource allotment code adds complexity and time to the history simulation, the desirability is used as an approximation of resources in the battle simulator (since a settlement with access to more physical resources will have an inevitable edge over their adversary). Raw desirability is the desirability in the absence of civilization; it is mixed with infrastructure to obtain a measure of desirability for city expansion, when an existing settlement sends out settlers.

Infrastructure is an integer which describes the effect of settlements on surrounding terrain. Although the Tao only uses elevation to limit the spread of infrastructure, I also include local effects such as forest or desert. I also make infrastructure "flow" downriver easier than upstream. A high enough infrastructure (over 400, for now) changes a forested hex into plains or grassland, depending on the local climate (which is a feedback element encouraging a more efficient infrastructure spread). A higher infrastructure implies a better training mechanism for soldiers. Infrastructure spreads from every settlement in a hegemony and stops at the border.

Hexes with infrastructure but no settlement are the hinterlands; they are prime candidates for future settlements. Since the hinterlands are populated (however sparse), reinforcements can be press-ganged. Generally, however, their population is very low. The rural population of any hex with an infrastructure value is an exponential function of that infrastructure number.

If the effect of a hegemony's capital (measured in % of total infrastructure in a hex) drops too low, and a city's self-generated infrastructure is high enough (100), then a rebellion is possible.

Available resources (which are fed into the market system, not shown) are acquired by cross-referencing the available resources (which is somewhat determined by terrain) with the resource definitions. Certain resources cannot be extracted by low-tech cultures, but may become available as the hegemony grows.

The Long-awaited GitLab. There is no README yet: I've been working on this for two years now, and so the code is a garbled mess in places and cleaner in others. Eventually I'll get around to some housekeeping. Enter at your own risk.