Simulation for Island of Naru’s economy

 After prototyping the basic map editor, I’ve switched to working on the backend of Naru recently.  Specifically, I’ve been working on the simulation of the island’s economy, which is going to be the meat of the game.  

My approach has been to create a dashboard that exposes the interesting stats and graphs them over time.  I’m trying to make it easy to visualize what happens when I tweak the various values. I’ve found the graphs to be really helpful in illustrating how trends work their way through the system.  I can do something like connect two cities (so they can trade), then run through several turns watching how the populations grow & shrink until they hit a new steady state.  

I think I have the simulation to a point where it is starting to be convincing. The population of each city depends on whether the citizens are happy, which in turn depends on whether their needs are met.  For example, if they don’t have enough food, they will be unhappy and will eventually move away.  If they have an abundance of food, they will be very happy and more people will move in to the city.  At the moment I only have 2 resources in the simulation: food and raw materials (which could some day be turned into manufactured goods in a factory).  Cities can be connected by roads, in which case surpluses can be distributed to other cities.  This means that the total population of the island should increase as more towns become connected (because the surpluses won’t be wasted). The only control the player has is over the amount of resources produced by each city and the road connections between cities.

If you want to play with the simulator, you can get started by going to http://naru.countlessprojects.com/island/economy

I’m pretty sure there are still lots of bugs in it. I haven’t written tests for most of the code because it is still very much a prototype. Still, any feedback you have would definitely be appreciated.