Resourciv: More Progress, More Problems

It's been really fun working on Resourciv! A lot has happened since my first post: wrapping maps with proper continents and climate simulation; combat between meeples; settlement borders that grow with population; animals which roam the frontier for meeples to hunt and collect food for their camps or cities; cultures with their own colors and tribe/city names; and a game observation mode for my convenience / enjoyment (pictured above).

That being said, as I get ever-so-closer to completing the game's basic functionality, it gets difficult running up against the game's actual "design". This is especially true for each society's mode of production, the flow of labor and material wealth. Civilization doesn't represent a specific mode of production, but an abstract model of growth and productivity which vary quantitatively between different governments or policies. This is easy to implement, but not very interesting. It does not model the internal structures of different modes, i.e. their social relations, which result in unique dynamics internal and external of each mode. At the same time, tracking the accumulation and consumption of resources can get overly complex. Never played a grand strategy game, and don't plan on making one.

I gave one shot at defining how "Liberalism", as an example, could look in basic Civ terms: all production is converted into wealth; units and buildings can only be bought, not produced; and cities have "poverty" scores equal/proportional to how many "peeps" they employ (with negative impacts that can be offset by spending wealth on welfare). This has interesting implications: liberalism is useful for advanced economies where micromanagement becomes tedious; although spending on welfare seems like a no-shit approach, it becomes increasingly difficult when other costs ramp up (war, civil disorder, disease, or climate change); liberal states with strong militaries could coerce less developed ones into liberalizing to meet their economic demands. These dynamics "feel" right but also to some extent forced. After all, is liberalism a discrete state of things, or a situation which has developed over time due to preexisting, evolving social factors?

The identification of (pre-modern) cultures as historical agents is also problematic—not necessarily in a moral sense, but in that modern nation-building is typically imposed top-down from the ruling classes of a society rather than emerging organically from that society (even though one might take for its basis a manufactured memory of a pre-modern culture). It's not as simple as one culture dominating others and establishing itself as a nation. Take, for instance, Britain: having been colonized repeatedly by Latin, Frankish, and Germanic peoples, the population lacked a cohesive cultural-national identity until the First World War when they suddenly decided to pretend that their royal family wasn't literally German. Until then, they mostly identified with a vague Christian 'nationality' signaling their civilized status. This would produce the WASP and eventual White nation during American colonization, which would itself generate Black and multivarious American Indian nations (so-to-speak) in relation to itself by depriving their respective peoples of their original cultures. The operative social categories became White/Black/Native rather than Anglo/Saxon/Brittonic/Yoruba/Igbo/Iroquois/Massachusetts/etc., with (initially deemed) non-White Europeans like the Irish understood as biologically "complicated" (being partly White, and partly Black or Asiatic) and thus racially lesser. Since this process was central to modern history, resulting directly in/from the enclosure of the commons or the colonization of the New World, can the paradigm shift from culture to nation be modeled? If social-historical agents of history are paradigmatic, is there any sense in treating the players as trans-historical? With what could they possibly be identified?

(Talked out a lot of the above with my partner! Specifically, about the connection between Britain's lack of historical-cultural identity and its relative efficacy at colonizing the world... and itself.)

As they say: much to consider. These are problems inherent to the structure of the thing.