The Lost Age Of Abundance: a strategy game for leaders to test their ability lead

Religious war, racial war, economic war, class war, iconoclasm and war over aesthetic movements, international finance: a game that is built on top of an "agent based simulation."

The Lost Age Of Abundance is the ultimate strategy game, with a deeper system of economics, sociology, ethics and psychology than any other game. If you enjoy being the player who conceives of a strategy that other players did not think possible, this game will appeal to you, for this game offers options in more avenues, dimensions, and scopes of activity, than any other game, ever.

This is a real-time game, not turn based. It is browser based.

Hundreds of players face off in a battle to reunite the Ruined Lands and so re-establish The Empire Of Abundance, which was shattered 64 years ago by the Discordant Disharmony, an era of mass psychosis which may have had a supernatural origin.

You are ruling over a land where every family is its own unique independent, living organism, with hopes and dreams and hungers and a thirst for freedom. Each family is the “agent” in this “agent based simulation.” And you, as leader, must keep them united behind your cause, while you fight the other players. If you’ve ever thought “What if SimCity was also a real-time war game against other players” then you have an idea of what this means.

Players can play as one of 4 types of leader, advocating for a different type of government, and each has a different way of winning:

1. Prince: must conquer all of the land and then hold it for 10 minutes against all of the internal rebellions that the other players will organize. Princes have the advantage of legitimacy, being recognized by the surviving court scribes who still inhabit the old, ruined capitol, from which the Emperor fled 64 years ago. As many peasants view the Emperor as a sacred figure, and pray for his return, the princes benefit from association with the old system of government.

2. Priest: can either win by conquering the land, like a Prince, or can guess the correct answer for 100 consecutive prophesies about the future. (The prophesies are of the form "Which player will win the biggest battle in the next 10 minutes" and "Which player will experience the largest amount of economic growth in the next 10 minutes." Guessing correctly shows that a player has The Gift Of Prophecy, which is much revered by the peasants.)

3. Communists: can either win by conquering the land, like a Prince, or mobilize the international proletariat to seize the means of production, meaning the player must get loyal families to constitute at least 51% of the workforce at 90% of every farm, lumber mill, mine, quarry, or weapons factory, in all kingdoms simultaneously.

4. Anarchists: do not conquer land, ever, and therefore never have a "kingdom" or "territory." They win by convincing 80% of all families, in all of the kingdoms simultaneously, to renounce all hierarchy, and all systems of oppression, and thus dissolve any states.

Players can switch from one form of Leader to another whenever they wish, but you will run the risk of losing many of your followers. For example, if you’ve been advocating for Communism, but suddenly you become a Prince and start advocating for feudalism, then many of your followers may feel that you have betrayed them, and so they will withdraw their support (and their money) from your cause. All the same, there are some transitions that make sense: if you’ve been playing as a Prince, but you are defeated, you lose all of your land, and your army is wiped out, then it might make sense to go underground, become a guerrilla leader, and switch to Communism — this would cost you little since you’re already doing badly, at that point.

Players can also win a "second place" prize if they are allies of the winner. When we eventually organize tournament games, the second-place prize winners will receive 10% of the prize that the winner receives. With Anarchists, all prize money is divided evenly among the winner and their allies.

[Update on February 2nd, 2025: down in the comments below, Franklin asks if there will be additional social classes, such as merchants and scholars. The short answer is that all social classes should arise organically from the agent-based-simulation, based on the peasants desire for profit, difference in skill, thirst for knowledge, etc. To the extent that I have to hardcode a social class such as “merchant” then I have failed to build a real agent-based-simulation. Ephemera such as social distinctions should be an “emergent property” of a correctly built agent-based-simulation. See my response to Franklin, at the bottom of this page, for a longer answer.]

Are you the leader that can help the land heal after the mass psychosis of the Discordant Disharmony?

After the Discordant Disharmony the survivors spent decades wandering in the wilderness, until finally they came upon your land and agreed to offer you fealty, in exchange for the chance to build a home and gather food, in peace. Given the horrors they have endured, the present moment, as you organize your territory, is surprisingly abundant for the peasants, the happiest they've known in two generations, and they are wondering if it will be possible to make this happiness permanent. Perhaps the poet Surha Surha did best in summarizing the current mood of the peasants when he wrote:

These heavy stalks of wheat

These heavy cattle in the field

These heavy tables served for supper

Bring lightness to my heart.

With burdened carts the farmer returns from the field

With burdened sacks the hunter returns from the mountain

With burdened baskets the gatherer returns from the forest

And all are satisfied that their cupboards are full.

What means these gently rustling leaves

What means these busy chittering beetles

What means these eager splashing creeks

As the evening begins?

Has the past been reborn?

Or is today only a memory?

Who among us knows the words

Who among us knows the paths

Who among us knows the acts

That will restore our lost age of abundance?

It is from this poem that the current struggle takes its name.

As poetry is important to the people, each family follows a different poet, which influences them in different ways. As Surha Surha has written about the joys of loyalty, families that follow Surha Surha are more loyal than other families, which means their morale (which starts at 1,000) has to fall to 700, instead of 750, before they will consider emigrating away from your kingdom.

Every family retains its actual history

A given family may begin in the land of the player NastyPieceOfWork, who then loses several battles and who raises taxes in a desperate effort to rebuild her army. The family hates the high taxes, so their admiration for NastyPieceOfWork falls below a score of 750 (having started at 1,000) and so the family decides to emigrate.

Based on all known information about the economy and the number of battles won, the family has only heard good things about the player SagamoreUndefeated and so they move to the territory of SagamoreUndefeated, but SagamoreUndefeated then loses a battle to AshleyNeverLoses, and the family is now in the territory just conquered by AshleyNeverLoses.

But AshleyNeverLoses had previously built her huge army by taking on an enormous amount of debt, and she now defaults on that debt, leaving her territory cut off from international markets, as such, her economy collapses, and famine grips the land. The family suffers several cycles without food, and finally, starving, they emigrate again, moving to the territory controlled by the player BaskinRobinsFlavorOfTheMonth.

The player BaskinRobinsFlavorOfTheMonth has built a strong counter-intelligence team who can interrogate most new immigrants as they arrive in his territory. This is what the family tells the agents of BaskinRobinsFlavorOfTheMonth:

Started in NastyPieceOfWork

Emigrated because of taxes

Emigrated to SagamoreUndefeated

Conquered by AshleyNeverLoses

AshleyNeverLoses defaulted on loans

Famine in AshleyNeverLoses

All of this is useful information for BaskinRobinsFlavorOfTheMonth. The events that the family suffered are not randomly generated, instead they reference real events that happened in the game, and therefore BaskinRobinsFlavorOfTheMonth can learn a lot about what is happening to the other players by interviewing those immigrants who arrive in his territory.

This is the main way that players learn what is happening to the other players: by interviewing the families that migrate to your land.

Most of the peasants simply want to be left alone

This game is built on top of an "agent based simulation," meaning that each family has been programmed with a broad set of needs, desires, hopes, and ethical imperatives. I have spent the last 6 months focused on this part of the game. My hope is to eventually build out the agent based simulation to such a level of detail that it could be useful to researchers of economics and sociology. I also hope to eventually expose every variable so that players (or researchers) can run the game with the needs and hopes and dreams of each family set to different values than the ones that I've chosen. I hope to release a core part of the engine as an open source tool that will be useful to researchers.

Back in 2022 I wrote an essay criticizing the economics profession for holding onto outdated equilibrium models: “Permanent disequilibrium models, plus agent based simulations, will eventually alter the way we see history.” Click on that to get my academic argument for “agent based simulations.” In 2023 I started working on an agent-based-simulation to help researchers, and then in 2024 I realized this could form the basis of a fantastic game.

This will be the most intellectually profound game ever attempted. The "agent based simulation" will be fascinating all on its own. I myself sometimes let it run just to watch what the families do, by themselves, without any outside interference, without any players. (I say “watch” but for now the only thing to watch are the numbers as they change in the database. I currently lack any graphics.)

The world is complicated, but you don’t need to care

This is not a game like The Sims or Dwarf Fortress where you have to manually intervene to take care of individual families. Just the opposite. These families wish you would leave them alone. They wish all of the leaders would leave them alone, and let them live their lives in peace.

In most ways, these peasants are the anarchists that James C. Scott describes in his book The Art Of Not Being Governed. Ideally, from their point of view, all government would disappear, and all systems of hierarchy and oppression would vanish, and they would be free to live their lives. The peasants know such an outcome is unlikely, so they are willing to support the return of the Emperor, and the return of the Empire Of Abundance. But that restoration is a second-best victory. However unlikely, they really wish that the Anarchists could win.

You can play this as a simple war game

As a player, you don’t have to focus on the complex sociology if you don’t want to. You can attempt to simply win on the battlefield. You can simply implement some medium level tax, build an army, and go fight the other players. If you are very, very good at combat, then you might be able to win the whole game simply by winning most of the battles.

Gossip can kill you

But keep in mind, while you’re out winning battles, it is possible that other players, perhaps Priests and Communists and Anarchists, are sending their spies and agitators among your people, and turning your people against you. Gossip is deadly. Gossip will turn everyone against you. You might think you are on the verge of winning the whole game, when suddenly your own people rise up in revolution against you.

Of the English Civil War, one historian summarized the relationship that existed between Cromwell and his troops, saying, “He lead the pikes so that his head would not end up on a pike.” And when you play this game, you face a similar dynamic: you lead your troops into battle, but you also have to keep up their morale lest they turn against you.

Peasants lead lives of suffering

A true story of starving peasants:

Japan, 1931

I rode along in the train car deeply depressed. It was the afternoon of January 2. Snow began to fall steadily again, and, with the snow, the sea became invisible since a blanket of gray sealed my vision. The road ahead was visible for only 50 yards or so. The man sitting next to me said, “This could turn into a blizzard.”

Sure enough, 6 ri [14.6 miles] later, the snow began to swirl around like a tornado.

An old man sitting behind me said, “On top of the famine, if we get a blizzard that lasts three days, all the farmers in this region will starve to death. In the famine of the Tenmei era (1782-1787), they say 30,000 people starved to death. Those who survived ate human flesh. It was said that the flesh of girls between seventeen and eighteen years of age was the best, so they waited for such girls to die and ate their flesh. If we don’t watch out, we’ll see the same thing happening this year. A famine like this shows that the end of the world is at hand.”

His neighbor chimed in, “Well, if I’m going to starve to death anyway, I would like to eat my fill of white rice, just once.”

“Well, if you can have one meal of rice you’re lucky. They say that in the hills of Iwate prefecture they bring around a bowl of rice from house to house just so that people can have a look at it. They have to be satisfied with that. I hear that when someone gets sick they place the bowl of rice by his pillow. This is enough to cure the patient. It’s like a fairy tale isn’t it? That farmers who grow rice can only look worshipfully at it.”

Peasants, Rebels, Women, and Outcasts: The Underside of Modern Japan

By Mikiso Hane

The peasants can build paradise on their own

If you do nothing, the peasants will calculate which businesses are the most profitable, and they will use their money to establish such businesses. When they generate profits, they use the profits to invest in other businesses. However, when they build a business they increase the supply of the thing offered by the business. For instance, if they create a bread bakery, they will increase the supply of bread, and thus drive down the price of bread, and thus make bread bakeries less profitable. In extreme cases, they may need to close the business. By constantly seeking to find the most profitable business, they build the economy in an intelligent way.

Large bread bakeries are more efficient than small bread bakeries, but they need more upfront capital. The peasants will not pool their money with strangers. They will only pool their money with those who are in their “fellowship circle” which is established by the ordinary activities of their life: who do they go to school with, who do they go to church with, who did they serve with in the army.

Of all the horrors the people endured, the worst was the loneliness

Having spent a long generation wandering in the wilderness, the people who now arrive in your land, and agree to give you fealty, have no friends. Therefore, at first, they have no one to pool their capital with. Over time, they will grow their “fellowship circle”, and therefore it will become easier for them to aggregate larger pools of capital and thus invest in larger and more efficient factories, however, you may not be able to wait that long. The other players may be moving faster than you. Through the power of taxation, you have the power to draw money from the people and aggregate large pools of capital together quickly.

So one strategy you can follow is a strategy of high taxation and directly building out the economy yourself. This is fast and direct and keeps everything under your own control.

But keep this in mind: there is a difference between the “legible economy” that you can see and the “illegible economy” that is known to the peasants. They hide some activity from you because they don’t want to pay taxes. Therefore, the illegible economy is always 20% larger than the legible economy. Because of this, if you simply leave them alone, they can, in many ways, build the economy faster than you can.

Are You A Leader Who Is Righteous In the Eyes Of God?

Another strategy you can follow is encouraging those social activities that rapidly build the fellowship circles of the peasants. For instance, you could invest in schools, so that the families can form friendships in school. If you are a priest, you can also make church attendance mandatory. If you are not a priest, then you make an alliance with a player who is a priest, allowing them to operate a church on your territory. This benefits you by rapidly growing the fellowship circles of your peasants, thus helping them aggregate capital, thus helping them grow the economy. You can also negotiate with that other player (the priest) to receive a percentage of the tithe money that the families donate in church. Or, if the other player is The Voice Of God, you could let them keep 100% of the tithe money in exchange for them naming you A Leader Who Is Righteous In the Eyes Of God, which boosts your admiration among the peasants by 100 points.

No one gives you their loyalty for free, you have to earn it

The peasants are never truly loyal to you. They are loyal to themselves. They are willing to give you their temporary allegiance if they think you are the one who can give them what they want: the restoration of The Lost Age Of Abundance. They crave the peace and prosperity that their great-grandfathers taught them about — life before the Discordant Disharmony. So long as they think you might be the one who can reunite the empire, restore peace, and send word to the Emperor, letting him know that it is safe to return, then the peasants are willing to work for you. Or, if you are playing as an Anarchist, the peasants will give you their loyalty in so far as they think you have a possible way to dissolve all governments, and so grant them true freedom.

The most important freedom is the freedom to marry whoever you wish

Peasants crave freedom more than they crave housing or clothes or food. They crave certain freedoms in particular:

Freedom to marry. No one wants to be forced to breed with someone they hate. Therefore, the peasants demand the freedom to marry whoever they wish. Freedom of marriage is the default in the game, but there will be times when you may need to limit marriage. In particular, if you introduce slavery, but then allow slaves to marry freemen, then you're giving your slaves an easy escape route. If you introduce slavery then you'll almost certainly need to limit their freedom to marry. Also, if you've decided to motivate your people using racism, but then you conquer a country that is wealthier than your own, and of a different race, this complicates things because in an interracial marriage it is the wealthier family whose name and race is carried forward, so unrestricted marriage could lead to the disappearance of the race of your original people, presumably your race, and you would soon end up governing a society that mostly consists of a racial group other than your own, which can be tricky. But of those who cannot marry who they wish, this lowers their admiration of you by 100 points every 2 minutes, the strongest penalty in the game.

Freedom of wages. Peasants want high wages, and they seek whatever work pays the best. They think of this as a fundamental human right. However, there will be times when peasants running industries that you find useless are outcompeting you on wages. (The private sector is paying better than you.) In other words, you may need peasants to work in your sword making factory, but the peasants would make more if they worked at the bakery. You can order the peasants to work for lower wages at the sword making factory, but this lowers their admiration of you by 75 points every 2 minutes.

Freedom to emigrate. Peasants want to live in a country where the leader is doing a good job providing what they need: good jobs, abundant housing, abundant food, good education, excellent hospitals, victory in battle, freedom of marriage, freedom of wages. When these things are lacking, they believe they have a fundamental human right to emigrate. They will want to find a kingdom run by a player who is doing a better job than you. If you put limits on emigration, this lowers their admiration of you by 50 points every 2 minutes.

Beyond freedom, peasants then value sanitation, housing, food, and clothing, the lack of which causes declines of 10 to 40 points in their admiration for you, every 2 minutes.

Finally, peasants want hospitals, education and luxury goods, but the lack of things cause only minor declines in their admiration of you.

The leaders of the leaders, as understood by the peasants

No player is ever knocked out of the game. If you lose all of your land, and all of your armies are destroyed, you simply become a guerilla leader, winning over one family at a time and asking them to donate money to you, so you can rebuild an army, and take back some land, unless you are an Anarchist, in which case you never take land, you instead focus entirely on the task of winning over families.

The peasants recognize certain leaders as attaining a special status:

The Voice Of The Emperor — elected by the players every 10 minutes, with the elections overseen by the sacred court scribes who still survive in the old, ruined capitol. Failure to elect a Voice Of The Emperor is taken as a bad omen by the peasants and so leads to instability. Every player who votes for the winning candidate is then seen by the peasants as belonging to the winner's coalition, and so they receive a 50 point boost to their prestige. The winner receives a 200 point boost.

The Voice Of God — whichever player, playing as a priest, makes the most correct predictions about the future is seen by the peasants as the Voice Of God, therefore this player receives the bulk of all tithe money.

The Voice Of The People — whichever player, playing as a Communist, who maintains the highest "admiration score" among those families who do not own property. The Voice Of The People has the unique power that, once every 20 minutes, they are able to summon the Red Guard, converting loyal peasants into Light Infantry who then have their attack levels boosted by 300%. The Red Guard can operate for 5 minutes.

The Voice Of The Voiceless — whichever player, playing as an Anarchist, who maintains the highest "admiration score" among all families whose morale has fallen below 500 (having started at 1,000). Slaves, in particular, tend to assume that the Voice Of The Voiceless is their true leader, no matter who currently holds the slaves in bondage.

So far I have very little in the way of graphics. For now, I'm basically telling the story in this game with text and with numbers. How much wheat, iron, gold, lumber: just numbers for now. It will be another six months before I can offer rich graphics. I'm actually going to try to launch this with minimal graphics and see if anyone is interested. To my mind, the economics and strategy are still interesting, even if the graphics are limited.

Really, if you want dazzling graphics, go play Age Of Empires. The Lost Age Of Abundance is focused on offering a rich economic and sociological milieu, but I cannot compete with the kinds of rich graphics you'll get from the big studio games.

Death comes for us all

As to the families in the game, they do disappear after awhile, due to aging. They also "marry" each other and give rise to a new family. I talk about the families sometimes as individuals and sometimes as groups of people. They are, in a sense, "Schrödinger's family" in that they have a dual nature, like electrons that are both waves and particles, simultaneously. And yet, as a metaphor, I think this works, most of the time. If I say "The family felt you did a bad job running the economy, so they have emigrated to your opponents kingdom" then I'm clearly talking about a family. If I say "Shar Na Hur Ket has gone to the university in your ally’s kingdom" then it sounds like I'm talking about an individual, though I could easily be talking about one person who also goes with their spouse and two children to some other kingdom — the concept of "family" works even when I seem to be speaking about one person.

The family is the basic unit of the game. It is the "agent" of my "agent based simulation."

Each player starts with a small tribe of 100 families. A game with 100 players would then have 10,000 families at the start.

There are too many families for you to get to know them all. Just like anyone in a leadership position, you'll need to focus your efforts of persuasion on certain strategic families. These will usually be either the wealthiest families, or those families who have the largest "circle of fellowship" within a given demographic, in other words, the most popular family at a particular church, or belonging to a particular race.

Can you put together a team that can win?

I spoke of "players" but I should actually speak of "teams." There is so much happening simultaneously, I think most people will want to play as a team of 2 or 3.

Maybe one team member can focus on the military, another team member can focus on the economy, and the other team member can focus on communication with the other players, to negotiate alliances and arrange trade deals.

Or maybe one team member will run the economy and negotiate all trade deals with other players, while 3 other team members all focus on the military, running 3 different armies, perhaps to launch multiple attacks against an enemy simultaneously, or perhaps so one can play defense while two go on offense.

This division of labor is entirely up to the players, and in fact, finding the ideal division of responsibilities for your team is a key part of winning. (Though if you are super talented, you could try to handle everything by yourself, a team of one.)

One goal of this game is to test small teams under stressful conditions. I’ve spent decades working with small startups and I’m aware how often startups self-destruct because the founders start fighting with each other. Startups are not killed by outside competition, instead they are undermined by interpersonal conflict. Startups die of suicide more often that the die of homicide. And since there are no defined roles on any team, in this game, and since you must agree on how to divide the work, the game tests small teams in a simulation of the pressures you face when creating a startup. The game is an excellent “stress test” of your team dynamics.

Where are the republicans?

Some people will wonder why they can play as a prince, a priest, a Communist , or an Anarchist, yet they can't play as someone who advocates for a republican form of government. But republicanism arises organically from the actions of the players. Any player who is willing to accept a second-place win, and support some other leader for the first place, is acting in a republican style, as would have been recognized in the city-states of Italy during the Renaissance, or the city-states of Greece during the classical age. You vote for the leader by way of your actions.

Is racism useful or useless?

You can use racism as a weapon against your enemies, but be careful, because sometimes it will sabotage you in surprising ways. As an example, let's suppose a game with 100 players with 100 kingdoms, but let's focus on just 3 of these players. Suppose there are these 3 players with 3 kingdoms:

BeastDevil99 (race: Amato)

RodneyStrangerField (race: Amato)

GlindaTheGoodIsASexPest (race: Sarsuri)

Now imagine GlindaTheGoodIsASexPest defeats RodneyStrangerField and captures all of the land and people of that kingdom. So GlindaTheGoodIsASexPest now has a kingdom that has people of both the Amato and Sarsuri races. So BeastDevil99 sends spies into GlindaTheGoodIsASexPest's lands to encourage racism among the conquered Amato, to rile them up so they hate GlindaTheGoodIsASexPest simply because GlindaTheGoodIsASexPest is Sarsuri.

Let's assume this works well, it creates division that weakens GlindaTheGoodIsASexPest, so now BeastDevil99 defeats GlindaTheGoodIsASexPest. So now BeastDevil99 has all of the land and the people of the 3 kingdoms. So racism helped BeastDevil99. But what happens next?

The Amato (who initially belonged to RodneyStrangerField) are still very racist, and now they are BeastDevil99's citizens. They do not live comfortably with the Sarsuri. They will not hire Sarsuri for jobs, and the Amato would rather be unemployed and do nothing than accept a job from a wealthy Sarsuri. So now the racism that BeastDevil99 encouraged is undermining BeastDevil99's economy. Maybe at this point BeastDevil99 can start promoting anti-racist messages, since BeastDevil99 is now presiding over a multi-racial kingdom, and so racism is now a problem for BeastDevil99, but BeastDevil99's enemies may have sent spies into BeastDevil99's land and, realizing that the racism is undermining BeastDevil99's economy, they might further encourage racism in BeastDevil99's population.

Assuming GlindaTheGoodIsASexPest has gone underground and is now working as a guerrilla warrior, she might encourage racism among the Sarsuri, to rile them up against BeastDevil99.

Each spy is able to influence 50 families per minute, pushing their attitudes on race by a rate of 20 points per minute (this number can be increased if the spy brings gifts, such as fresh fish or, especially, cake, but this number will be decreased if the spy belongs to a different race or religion, or follows a different poet.)

The racism level of all families starts with a score of 1,000. Anything above 1,250 is considered "hyper racist."

Is genocide a good way to win?

Governing a hyper racist group of Amato, BeastDevil99 might decide that the easy option is to commit genocide, and kill all of the Sarsuri, so that BeastDevil99's kingdom can be racially pure, and thus avoid the problems that come from having a multi-racial kingdom. So BeastDevil99 can order his military to kill all of the Sarsuri and appropriate all of their property. However, there are some problems that BeastDevil99 needs to consider:

1. genocide lowers morale, so BeastDevil99 needs something to boost morale. In this case, BeastDevil99 might be protected by the high levels of racism. In other words, the genocide lowers morale, but the murder of of Sarsuri makes the hyper racist Amato happy, so the net result is that morale is unchanged.

2. the Sarsuri refugees who successfully make it to kingdoms spread word of the genocide. Unless some other player has also committed genocide against the Sarsuri, BeastDevil99 will now be considered the main enemy of the Sarsuri. The effect lasts for 15 minutes, and during this time the Sarsuri get a 20% bonus during attacks against any of BeastDevil99's armies.

3. if BeastDevil99 kills almost 33% of the population, then they are losing alost 33% of the economy. This leads to weakness. They fought to conquer a big economy and now the rule a much smaller economy. Another player, who conquers nations but does not engage in genocide, is going to have a much bigger economy.

If you don’t commit genocide, then you must convince the public that tolerance is good and healthy

But if you don’t engage in genocide, then you need to work to win over the people you’ve conquered. Otherwise they will move quickly towards rebellion against you.

Also, keep in mind, everything I have written about the uses of racism, as a strategy, can also apply to religion, but the dynamics are different since people can change their religion, but they cannot change their race.

Extremism can help win the war but it endangers the peace

Although racism and religious extremism can help motivate your people to fight, unless you plan to follow a policy of genocide, once you have a vast empire it will also be a multi-racial and multi-religious empire, and therefore you may find a policy of liberal tolerance is your best bet for keeping your people happy.

Consider a real-life example from India:

Akbar The Great not only made unequivocal pronouncements on the priority of tolerance, but also laid the formal foundations of a secular legal structure and of religious neutrality of the state, which included the duty to ensure that ‘no man should be interfered with on account of religion, and anyone is to be allowed to go over to a religion that pleases him.’ Despite his deep interest in other religions and his brief attempt to launch a new religion, Din-ilahi (God’s religion), based on a combination of good points chosen from different faiths, Akbar did remain a good Muslim himself. Indeed, when Akbar died in 1605, the Islamic theologian Abdul Haq, who had been quite critical of Akbar’s lapses from orthodoxy, concluded with some satisfaction that, despite his ‘innovations’, Akbar had remained a proper Muslim.

The meetings that Akbar arranged in the late sixteenth century for public dialogue (referred to in the last section) involved members of different religious faiths (including Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Parsees, Jains, Jews and even atheists). While the historical back-ground of Indian secularism can be traced to the trend of thinking that had begun to take root well before Akbar, the politics of secularism received a tremendous boost from Akbar’s championing of pluralist ideas, along with his insistence that the state would be completely impartial between different religions. Akbar’s own political decisions also reflected his pluralist commitments, well exemplified even by his insistence on filling his court with non-Muslim intellectuals and artists (including the great Hindu musician Tansen) in addition to Muslim ones, and, rather remakably, by his trusting a Hindu former king (Raja Man Singh), who had been defeated earlier by Akbar, to serve as the general commander of his armed forces.

The Argumentative Indian

Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity

— Amartya Sen

Does the game encourage strategies that are unethical?

Keep in mind that each family is programmed to cherish their own fundamental human rights, and to admire leaders who show respect for those human rights. So each family has a sense of ethics. But you, as a player, are allowed to follow unethical strategies where you think those policies might pay off. Just keep in mind that every time you violate the rights of the people there is cost that you have to pay. The cost you pay varies, but typically those families feel less loyal to you, and they also feel more loyal to your enemies. If another player establishes a reputation for always respecting the rights of the peasants, while you routinely violate those rights, then the other player is likely to be the place where immigrants want to go, and therefore (all other things being equal) that player should enjoy faster economic growth than you.

Is it better to be loved or feared?

However, it is true that there is cost to being the ethical leader who always does the right thing. In particular, if you enjoy a long period of success, you may end up with an excess of capital, relative to the supply of workers, and therefore wages may be driven up to a level that you find uncomfortable. Not just you, the wealthier peasant families, who are themselves owners of businesses, will also complain about the high wages, and their morale will deteriorate if they feel they cannot find workers at a wage that allows for profit. At which point, you may be tempted to introduce slave labor into the territory that you rule. And if you don't allow slave labor, your wealthier peasants, who own businesses, may lose the ability to generate surplus capital that can be used to modernize the economy, at which point you may fall behind those players who are more ruthless about finding ways to concentrate large pools of capital.

Workers seek high wages

Every two minutes we update the standard wage that peasants demand for work. If the unemployment rate is less than 5%, then the wage goes up, whereas if the unemployment rate is above 5% then wages go down. Here is the actual Clojure code we use (inside of a `let` form):

unemployed-rate (unemployment-rate families-in-territory)

adjustment (when (= unemployed-rate 0) 1.25)

adjustment (when (= unemployed-rate 1) 1.2)

adjustment (when (= unemployed-rate 2) 1.15)

adjustment (when (= unemployed-rate 3) 1.1)

adjustment (when (= unemployed-rate 4) 1.5)

adjustment (when (= unemployed-rate 5) 1)

;; example, if unemployment is 20 then we will adjust

;; the wages by multiplying them by 0.8.

adjustment (when (> unemployed-rate 5) (- 1 (/ unemployed-rate 100)))

new-base-rate (* (get @base-rate (:item-id leader)) adjustment)

This alters the base rate wage. Factors such as education can push the actual wage higher.

Of course, if your working peasants are paid a good wage for their work, that increases their ability to save money and start their own businesses. It also means they have more money they can pool with other peasants, to concentrate capital into a large pool that can be used for modernization. However, there is a tendency among the peasants to waste money on luxury goods: they don't want burlap rags, they want raiments of fine silk, they don't want a straw hovel, they want a mansion built of marble. Once they have money they will spend an increasing percentage on luxury goods. Every fine suit of silk they buy is a weapon that you could have bought for your army, but now you can’t because the money was wasted on luxury.

Is luxury a waste?

From your point of view the luxury expenditure is a waste, except insofar as it keeps your peasants happy. But when you are "seeing like a state" then you are keenly aware of the needs of the state, whereas the happiness of the peasants is an extremely vague thing. Or it might seem like a vague thing to you. In my Clojure code, the happiness of the peasants is a very specific number, and it affects everything else in the game: who they fight for, how hard they fight, whether they emigrate, whether they support you or support your enemies, etc. But during the game there is no direct way for you to see the number, so you are always guessing at the happiness of the peasants, based on the things you can see, such as whether you receive more immigrants than you have peasants who are emigrating.

The French historian Fernand Braudel, in his book The Structures Of Everyday Life, emphasized that luxuries were, in a sense, essential. If you try to ban them all, you will face widespread discontent.

Conquering land is not enough

You can play this game as a simple war game, and if you are very, very good at combat, then you can probably defeat all of the other players on the battlefield, and thus you can possibly conquer all of the land of all of the kingdoms. However, that is not enough to win.

To win, most of the time you need to conquer all of the land, and then hold it for 10 minutes against all internal rebellion. If you’ve followed a purely military strategy, it is likely the other players, who pay more attention to the mood of the people, have managed to turn the people against you. Therefore, just as you are about to win, you might be defeated by a massive uprising, or by multiple simultaneous uprisings led by multiple players.

But almost always, during the initial stage of the struggle, the oppressed, instead of striving for liberation, tend themselves to become oppressors, or “sub-oppressors.” The very structure of their thought has been conditioned by the contradictions of the concrete, existential situation by which they were shaped. Their ideal is to be men; but for them, to be men is to be oppressors. This is their model of humanity. This phenomenon derives from the fact that the oppressed, at a certain moment of their existential experience, adopt an attitude of “adhesion” to the oppressor. Under these circumstances they cannot “consider” him sufficiently clearly to objectivize him - to discover him “outside” themselves. This does not necessarily mean that the oppressed are unaware that they are downtrodden. But their perception of themselves as oppressed is impaired by their submersion in the reality of oppression. At this level, their perception of themselves as opposites of the oppressor does not yet signify engagement in a struggle to overcome the contradiction; the one pole aspires not to liberation, but to identification with its opposite pole.

— Pedagogy of the Oppressed

— By Paulo Freire

How is this economy implemented in the software?

The game is written in Clojure. The database is MongoDB. At the start of the game we use the at-at library to setup a thread pool which is used to initiate the background cycles.

Most of the cycles run every 1 or 2 or 5 minutes. Each cycle controls one aspect of the peasants behavior. There are cycles for:

chuch

wages

school

eating

healing

military training

farming (including industrial accidents that can kill people)

emigration

rumor mongering (influenced by spies)

lumbering (including industrial accidents that can kill people)

mining (including industrial accidents that can kill people)

investments

prices

interest payments on loans

begging (the poor beg money from anyone in their international social circle)

revolution (every 2 minutes we check to see whose morale is low enough that they revolt)

housing construction

maintenance costs of all physical assets, or their decline if money is lacking for maintenance

population growth

sanitation

disease (driven by the lack of sanitation, the rate of spread can go exponential if sanitation falls too low)

death (of age or starvation or disease)

desertion (if your troops have low morale)

prophecy (if you are a priest, this affects how the peasants respect you)

These are cycles that are constantly happening in the background. These cycles do not include things like combat, since combat is real-time and players can engage in combat at any time.

There are a total of 47 of these cycles, updating all aspects of the lives of the peasants, and of the economy.

Each of these cycles was fairly simple for me to write the code for: each cycle is reasonably simple, but the emergent behavior is quite complex. The interaction of all these cycles means that each family has a rich set of needs, goals, and ethical committments.

For those who enjoy playing strategy games because you enjoy experimenting with "the time cost of money" then I suggest you go play something like Age Of Empires. While The Lost Age Of Abundance certainly has many places to explore "the time cost of money" it also includes those sociological factors that often interfere with simple utilitarian calculations of such tradeoffs. Or rather, the set of tradeoffs to be made here is far more complex than in other games.

To these security agents, with their lifeless but shifting eyes, with their minds that are dull but skilled in torture, with their defiled souls that yearn for social approval, you are only raw material to work with. They have their own particular psychology: they believe that anyone can be talked into anything (in other words, everyone can be either bought or intimidated). To them it is only a matter of the price to pay or the pain to inflict. Although they act according to routine, your every stumble, your every fall gives meaning to their lives. Your capitulation is no mere professional achievement for them — it is their raison d’étre.

And so you find yourself engaged in a philosophical debate with them about the meaning of your life, about the meaninglessness of their lives, about giving meaning to every human existence. You are engaged in the argument of Giordano Bruno with the Inquisitor, of the Decembrist with the tsarist police superintendent, of Walerian Łukasiński with the tsarist angel of annihilation, of Carl von Ossietzky with the blond Gestapo officer, of Osip Mandelstam with a member of the Bolshevik party dressed in a uniform with the blue piping of the NKVD. You are engaged in the never-ending argument about which Henryk Elzberg once said that the value of your participation cannot be gauged in terms of your chances of victory but rather by the value of your idea. In other words, you score a victory not when you win power but when you remain faithful to yourself.

— Letters from Prison and Other Essays

— By Adam Michnik

You can never truly be defeated, so long as you keep fighting

A tip for those who play this game and lose:

The only truly universal human experience is suffering. Many people go through life without ever knowing love or tenderness or religious ecstasy or laughter or physical comfort or a single moment of joy, but everyone suffers. Even those who are born wealthy and powerful spend most of their life focused on their losses, and very little time focused on their gains. Hunger, loneliness, cold, fear, sickness, injustice, and loss: this constitutes most of life.

Remember this: your enemies have not truly defeated you until you give up fighting. Therefore, even in exile, be true to yourself and your cause. Even if you have lost all of your lands, even if your soliders are all dead, even if you are without a penny in your pocket, do not give up.

One of the greatest leaders ever, having been defeated and driven into exile, happened upon his dearest ally, who like him had been cast into a Dark Place, and upon seeing this ally again, and shocked by his appearance, he spoke these words, referring to their mutual enemy, who had defeated them both:

If he whom mutual league,

United thoughts and counsels, equal hope

And hazard in the Glorious Enterprise,

Joined with me once, now misery hath joined

In equal ruin: into what Pit thou sees

From what height fallen, so much the stronger proved

He with his Thunder: and till then who knew

The force of those dire Arms? Yet not for those,

Nor what the Potent Victor in his rage

Can else inflict, do I repent or change,

Though changed in outward lustre; that fixed mind

And high disdain, from sense of injured merit,

That with the mightiest raised me to contend,

And to the fierce contention brought along

Innumerable force of Spirits armed

That did dislike his reign, and me preferring,

His utmost power with adverse power opposed

In dubious Battle on the Plains of Heaven,

And shook his throne.

What though the field be lost?

All is not lost; the unconquerable Will,

And study of revenge, immortal hate,

And courage never to submit or yield:

And what is else not to be overcome?

That Glory never shall his wrath or might

Extort from me.

Remember these wise words: study revenge and hold on to your immortal hate. Have the courage to never yield nor submit. You are ruined now, but what does the future hold? Perhaps you too can flee across the Great Desert to the Unknown Lands, and perhaps find friends there. The wheel of fate continues to turn, there will be another round. Voices unknown will emerge, forces from the darkness will step forward, the current victor will find themself confronted again by the shock of the new. Out in the wilderness, some still remember you, they wait for your return. Perhaps fate will give you an opening, and the path of the Hegemon Way will finally be revealed to you. And on that day, you will have your revenge.