Perseus Patrol devlog #3: Modeling state behavior for the colonies

Making an entire galaxy feel like a living world is a tall challenge. I can not achieve this by brute forcing asset creation, but only by creating a system, or multiple game systems. These system have to make it feel like there are more than one intelligence is at play and that you are only a part of a bigger thing. Yet give enough leeway that you can interact with it and get expected results, not random disconnected events. Otherwise the game would break its own narrative.

Let’s structure first the actors I have in place for the universe in Perseus Patrol, from largest to smallest organization that matters from gameplay perspective:

• Alliances: the Federation, colonial League, Swordfish gang, etc.
• States: colonies one by one, simplifying the game for now we count one colony per celestial.
• Individuals: humans, aliens, etc. single individuals, the Player.

A strong narrative only works if the actors have distinct and contradictory goals, creating conflict. The game’s driving main conflict will be the Federation’s goal to remain intact and continue protecting Earth. The Perseus arm colonies form a League as they want to determine their own future and have enough of the Earth-centric decisions.

Alliances goals

Federation → protect Earth and keep power and original law → increasingly authoritarian.

Perseus League → self-determination and growth by changing law → increasingly rebellious.

Swordfish → enrich themselves disregarding law → increasingly aggressive and influential.

You need actions

The beauty of video games is that you can take actions in the world and experience them playing out. Even better, other actors beyond you take actions, forcing you to react and so on, chaining into an enjoyable experience.

Previously I talked about the game loop, which mostly consists of actions you can take to manage your own ship and crew. To grow your capabilities and power, to enable you to take more actions in the world.

In this section, I want to outline the actions you can take in the world, against or with other actors. Let’s handle you as a mobile state with the top-grade military hardware under your command, you can:

• take diplomatic actions, e.g. agreements about selling, buying, co-operations, promises, and of course you can break these with other side being unhappy about it,
• take engineering actions, e.g. deploy specialists to a colony to lower its upkeep, increase its growth rate, or repair damages suffered during surface combat,
• take scientific actions, e.g. actively scan a colony or habited celestial, which may or may not result in negative or positive effects,
• or take military actions, e.g. deploy soldiers on planet to guard, positive if invited, negative if you do it anyway, and you can escalate yourself or react to escalations up to deploying WMD’s from the Steeldome (planetary bombardment for partial destruction or Alcubierre-torpedoes to wipe entire colonies).

Modeling behaviors

For this conflict to model, I found few concepts very compelling for modelling the galaxy of Perseus Patrol:

• escalation ladder of conflict between states, especially the model I listened to from The Templin Institute,
• game theory and its application in an international settings, where there is no overseeing authority to keep everyone to their agreements, resulting in the prisoner’s dilemma to play out.

The goal is that I figure out a way to programmatically represent these two concepts between all actors, creating a fluid alliance system where each actor choses based on their goals and suffers consequences based on the actions they chose.

The escalation ladder

Adapting the table to Perseus Patrol, could start to look like this:

The main idea: military actions or breaking agreements contribute to escalation. Diplomatic, engineering and science actions mostly contribute to de-escalating tensions.

The game theory

Each actor has a series of choices, the other actor has the same choices. All options have different payoffs for each actor, depending on what the other actor chooses too.

The main idea: putting “next decision taken” to matrices between all somehow related states, between alliances, between alliances and states, and calculating the next decision based on a goal function for the actor.

E.g. Federation versus Perseus League, while in war, invade one colony or protect one colony.

Similarly, could write down an escalate/de-escalate matrix based on current level of escalation, numbers only examples:

The numbers could be set up dynamically, using situational information, e.g. as they go higher on escalation ladder, the de-escalation pay-offs increase, but power differences may increase escalation pay-offs for one side.

Game theory and crisis bargaining

This rambling devlog was mostly high-level concept without practical application yet. My next steps on this front is to:

1. Learn more about Game Theory and crisis bargaining,
2. Translate the learnings to a mathematical model,
3. Implement the model as a step simulation into Perseus Patrol demo.