World Simulator
After the World Generator has created a world and spawned life onto it, the World Simulator can simulate the passing of time on this world. The World Simulator is broken up into two main parts.
Initially I just wanted to start with sedentary civilisations, but that would miss out a lot of interesting details. I decided to go back a step and allow nomadic tribes to spawn into the world. They basically wander around looking for food and other resources. Eventually due to certain conditions, they will settle in a particular area. This essentially means that some civs will get a "head-start" on other civs, which is unbalanced but also realistic.
This part of the game will not be too complex. The purpose is to lay down foundations of what will become procedurally generated cultures between the civilisations, and even within civilisations. It won't be too complex, but will provide a backdrop for existence of certain artifacts and ancient ruins, that kind of thing. Tribalism is still relevant in our modern world. For example many developing countries are still divided into tribes, and even in developed countries you have subdivision along cultural lines.
In our world it took millions of years for humans to progress from tribes to civilisations, but I will abstract it down to a few hundred years to keep it manageable. There will be a lot of tribes. Australia for example had over 500 Aboriginal tribes, North America has 562 Native American tribes. I will not make things that complex, but there will be enough to create interesting variety. Tribes will generally be located everywhere on the map, just like on Earth.
Once a tribe builds their first settlement, they become a civilisation, capable of building armies, researching tech, exploring, founding new settlements, fighting wars, etc. Each tribe will found its own independent city-state, but over time these will merge together into larger civilisations, kingdoms and empires. From this point the world will basically simulate something similar to what we see in something like Europa Universalis.
The duration of this period will probably be 1-2,000 years. This will create a history good enough for most people. Creating too complex of a history will probably just make things confusing. Once the player has simulated an amount of time they are happy with, they will then be able to interact with the world and explore the procedurally generated world.
At some point I will need to add in an ability to actually control a character inside the world. This will probably be closely-tied with the World Simulator, and it should be possible to transition between the two features. I will probably implement a very basic version of this feature to get things started. Probably just an ability to walk around and uncover the map.
This button toggles the territory overlay.
This button shows a table of all biomes in the game. All biomes are named.
This button shows a table of all characters in the game. Obviously there will be a lot of them, so it will be necessary to search, filter, sort, etc. This menu also leads to the "Character Sheet", where you may read the stats of the individual character you select. The game tracks family, relationships, stats, etc.
This button displays world info. Right now it shows a table of all landmasses.
This button displays a table of all tribes in the game. You will be able to see the characters in each tribe, their resources, their population, etc.
Increment time by a single day. Currently this is the smallest increment.
Increment time by a month.
Increment time by a year.
Increment time by a decade. This can take a long time in some cases. The time increments in a thread, and you can stop it by pressing ESC. This is the longest increment.
The game is generally only intended to simulate up to a late medieval period of history. However there is not too much reason why it wouldn't be possible to go beyond that point in the future.
