# General principles The core idea is a **radically social and organic game world, within an engaging, disbelief-suspending setting**. This has several corollaries: * NO RPG GIMMICKS. No stupid missions you have to do repeatedly to gain points, etc. * We want players to do actually meaningful creative activities. * Not lure them into some dopamine-generating loop. * Intensive, simulation-based procedural generation to "fill out" the world * Highly polycentric game infrastructure run by players * Implies: everything open-source, no "anti-cheat" * Implies: game mechanics must be designed around things like "aimbotting" being pervasive * "Single shard" persistent world * Detailed, handcrafted setting that nevertheless does not have a fixed storyline for the future * See: *Kaiserreich* HOI4 mod, which does this beautifully * Vast human-directed automation * Basic model: a hierarchical "chain of command" ending in some sort of in-game sovereign polity. Every node in the CoC can either be AI-controlled or human-controlled. * Orders are "mid-level", between grand strategy and RTS. HOI4 is again a good guide. * AI units will blindly follow orders, modulo their own algorithms' calculations of how best to reach the goal. * Humans see orders but may or may not follow them. * First reason: nobody wants to do manual labor in a game * Second reason: this fixes the false dichotomy between a rich, ordered world and a Second Life-style "real-life social media disguised as a RPG". * See: *Distant Worlds* --- # Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question. Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter: ``` GET https://ostomo.gitbook.io/ostomo-notes/general-principles.md?ask= ``` The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language. The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation. Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.