I have another question, how do you control the growth of the number of agents?
Reading your past blogs, I'm deeply fascinated by the subtle interactions and concepts you've laid out, everything works so perfectly. Many things, from kinds of characters like politicians and generals, and even population units have their own agents. But I'm curious, aren't you worried about the ensuing increase in performance pressure? Over time, populations grow, characters reproduce. While this isn't a simple exponential function growth, it's almost a certainty that the total number of population and characters will grow two times over time. I'm afraid the performance pressure is also strongly growing even more insanely at this time. Even considering you have a decade to slowly develop the game, comparing mainstream computer specs in 2023 and 2013, PC performance isn't going to grow in the same way.
Well there's lots of inherent limitations on the growth of the Character totals. There will probably also end up being hardcoded caps. I'd expect maybe an 8-fold increase max from the point when a player starts to play to when they go on to another world/campaign. So that's the variation I'm keeping in mind. Character numbers are somewhat tied to population and province counts mechanically, though not in a rigid way. In settings you'd be recommended to cut characters per province in half if you double provinces, based on your available RAM.
For turn times I think the multi-threading is pretty effective, and the game guides the player to pretty long turn times to give the npc agents time to work on their plans.
I have another question, how do you control the growth of the number of agents?
Reading your past blogs, I'm deeply fascinated by the subtle interactions and concepts you've laid out, everything works so perfectly. Many things, from kinds of characters like politicians and generals, and even population units have their own agents. But I'm curious, aren't you worried about the ensuing increase in performance pressure? Over time, populations grow, characters reproduce. While this isn't a simple exponential function growth, it's almost a certainty that the total number of population and characters will grow two times over time. I'm afraid the performance pressure is also strongly growing even more insanely at this time. Even considering you have a decade to slowly develop the game, comparing mainstream computer specs in 2023 and 2013, PC performance isn't going to grow in the same way.
Well there's lots of inherent limitations on the growth of the Character totals. There will probably also end up being hardcoded caps. I'd expect maybe an 8-fold increase max from the point when a player starts to play to when they go on to another world/campaign. So that's the variation I'm keeping in mind. Character numbers are somewhat tied to population and province counts mechanically, though not in a rigid way. In settings you'd be recommended to cut characters per province in half if you double provinces, based on your available RAM.
For turn times I think the multi-threading is pretty effective, and the game guides the player to pretty long turn times to give the npc agents time to work on their plans.