Soulash 2 Devlog 2 - Procedural History

Greetings fellow gods,

Today I'll tell you a little bit about the different simulators in Soulash 2 working together to create a unique story of the world during its generation. Let's start with simulators that create the first families, settlements, and state factions.

At this stage of development, the goal is to create different settlements that can sustain themselves and grow. For this reason, I'm not focusing on adding multiple races with distinct quirks and perks, as humans are enough to create a first playable prototype, which is critical to start testing all of the unique ideas I have for Soulash 2. I hope that the History Simulator will assemble many individuals to interact with, befriend, or murder.

As of today, we have 30 simulators. The world generates with a couple of settlements placed in tiles with valuable natural resources before history simulation starts. The settlements then have a couple of families of 2 - 3 people and a single building related to resource gathering, so they can start working right away.

With such a prepared world, the simulation may begin. First, we deal with death by simulating battles (currently uncomplicated simulation of damage and health as the actual fighting mechanics are undecided) and natural death from old age. As people die, we then deal with inheritance. New leaders of factions are chosen, as the head of the family or the settlement when there's an empty spot. If the final family member dies, all the wealth and buildings pass along to the children, which can already have their own families, and if no children are still alive, or are not living in the settlement, the settlement inherits everything.

Then we move along to the building assignment and production. To simplify things and allow for a building distribution that will hopefully make sense, I've decided to tie buildings to manufacture and people. A family may own a farm or a mine, and they will live and work there. The building creation and worker assignment simulators try to prioritize food production, as the food was one of the significant challenges with this whole system - the settlements kept dying from starvation as soon as some food buildings lost a couple of workers.

If the price is right (we'll get to that soon), families sell their resources to the settlement market. During the new settlement creation, the first families may not have enough resources to build new buildings, so "unemployed" people are kicked in the butt to gather natural resources at a much lower rate than if they had a building.

Then there's a simple tax simulation. I've set up a 10% family wealth tax every quarter of a year (25 days, I'm considering shortening a year to 100 days, so the time progresses faster) that is paid to the settlement. Then comes a critical simulator - family consumption.

Family consumption simulator is a critical part of the economy. It imitates food consumption and causes starvation if there's not enough food in the settlement, but also simulates consumption of other products and resources, for example, shirts, shoes, firewood, etc. The consumption is then preserved for the whole simulation cycle, as it then affects the resource prices using simple supply and demand calculations. And we have a simple screen to monitor it now.

Then marriages are set up, and new families get created in different situations. We simulate the birth of new people so the families may grow. New settlements are built when the existing ones are highly populated, and there's an opportunity to expand.

Families create new buildings using the resources available to produce more stuff, this part is simplified for now, and buildings have a set cost (for example, 20 logs). Still, it will change in Phase 3 of development which I hope to be able to tell you about next time. In some rough places with little food or building resources, some settlements may fall into ruin, or if the population and wealth rise high, the settlements may upgrade (currently, it's Village -> Town -> City).

Then we have a State-related simulator. States are factions above settlements in the hierarchy. You can think of them as Kingdoms or Empires that control multiple settlements and areas.

Then we move to things called Companies. Companies will hopefully have multiple types, but today they are used as armies of the states. Every settlement has an army with a unique name, and these armies are the ones that fight in battles, start sieges and move around the world. Aside from armies, I hope to create smaller adventuring parties and allow players to create their own companies to lead.

States then decide if they want to wage war. For now, we only have conquest-type conflicts, to take over different settlements. Related simulators then decide where to move companies to battle, either in one of the open space tiles or siege the settlement. Settlements pay wages to troops in the companies assigned to them.

If you've noticed the roads that keep showing up during the simulation, these are created by the Caravan simulator. Caravans are a simple way for a family to sell resources to a different settlement if the current one has too many of them (and the prices are low). Roads show up where the caravan has moved.

All of these simulations can now run for a couple of thousand years, and most settlements don't die out, which was very hard to get to. This second development stage is finished, we have a history simulation prototype that creates unique settlements and simple people stories. This is enough to move to the 3rd stage - Map Maker 2.0, which I've just begun, and we'll talk about in 2 weeks. Hope you enjoyed the read and if you would like to discuss some of these simulators, or have a cool idea of what to add, I'm available on Discord.

Till next time,

Artur