Resourciv: Revamping Peeps, Part II

Okayyy this is going to be a lot. Had a breakthrough so I don’t feel quite done yet.

Hex Assignment

One of the original benefits of discrete peeps was determining where they lived. You could hover over a city or suburb to see how many peeps live there, and whether there was any surplus housing or homeless vagrants (due to lacking housing). This felt mostly great, but it was missing something: the system presumed from the onset a division between one's home and one's workplace, as well as a division between the urban and rural (in that peeps, from the get-go, live in urban centers).

So I made a weird decision. To start, no one lives in the center. You can imagine it as a sort of ritual meeting place such as Catalhoyuk is theorized as having been. Instead, peeps start out filling rural hexes, 1 peep per hex, and that rural hex serves both as their 'home' and as their 'workplace'. Peeps only live in the city when assigned to an urban workplace (which can't serve as a home) or when there's not enough rural land to 'house' new peeps. The more a city/region urbanizes and later industrializes, the greater the transition from rural to urban habitats for peeps.

What remains to complete this system is: (1) finally adding the labor/leisure slider; (2) having visual indicators for peeps living or working on hexes; and (3) implementing a job system where peeps will take the best job possible for themselves (perhaps given criteria based on a peep's current situation). The tricky thing will be modeling ownership via value-flow; certainly rural workers and urban artisans will receive the fruit of their own labor, determined by the social value of their products, but is there an intuitive way to model one peep extracting value from others? Will cross that bridge when I get to it.

Goods & Needs

The previous system consisted of resources, with supply generated by producers and demand generated by consumers, displayed as a ratio of S/D. I felt like this system worked well for its emphasis on circuits of production and consumption rather than, in my view, obscuring that relationship through stockpiles. But I was unhappy with having to abstract goods according to how they're supposed to be used, since that limits the ability for one good to have multiple uses, or for one need to be met by multiple goods.

So I'm separating the two. Needs are generated by your population, which will now appear on the top-left of the screen. Goods are produced or transformed by the labor of peeps to meet needs. The value of a good depends on the weight of the various needs it meets, and the allocation of goods to needs is balanced according to how many possible goods can meet each need. We can call this social necessity.

There's still some quirks I'm trying to figure out. For context, transforming goods from existing goods is handled through the 'needs' system rather than being distinct (as it is in Victoria III, for example, which I don't play myself since it's crazy complicated for me, but whose model served as inspiration). However, sometimes it makes sense for a specific good to be required by another. I think I'm going to just structure the code to allow for both, especially since this will help clean up the top-left needs dialog.

Doing Race

Okay. We're doing patriarchy. We're doing caste. We're doing capitalism. We're also doing race. Yay! I've thought about ignoring the question and treating it as an imaginary (in the Lacanian sense) extension of caste, i.e. not having a formal representation in the game, but race is a discourse central to modernity, and it represents a qualitative evolution of caste relations through their generalization at the species level.

That being said, I'm not basing race on skin color. The below image would be really funny to recreate in the game, but I don't want racists to use the game as a vehicle for their bullshit (and, considering the actual emergence of skin color due to environmental pressure, you may have Black Greeks or White Dominicans—which would be funny but not intuitive). Therefore, I'm going to take something more inscrutable as a basis: species names of the genus Homo.

My plan is to assign the original campaign of a game one of three races, based on relative proximity to each another: denisovan, neanderthal, and sapiens. Each new peep will have a racial constitution based on two random parent peeps (which may be the same peep, since peeps represent abstract populations anyhow). However, this will be invisible to players up until the advent of racism, which itself is only possible given certain paths in modernity and only available to cultures with a relatively homogenous racial constitution across their population.

I think this will be an interesting lever for players to mess with—I imagine a literal racism slider like the dril tweet that you can adjust to determine your level of blood scrutiny. If this impacts the happiness of peeps, which it should, it will in turn impact their migration and cross-mingling with each other (on that note, I'd like the racial constitution of existing peeps to also change over time, not just to impact that of new peeps). Simultaneously, the nonsense of using species names I think will both veil the viscerality of the mechanic and satirize the 'real abstraction' of actual race categories.