World of Gonz — MMO gameplay design

City → Public offices → Joint realm production office (implemented, M4/M7/M8 partial): Review a named member owner as production governor; each affected owner separately funds three delegates/three full local voting days and every local majority must approve. The nominee separately accepts the fixed seven-shared-day office within three shared days. Per-home food/workforce/stock exceptions and reviewed producer rows support atomic multi-home staffing/recipe changes, 2–8 producers across at least two homes. Three orders per home per shared day and twenty-one per term remain visible, including a joint order in the governor's own home. Foreign menus show only consented producer access. Revocation by any member, governor resignation, service interruption and named-holder/member/source loss have explicit consequences; applied production stays. Reviews pin current world/office/producer revisions and draft changes invalidate confirmation. Script v243 is current. Founding Getting started retains food/staffing/first-production priorities; this elective later role adds no starting requirement. See primary design, player guide and technical reference.

Implemented federation congress scope: The founding compact can now admit additional independently founded homes up to four and jointly amend common food/civilian/timber safeguards through separate owner payments and three actual voting days in every affected home. City → Constitution & authority exposes current members, exact expiry, fresh amendment drafts, local bills/votes/refunds and seven-shared-day guest exit notice. Current safeguards bind throughout deliberation and notice. The original term, local titles, residents, goods, armies, charter and succession remain separate. The earned served journey exercises three homes; other realm offices, wider forms/elections and sovereignty remain planned. See the primary living-world design, player guide and technical reference.

Current scoped political implementation: City → Constitution & authority now supports separately consented bilateral civic federation compacts with paid three-day local conventions, enforceable food/civilian/timber safeguards, finite twenty-eight-shared-day terms and seven-day exit notice. Local titles, property and succession remain separate; no sovereign office, pooled treasury or automatic treaty right is granted. Realm admission/amendment and the bounded production governor above are implemented; wider government templates, elections and sovereignty remain planned. See the primary living-world design, implementation ledger and player guide.

Design baseline: 9 September 2026. Status: proposed gameplay rules and tuning for implementation, not a claim that the simulation already supports them.

Read with Game Vision, Living World Design, and screen specifications. This document makes the vision actionable. The living-world document remains the engineering foundation, except for the explicit expanding-world identity refinement below. The current browser management screens use sample data; multiplayer movement is a separate existing capability.

1. The experience

“I wonder what happened in the world today.”

You embody a mortal person in a persistent society. Your family connects generations; your tribe is a political community that can outlive you. Start with a village and a few neighboring hexes, learn to sustain it, and choose what you want to become. Wealth, discovery, service, influence, peaceful stewardship, military achievement, and institutions all create lasting legacies.

The world has human and AI inhabitants with the same fundamental rules. Geography produces opportunities, people create demand, trade connects places, scarcity creates disputes, and institutions determine how those disputes are resolved. No universal victory screen resets everyone else's work.

Every major system must answer: what information does the actor possess, what decision can they make, what does it cost, when does it resolve, who else can respond, how does it change the map, and what remains after failure?

2. Who the player is: Familie og Tribe

“Tribe” is the founding community, not a mandatory government type or a synonym for biological family. Unrelated families can join; relatives can belong to different tribes. Later names may be league, republic, kingdom, or federation while preserving the founding tribe's history. A guild/company is an additional organization, not an extra playable identity or action pool.

First character and household

Create name, house emblem, pronouns, one background (cultivator, trader, scout, organizer), and two values. Background changes starting expertise and introductions, not exclusive classes. Appearance and identity do not determine attributes. Kin may be biological, adopted, or chosen; adoption provides a fully valid succession route.

The founding household contains a playable adult, two adult relatives or chosen kin, and an elder adviser. The population is simulated as cohorts; only notable people receive individual records. Children can exist in the lineage but cannot be commanders or playable officeholders. Adult eligibility begins at 18 world years; no player needs to wait for a child to mature to continue playing.

Family play centers on mentoring, education, appointing trusted people, estate planning, competing loyalties, adoption, and marriage/partnership agreements between consenting adult characters. A political union proposes specific property and treaty clauses; it never grants control over another human account. No mandatory romance, fertility grind, or superior hereditary bloodline bonuses.

Death and AI takeover — required rule

When your character dies, AI immediately takes over your tribe. The account remains playable. This is a domain event, not a logout timer and not an optional animation.

Default succession sequence:

1. Resolve CharacterDied once, with cause and evidence. Revoke that character's authority immediately.
2. In the same durable transaction, enter AI_INTERREGNUM, appoint the charter's legal interim leader, and activate the tribe's stewardship mandate. The deceased can never submit another valid order.
3. Revalidate queued orders. Preserve communal construction, contracted deliveries, defensive orders, and debts. Suspend unsigned personal diplomacy, discretionary aggression, and commands requiring the deceased's office. Never refill action capacity or forgive obligations.
4. Settle the estate: personal assets follow the will and inheritance law; communal land/treasury remain communal; public office follows its own election or appointment law. An heir does not automatically inherit a republic's governorship.
5. Present the death chapter: what happened, who now governs, what AI has done, what your estate contains, and available continuations.
6. Choose an eligible adult heir/kin, remain an observer, or begin a landless role/new household. Choosing an heir grants embodiment of that person, not automatic tribe authority.
7. If the character has the legal mandate, they may request handover. Handover shows current budgets, pending commitments, political support, and suspended orders; the server atomically switches control at a command boundary. An unlawful claim opens the political route rather than a takeover button.

HUMAN_RULE -- character dies --> AI_INTERREGNUM -- legal handover --> HUMAN_RULE
                                       |
                                       +-- player leaves tribe --> AI_CONTINUITY
HUMAN_RULE -- ordinary logout --> MANDATE_CARETAKER -- login --> HUMAN_RULE

Ordinary logout does not trigger succession or kill the character. A caretaker executes existing mandates without taking title. Death does. If another human holds mayor/general/treasurer office, their authority continues under the charter during the AI interregnum; AI takes the deceased leader's tribe-wide responsibilities without possessing other players.

Stewardship mandate

Before death, set food reserve, spending ceiling, permitted trade partners, defense posture, diplomacy limits, priority projects, and escalation conditions. Initial default: preserve 14 world days of food, limit new spending to 10% of unreserved communal treasury per world day, defend and retreat, honor treaties, avoid new offensive wars, avoid communal land sales, and defer constitutional changes. Costs and thresholds are proposed balance values.

Hard charter limits always override AI personality. Skills affect forecast quality and prioritization; disloyalty produces visible political acts or embezzlement cases within the rules, not silent bypasses. The AI action log shows objective, known evidence, chosen order, cost, and result. During interregnum the player can inspect it, but cannot secretly edit the tribe's mandate without authority.

If no will, adult kin, or legal heir exists, the council supplies an interim AI steward. The player can adopt an eligible unclaimed adult from their household before death, or after death choose a landless continuation; never leave a dead-end screen. If an heir is already controlled by another human, they are ineligible for embodiment. If all land is lost, family records, surviving personal property, reputation, skills, and claims remain; no starter treasury is repeatedly minted by switching roles.

Mortality and return fairness

Deaths follow battle exposure, illness, hazardous expeditions, or aging. Ordinary shortage first causes illness/migration and warnings. Preventable health decline has a forecast and delegated care policy. A battlefield death can be sudden, but assignment of the character to that force explicitly previews mortal risk. Rulers can command from a safe council seat at the cost of fewer personal field benefits. No mandatory periodic death merely for being offline.

Age is recorded in world years but receives a separately tuned lifecycle rate; the accelerated season calendar must not kill characters every few real days. Initial playtest target: months of real play per peaceful adult lifespan, with advance aging warnings. Death timing, inheritance disputes, and estate transfers are server events. A disconnect during succession resumes the same chapter; it cannot roll a new heir or duplicate the estate.

3. Starting and returning

First 30 minutes

1. Read a compact world primer: persistent time, mortal character, AI continuity, action cap.
2. Choose one of three server-validated village sites with food, water, access, neighbors, risk, and a specialization hint. A default start reserves one village plus six surrounding usable land cells. An optional invited start joins an existing settlement with a household lease; no free duplicate village.
3. Meet the family and council; review the default stewardship mandate and identify an eligible adult successor.
4. Follow the gameplay foundations plan: begin with a functioning food source, survey a suitable plot, and construct the first useful forestry/timber project through a cost preview. Woodland onboarding comes first; farm and coastal starts follow their supported local production chains. A shared scenario introduces a nearby market through actual demand once physical trade exists.
5. Arrange a supported food/tool delivery and choose a reserve policy once those authoritative systems are implemented. Watch a completed project change the land-use layer. Founding, trade and this full onboarding journey remain design proposals beyond the current bounded development scenarios.
6. Queue a second project and leave with an explicit forecast of what will happen offline.

Site reservations expire after 10 real minutes if abandoned. New settlements receive 72 real hours of limited newcomer protection, visible to all: no territorial siege or direct raid against the starting estate; no offensive participation while protected. Protection does not cover imported armies, proxy war assets, monopolies, or distant merchant ventures. A protected player may decline early exit; hostile action previews the irreversible protection loss. These are initial tuning proposals. The implemented disputed-control declaration gate now enforces the 72-real-hour founding window and separately reviewed irreversible exit; actual imported allied troops and distant fortifications stay outside estate protection. Wider siege and direct-raid behavior is still planned.

Session loop, five to fifteen minutes

Open Since you were away → inspect three consequential changes → follow one cause to the map → compare responses → commit a few orders → review their dependencies and delegate routine work → leave. Event timestamps display world date and local real deadline. Information refresh, inspection, drafting, filtering, communication, queue reordering, and reading advice are free.

The return briefing is generated from events since the last acknowledged sequence. Group repeated changes, distinguish facts from estimates, and retain unread decisions when the player closes the briefing. Critical succession appears before normal economic news. A factual “no material changes” state must exist; do not invent drama to populate a feed.

4. Time, orders, and asynchronous fairness

Initial tuning: one world day = four real hours; four seasons of 90 world days. Travel and harvests use world time, while protection windows and notification deadlines also expose real-time equivalents. Character aging is deliberately separate as described above. Timings below are real hours unless labeled world days.

Account command attention: cap 12, regenerate one per two real hours. New account starts at 12. The pool belongs to the account/world, follows all careers, and is not reset by death, login, organization creation, or character switching. Daily play can use the full 24-hour allowance with one check-in. This reduces activity-volume advantage without pretending that strategy or collaboration has no advantage.

Organizations have bounded operational capacity funded by population, institutions, staff wages, and administration. Autonomous production, contracted repeated routes, upkeep, and standing defense use this capacity, not a human click for each cycle. AI factions have the same organizational limits and a capped strategic attention budget. Governors cannot multiply the owner's strategic attention by submitting forbidden commands on their behalf. Human members each retain personal attention, but shared project slots and office limits bound coordinated throughput.

Emergency controls never create resources, move faster, or launch new attacks; repeated toggling cannot reset travel or restore spent supplies. Diplomacy drafting is free; sending/signing a binding proposal uses the appropriate authority and commitment path.

Order states: draft → preview → accepted → queued → running → completed; alternatives blocked, cancelled, failed, suspended. Preview is an estimate at a revision, never a guarantee. Accept deducts attention and atomically reserves resources. Execute revalidates rights, paths, staffing, and world state. A blocked order names the missing prerequisite, retains only appropriate reservations, and offers edit, retry, or cancel. Independent lanes allow a blocked mine to coexist with a running caravan; explicit dependencies wait for their parent.

Cancel before execution returns unspent reserved goods, but not spent attention. Cancel during construction returns only unused stock and stops at a safe stage. A rejected/stale command spends nothing. Duplicate requests return the original result. No client-only success message may imply acceptance by a server.

5. The world map is the board

Most ordinary tiles are mutable. Players and AI may terraform terrain and construct many specialized buildings. Woodcutters require harvestable trees; conventional fields require suitable soil/water and cannot be built directly on untreated desert. A separate terrain project can unlock new uses after completion. The terrain and building design defines conversions, ongoing requirements, the broad building catalog and screens S24–S25. It supersedes earlier blanket protection of painted landmarks: only explicit world-critical or legally protected anchors are protected, not every illustrated place.

Generated geography establishes original terrain, river flow, passes and resource potential. Durable terrain and waterway projects can change effective topology, navigability and hazards. Art depicts effective state; it does not grant build rights or introduce a river because one is painted on an incoming tile.

Select a hex, site, route, army, or settlement with a click or the searchable place list. Display overlapping objects as a chooser. At overview scale inspect regional aggregates; at local scale expose projects and supply. Map overlays: influence, land rights, food, production, trade flow, transport capacity, military supply, hazards, knowledge, and history. One analytical overlay is primary at a time; labels retain symbols and text so color is never the only signal.

Context actions are capability-based: inspect, survey, develop, negotiate access, route through, patrol, preserve, salvage. An unknown cell permits exploration but never reveals its hidden ore to the client. A beautifully painted city can be a historical site or an AI settlement; the inspector states authoritative status before offering management.

Expansion and shared knowledge

The physical world is shared; knowledge is faction-specific. States are unknown, charted, surveyed, observed, and stale. A map sale transfers a timestamped report, not permanent live vision. Distant market prices and troop counts are estimates with age and source.

Expeditions reserve supplies and a route to the frontier. On crossing a generation boundary, the server creates a chunk exactly once from its stable coordinates and pinned generator version. Adjacent topology must agree, including rivers and coasts. Concurrent expeditions discover the same geography; discovery credit uses deterministic arrival time and allows joint credit for ties. New land may already contain AI societies whose rights and presence must be discovered; it is not all free claim space.

The fixed-map row * WORLD_COLS + col identity in the earlier living-world draft cannot survive changing width. Before expansion, adopt worldId + signed axial q,r as stable cell identity (or a fixed-size chunk key plus local index). Retain a migration table for existing legacy integer IDs and sort edges by canonical endpoints. Never resize and reinterpret persisted IDs. Existing seeded geography remains pinned; art releases never regenerate owned land.

6. Development without repetition

At village scale, place a few functional projects yourself. At town scale, allocate land and budgets to districts. At regional scale, appoint governors and apply editable templates with local exceptions. These are choices, not mandatory level gates that take tools away. A merchant can remain small forever; a king can inspect one farm without needing to manage every farm.

Construction requires surveyed suitable ground, tenure/build rights, workers, delivered materials, maintenance capacity, and a connected route. Stages are reserved site, foundations, working structure, improved, damaged, abandoned, ruins, restored. Footprints cannot overwrite explicitly legally protected or world-critical sites; landmark artwork alone does not grant protection, as refined in the terrain rules. Important wonders require explicit projects and regional participation; they are not automatic upgrades.

District templates allocate land, workforce, public spending, and priorities separately. Percentages within each budget total 100%; a housing percentage is not also a labor percentage. Template preview identifies terrain conflicts and projected shortages before application. Governors may adapt inside bounds and report exceptions.

Emergent private buildings require persistent demand, private capital, zoning permission, labor, inputs, and a profitable forecast. Traffic may attract a tavern; it does not create free materials. Public budgets do not pay for private growth unless an approved subsidy says so. Closure and bankruptcy leave vacancies and history rather than instantly deleting households.

7. People, needs, culture, and knowledge

Population cohorts track count, occupation, wealth band, culture, legal status, location, food/housing/health/security satisfaction, and political concerns. Cohorts split/merge at bounded granularity; avoid individual daily simulation for every resident. Individual notables represent leaders and specialists, not every worker.

Food prices reduce real wages; low wages reduce housing access; overcrowding harms health; insecurity slows migration; recruited workers leave production. Migration uses real travel and destination housing/jobs. Unrest progresses through petition, organizing, strike/protest, secession demand, and rebellion, with thresholds, causes, response windows, and recovery paths. A single bad meal cannot instantly erase a city.

Farmers seek protection and fair land access; workers seek affordable necessities; merchants seek predictable fees; soldiers seek pay; scholars seek institutions; nobles seek authority; clergy seek cultural influence. Cohorts can overlap political coalitions. Governors show the top causes of satisfaction, not an unexplained happiness bar.

Research progresses through scholars, institutions, equipment, trade contacts, practical use, and discoveries. Unlocks require actual capability: a navigation technique needs trained navigators and a shipyard to matter. Diffusion travels with people, manuscripts, and licensed knowledge; pioneers gain a period of reputation and advantage, not permanent monopoly. Culture affects trust, legitimacy, identity, and building style; no culture is inherently superior. Heritage preservation can compete with profitable excavation.

8. Economy and physical trade

Start with food, timber, stone, ore, tools, labor, and coin; extend to fuel, textiles, weapons, medicine, luxuries, mounts, and ship components after the basic loop works. Coin is an accounting medium with explicit faucets (limited public stipends/contracts) and sinks (institutional services and upkeep); goods are conserved across production, consumption, spoilage, loss, and trade.

Example chains:

• Soil + water + worker time + tool wear → grain → flour/bread → household consumption.
• Managed trees + worker time → timber → charcoal; ore + charcoal + smith time → tools/equipment.
• Timber + cloth + metalwork + shipwright time → vessel → transport capacity with maintenance.

Each settlement market matches bounded buy/sell offers with quantity, limit price, expiry, owner, and local warehouse. A matching transaction transfers local title and coin atomically. Buying abroad does not teleport cargo home. Quotes show available quantity and age; avoid a global magical price. NPC cohort demand creates consumption, but purchases cannot exceed income/budget. Persistent excess demand raises bids, encourages import, and reduces consumption; no infinite money buyer.

Merchant route loop: compare markets → buy/reserve cargo → pick land/river/sea legs → select carrier/escort → set minimum sale price and loss limit → preview gross revenue, each tariff, wages, spoilage, and risk → dispatch → monitor exceptions → sell or hold at destination. Profit is estimated until sale. Warehouses enforce capacity; unsold goods consume space and can spoil.

Caravans and ships are scheduled entities with cargo manifests, owner, route, capacity, legal access, speed, escort, and checkpoints. They can be taxed at a jurisdiction crossing once per crossing event, protected, raided, delayed, blocked, or rerouted. A changed tariff applies at its published effective time; no retroactive fee to an already-cleared crossing. A border closure pauses at the next safe node, then follows the approved wait/reroute/return rule. Already departed goods do not vanish.

Raids require interception access, detection, strength, and an engagement; loot is limited to actual cargo. Carriers can surrender cargo or flee under standing orders. Repeated routes obey a cash ceiling, stock floor, permitted counterparties, and expiry; they cannot drain the treasury indefinitely. Contracts define escrow, partial delivery, deadline, force-majeure rules, and jurisdiction. Insurance and banking are later-stage systems backed by reserves, not free risk removal.

9. Influence, rights, and administration

Influence is soft political pressure; land title, construction rights, passage, taxation, military occupation, and sovereignty are distinct legal facts. A tribe with 65% influence cannot silently spend another family's property. Inspector shows both influence shares and enforceable rights.

Initial influence score per faction: weighted population presence, cultural ties, road/trade links, institutions, garrison, and recognized authority, attenuated by travel cost and resistance. Normalize visible shares; include local/unaligned population. Use smoothing and thresholds with hysteresis. Changes accumulate pressure toward negotiated affiliation, contested status, or a formal sovereignty action rather than flipping ownership every tick.

Expansion options are new settlement on valid unclaimed land, negotiated lease/purchase, federation, vassal contract, lawful annexation, or war. Each adds administrative load and a real supply problem. Distance increases corruption risk and communication delay; plural local identities create political bargaining. Large realms gain policy tools but face diminishing net revenue and secession pressure. Cap office scope and project throughput through funded institutions rather than arbitrary unlimited title stacking.

10. Government, diplomacy, and courts

The constitution defines franchise, offices, powers, appointments, elections, taxes, succession, emergency powers, and amendment procedure. Government types are templates of these rules: monarchy, constitutional monarchy, republic, merchant republic, tribal federation. Titles (mayor, governor, baron, count, duke, judge, general, chancellor, king, emperor) communicate scope; permission checks use the office charter, never the title string alone.

Elections have published eligibility snapshots, nomination phase, candidate manifestos with mechanical promises, ballot phase, deterministic tally/tie rules, and transition time. Starting proposal: nominations 48 real hours, voting 48 hours, 14-real-day term. One eligible character/account ballot per constituency; AI population votes are cohort-weighted by the constitution and shown separately from human ballots. New arrivals cannot instantly acquire duplicate franchise. Campaign spending is capped and disclosed. Offices transfer only after tally finalization; death uses an interim officeholder.

Promises bind visible policy targets and dates (e.g. reduce gate tariff 7% → 4% within three world days). Broken promises affect trust and future elections; they do not magically force a policy beyond the office's powers. A voting user sees eligibility, weighting, privacy rule, deadline, and whether their ballot may be changed before closing.

Diplomacy follows draft → propose → counteroffer → ratify → active → expired/breached/terminated. Every party sees the same structured clause revision. A counteroffer invalidates older pending acceptance. Treaty clauses modify concrete permissions: trade tariffs, transit, embargo, defense obligations, tribute, nonaggression, border settlement, and peace. Start/expiry, exit notice, beneficiaries, guarantor, collateral, and breach remedy are explicit. A defensive pact authorizes a bounded response; it does not seize another human's army without delegated standing orders.

Courts receive claims referencing engine events, treaty clauses, cargo IDs, or titles. Workflow: filing/bond → notice → evidence/response (minimum 48 real hours) → hearing → reasoned verdict → remedy → appeal. Human judges disclose conflicts; conflicted/unavailable judges recuse to an eligible neutral pool or rules-based AI adjudicator. AI judges have the same evidence projection. Authenticated engine facts cannot be edited by player testimony. Courts may enforce escrow, fines, sanctions, or supported transfers only in recognized jurisdiction. Outside it, a judgment becomes a claim others may voluntarily enforce. No global omnipotent tribunal or instant confiscation on accusation.

Player interaction uses permissioned company contracts, tribe membership applications, council proposals, delegation, treaties, ballots, and case files. Contact cards distinguish human, delegated AI, and independent AI. Offers expire and cannot be accepted twice. Membership states: invited/applied, probationary, member, officeholder, departed/removed; the charter states voting, treasury access, land use, and departure property. Chat is contextual and asynchronous with mute/block/report; moderation tools are separate from in-world courts and cannot be controlled by an elected king.

11. Military, PvP, and PvE

Players choose campaign objective, commander, force composition, equipment, route, supply, engagement policy, and retreat/surrender thresholds. Battles auto-resolve in deterministic event phases with recorded random outcomes. No requirement to log in and click during a ten-minute battle.

Forces draw recruits from real population and equipment from inventories. Logistics consumes food, wages, mounts/transport capacity, medicine, and replacement equipment. Supply travels along routes with throughput and access constraints; distance and congestion matter. A nominally huge army starves if its narrow mountain road cannot feed it. Capturing a depot or blocking a harbor changes the feasible campaign.

Campaign lifecycle: objective and legal grounds → declaration/notice → muster → march/checkpoints → contact → recon/skirmish → engagement → retreat/siege → occupation → settlement. Initial territorial war notice: 24 real hours before first siege, then at least 12 hours of visible siege pressure before major occupation. The paid disputed-control declaration, exact notice dates and two-party truce are implemented; physical siege/pressure and occupation are still planned. A recorded claim is not a legal judgment or ownership grant. Raids outside protected estates remain possible under existing warnings and standing defense; do not confuse a safe home with safe remote shipping. The opponent can evacuate, negotiate, hire guards, reinforce, fortify, cut supplies, or surrender under preset policy.

Auto-resolution considers force roles, equipment condition, terrain, weather, commander experience, morale, recon quality, fatigue, and supplies. Preview gives a range conditional on known intelligence, not exact hidden enemy strength. Report explains key factors, phase losses, retreat reason, captured equipment, civilian effects, and whether the character was exposed. Same seed/events replay the same result. Surrender offers preserve some population/property while changing political obligations.

Occupation limits taxation, requires a garrison and supply, and creates resistance. A victorious army does not instantly gain perfect loyalty or permanent title. Peace clauses settle recognized borders and reparations. Defeated players can serve as governors, organize lawful political opposition or rebellion, hire out as mercenaries, trade, emigrate, or seek an exile sponsor.

PvE shares the world rules: bandits target profitable vulnerable traffic, pirates need havens and ships, rebels arise from sustained grievances, monsters have habitat and finite resources, and hostile wilderness obstructs expansion. Contract boards arise from these causes (escort, patrol, survey, relief), with funded rewards. Magic/rare sites remain constrained special capabilities with visible costs, range, cooldown, and counters; no unexplained teleporting economy. Monsters and magical research can enter after the grounded economy/combat loop is proven.

12. AI societies and delegation

The September 22 design distinguishes cautious neutral Neighbour Houses from three major factions: ice mages controlling extensive lands around both poles with unknown intentions, long quest-gated contact/trade and overwhelming territorial defense; a Lich King defending and expanding a large continental undead realm; and a troll, goblin and orc horde defending and expanding under a dynasty of orc kings. These are future design contracts, not implemented factions. The living-world design records the current decisions. Major powers receive explicit one-time historical opening assets; thereafter shared rules apply. Undead recruitment and magical upkeep extend the living military model through finite remains, energy and command capacity, rather than free units. Neutral houses do not initiate territorial conquest against humans.

AI philosophies: trade, expansion, military security, raiding, peace/mediation, internal development, construction, and political influence. Traits weight priorities and risk tolerance; they do not grant resources, omniscience, or special movement. Player stewards additionally obey hard mandates and can explain why they declined an order.

Economy, military, diplomacy, construction, exploration, and government planners submit proposals to a budget coordinator. The coordinator reserves shared stock and chooses compatible actions. Engine validation has the final word. These are conventional game-code responsibilities: all routine decisions use engine scripts, authored plans and bounded scoring with zero model-inference calls. The cost-constrained automation policy restricts optional models to reviewed content assistance or non-authoritative prose, disabled by default with global spending caps and a complete template fallback.

Knowledge is faction-specific and timestamped. AI may infer uncertainty but cannot inspect hidden ore, unopened ballots, or private queues. Persist decision evidence and command results. Sleeping regions catch up bounded scheduled events in the same order as observed regions; camera presence never changes outcomes. AI workloads have per-zone budgets and degrade by thinking less often, not cheating or freezing production.

13. Events, history, and careers

Events use trigger thresholds, cooldowns, observable causes, and recovery trajectories. A disaster can emerge without a quest, but is still tested and bounded. Scripted onboarding may teach the systems without fabricating outcomes in the shared economy.

Chronicle entries reference event IDs, people, places, organizations, dates, and causes. Public history excludes private holdings and fog-hidden discoveries until publication. Separate verified fact, attributed claim, and later interpretation. A historical border view is a dated reconstruction, never actionable present state. Players can bookmark chapters and attach attribution; they cannot rewrite the source event.

These are intersecting careers rather than locked classes. Progression grants skills, trust, contacts, and institutional access; it does not erase logistics with exponential stat multipliers. World rankings can compare dimensions, but no single score defines success. Inactive tribes continue under AI; abandonment follows real insolvency, depopulation, or chosen dissolution rather than an arbitrary login deletion clock.

14. Incoming tile integration contract

Gameplay development must proceed while new art is arriving. Preserve the current Atlas v2 geography, Hero spacing, terrain profiles, connector masks, and art direction. Do not edit production manifests or overwrite incoming paintings to implement a UI concept.

Authoritative records describe semantic facts: terrain profile, land use, structure type/stage, condition, rights, settlement footprint, route edges, hazard and visibility. A presentation adapter resolves (semantic type, stage, terrain profile, season, art version) to an approved asset recipe. Existing approved art is the fallback. If a state has no painting yet, show an accessible state badge and neutral footprint; never pretend finished art exists.

Incoming asset manifest requirements: stable asset ID, art version, semantic tags, compatible terrain profiles, anchor/pivot, footprint, occlusion class, native dimensions, ground/detail/Hero relationships, fallback, and review status. Visual footprint may span several hexes; collision/build rights use the semantic footprint. Art-only refresh invalidates affected cached scenes at a frame boundary; it does not reset selection, reroll a world, move a road, or migrate gameplay saves.

Needed state families: farm foundation/working/fallow; woodland managed/burned/regrowing; mine construction/working/exhausted; settlement growth/damaged/occupied/ruined; road class/bridge damage; port construction/blockade; expedition camp; supply depot; hazard warning. UI badges and analytical overlays remain a separate layer above paintings. Asset arrival is not a gameplay prerequisite; unsupported terrain semantics, unlike missing art, must block the command with a reason.

Art gate: validate manifest and profile compatibility → inspect source art → compose on retained neighboring scenes at overview/regional/local zoom → verify shoreline and landmark occlusion → verify missing-asset fallback → measure dirty-scene rendering → publish versioned presentation manifest. Runtime state must be identical before and after an art-only swap.

15. Authoritative data and command seams

Extend the living-world architecture with AccountWorld, Character, Family, Estate, Tribe, Membership, Office, Mandate, PopulationCohort, District, Inventory, MarketOffer, Contract, Journey, Army, Treaty, Election, Case, KnowledgeReport, and ChronicleEntry. Each has stable IDs and revisions; monetary/resource transfers balance a ledger.

Commands include actor account/character/office, world/epoch, idempotency key, target IDs, expected aggregate revisions, parameters, and quote/reservation references. Authority must be rechecked at acceptance and execution. Commit events, ledger changes, and durable jobs before acknowledgment. The UI distinguishes submitting, accepted, queued, completed, and unknown acknowledgment; reconnect queries by command ID before retry.

Family-specific events: CharacterDied, TribeInterregnumStarted, AuthorityRevoked, EstateDistributed, CharacterEmbodied, HandoverRequested, TribeControlTransferred. Death and caretaker activation commit together. Handover uses the current office/tribe revision and consumes no attention: it is an identity transition, not a free military action. An unauthorized handover changes nothing.

Server projections grant only known geography, own inventories, permitted offices, public offers, filtered event history, and applicable forecast bounds. Client sample data must remain visibly labeled until replaced by those projections. Camera travel is separate from authoritative strategic journeys and cannot reveal hidden terrain or teleport goods.

16. Delivery and acceptance

First playable alpha combines B and C before marketing mortality as a shipped feature. D–F build breadth after durable village and succession loops are proven. Banking, espionage depth, magical industries, dynastic intrigue, and multi-machine authority are subsequent expansions, not hidden prerequisites for a first game.

Required scenario checks for the eventual engine:

1. A farmer, merchant, and AI governor exchange actual grain/tools; a blocked pass changes prices and supply without duplicating stock.
2. A mine attracts workers; housing pressure causes a petition; district spending fixes capacity at a real resource cost.
3. A character dies with a running farm and pending treaty; the farm continues, unsigned treaty suspends, public office follows law, AI spends within mandate, and a legal heir can take over after reconnect.
4. An elected leader's child inherits personal property but cannot inherit the office without an election/appointment.
5. A loser continues as a merchant without recovering the lost tribe's treasury or creating a new free attention pool.
6. A once-daily player receives the same attention regeneration as an always-online player over the same elapsed time.
7. Two expeditions reveal one chunk consistently; purchased maps remain stale reports, not live vision.
8. A new farm painting arrives mid-selection; the appearance updates and all IDs, resources, jobs, permissions, and routes remain unchanged.

Playtest decisions still open: exact lifecycle speed, newcomer/war windows, attention tuning, newcomer invitation economics, migration rates, market matching cadence, and court throughput. Instrument daily return comprehension, meaningful orders/session, blocked-order reasons, delegation reversals, survival after defeat, heir continuation, AI mandate violations, market concentration, and notice-window participation. Tune toward understandable consequences and viable small-player careers, not maximum clicks.