thoughts

How to challenge a Player Without extensive Reinforcement Learning, the AIs in the simulation cannot rival the long-term planning and strategic thinking of a thoughtful human. Most AI’s will be simple heuristic agents that respond to their environment in an attempt to maximize their particular objectives (reward function). These agents will be incapable of strategic thinking. So how can the player be challenged in such an environment? Here are a few avenues: [Read More]

Population Design Document How people are represented determines the flexibility, level of detail and performance of the above societal model. A vast number of attributes apply to people including: health, age, sex occupation, skills culture, religion, race ideas/mindsets/attitudes, (imperfect) information relationships, membership of groups location For influential people (ie. actors), all these factors can be modelled on an individual basis, however this approach clearly can’t work for the nameless masses. Therefore an important design decision is how to balance the trade-offs between detail, implementation flexibility + complexity and runtime performance. [Read More]

Part 2 in Historical Simulation series Societies and peoples cannot exist without a world… so let’s build one! When starting this project, we could either use Earth as the source of geography and climate, or attempt to create plausible alternatives. Using Earth brings with it all the expectations from history about what should happen where and when, even if much of history was based not on inexorable drives, but chance. Instead we will create a fresh set of terrain for each simulation, along with climate, biomes and basic geology. [Read More]

Grand strategy games like Europa Universalis, Crusader Kings, Civilization, Victoria and even Total War each immerse the player in a simulated world. Which aspects of reality they focus on while abstracting (or ignoring) the rest, defines the experience and the game. Crusader Kings stands out as the only game attempting to model leaders’ intricasy and humanity. Victoria, through representing and tying populations’ plight or prosperity to events in the world abroad. [Read More]