Settlements were static -- every town grew with one global rate to the same
habitability cap (frozen in Live World), so they grew "the same amount
everywhere". Now stepCivilization(dtHours, liveTime) is environment-driven and
time-varying. All drivers are deterministic functions of (region, year, seed),
so step-back replays them with no new saved/snapshot state (population is
already snapshotted).
- Differentiated growth: rate scales with habitability (fertile boom, marginal
crawl); capacity K = maxPop * habitability * siteQuality * conditions.
- Site quality: max city size varies by an order of magnitude with location --
a great river (log-scaled discharge) or coast hosts a metropolis, a dry inland
cell a town (civSiteVariety). This spreads final sizes ~8-9x instead of all
saturating equally.
- Conditions (per ~20deg region, per year): multi-year droughts (worse in arid
regions), year-to-year harvests (bigger swings inland), rare cold years, river
floods, and the existing volcano ash. Regional, so different parts of a
continent have different fortunes.
- Storms kill directly: a system within its radius of a town deals deaths scaled
by strength (hurricanes x civHurricaneDeathMult) -- a parked hurricane can gut
a coastal city. Reads the already-snapshotted storms().
- Famine: accelerated loss when food < population; sustained drought / acute
disaster can collapse a settlement to ruins (revives when conditions return).
- Viewer: markers withered-tinted by hardship (3D + 2D), cell-info "drought/
conditions" line, and cause-attributed kind=3 events ("Hurricane X devastates
Y", "Famine shrinks Y to a Town", tier up/down/abandon).
New civ* knobs (self-describing config -> no save bump). test_civ extended:
sizes vary widely (not uniform), bad-year declines, a hurricane over a town
kills its population. All 10 suites pass; GUI build clean. Docs updated.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Jonas Reith
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