1. I'd like to hear from Phase 1 players who haven't responded yet. I need your jacket and motorcycle. And your registration on the website. Phase 2 will take place on the website forum.
So far, Russia, China, the EU, and Scandinavia are active.
2. China, the EU, and Scandinavia: if you plan to build ships, I need your concepts and rough sketches of what you want, in words and drawings, please. Your own route planning and expedition durations will depend on them.
We've decided to take part in the first public event for the EXODUS project. There will be a role-playing convention on the 25th, where I plan to present Phase 2 and attract new players. Anyone interested can join us, although entry costs five euros. The venue is decent, at least. Update: China is with us.
Phase 2. We are starting to recruit players. We play as countries, deal with the unfolding situation, build policy, plan flights, and generally get on with it )))
So far, the players definitely continuing are Russia, Scandinavia, and the EU. I ask those who played China, the United States, Brazil, India, Japan, and Korea to confirm as soon as possible whether they will continue. You may also decline or say nothing, which will start the transfer of your country and the storyline you began to other players.
We can slowly get started.
Development diaries. 1.
So. Today I spent a great deal of time on a bug I noticed yesterday. When I simulated a colony's population for roughly 3,500 years, negative birth values suddenly appeared and were written to the arrays. These weren't two and a half miners; they were anti-miners!
Several debugging factors compounded the problem, so I didn't catch the exact figures until the evening. And what do you think happened? The number of women who could potentially give birth simply exceeded two billion and a bit, hit the limit of a 32-bit integer, and miraculously flipped into the negative. I had to convert some calculations and variables to floating-point numbers. Now the limit is two billion newborns, but that occurs with a population of about 40 billion, so it should certainly be enough to simulate a whole planet as a single unit, if anyone manages to grab such a prize. And it happens somewhere around the year 4800... Since we're planning to play through a period of no more than 1,200 years, there's a decent margin.
For the curious, here's why I didn't just make the limit enormous: I don't want memory and CPU use to grow without bound. It's very important to stay within 32-bit integer arrays. They're very fast. ;)
Colony population, part two.
What you need to know so you don't ruin your colony in the long term.
The birth-rate calculation includes all women who have reached the age of adulthood set by the player but have not reached the end of their fertile years. Ground-force and fleet personnel are excluded. It takes into account the average lifetime number of children per woman in that society, modified by events, policy settings, prosperity, and several other factors. Based on these calculations, the player gets a number of newborns every in-game year. Mortality during childbirth has already been applied.
Here are the important parameters.
The proportion of women in the population: about 50% by default, with some variation.
The average lifetime number of children. It differs among societies. The base value for Europe is below two, which means a slow decline in the colony's population. Allowing for mortality and other factors, a value of about 2.19 to 2.23 means stagnation; 2.5 or more means growth, and 3.5 to 4 means substantial growth.
Infant survival depends on the colony's level of medical care and specialized buildings. Without medical care and in adverse conditions, mortality can reach 10% or higher. In modern developed countries, infant mortality averages between 0.2% and 1%.
Yesterday's conversation with an old friend made me think it would be worth trying to summarize the essence of our game's gameplay very briefly. It turned out that people's understanding differs from what we've described.
