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