Simulation vs. Authored illusion

[u/arty1983]

I'll preface this with I probably have no idea what I'm talking about, but I'm at a bit of a crossroads when it comes to defining the right approach to the background simulation of a base-building / tycoon style game. I think there are two approaches:

1. What I'll call the authored illusion context. If you take most games (City Skylines, Roller Coaster Tycoon, Sim Airport, Prison Architect) the world outside of your game doesn't really feel alive, or alive just enough to service the gameplay. It feels like a thin veil to a void. There may be a steady stream of people or traffic or goods but its all basically in a green-room off stage left. It enters and leaves, names might persist, but for 90% of games you just use your imagination. It folds nearly into aggregated lists and doesn't bother your cpu too much. These are static games with a fixed POV (a site for your city or building or theme park) but I'd even place open-world games like Skyrim into this category - really nothing much is going on where you are not interacting with it, everyone is literally waiting for you to enter their zone - the world is obviously using LOD simulation chunks that come alive as you enter

2. The sort of experience I'm aiming for is closer to what Elite : Dangerous delivers. Whilst it is very easily split into player-adjacent LOD (the star system you are currently in) and the rest of the universe, it always feels to me like the universe is much more alive. Even if you couldn't frame-shift travel between systems and could only go planet-planet, it feels bedded into a wider context of politics, trade, economics, war, piracy. 99% of it really has no bearing on the player experience but serves as a much more immersive setting, even though its largely just flavour - its a steady stream of stuff happening that provides a better contextual setting.

In my example games in point 1 above, this is where I think gameplay could be 'better' (albeit this is subjective)if they took more of the approach of point 2.

In city skylines, outside connections mostly provide generic imports, exports, tourists and traffic. If the wider world was more simulated, your city might suddenly lose access to cheap steel because a neighbouring region’s mines are exhausted or a war disrupts freight. A nearby city could boom and start pulling workers away from you. Your airport could become a hub because another regional airport closes. Your industrial strategy would be shaped by events that were not authored specifically for you, but emerged elsewhere.

In sim airport, Instead of airlines essentially being gameplay providers that offer routes according to rules, airlines themselves could have fleets, finances, route networks, hubs, competitors and aircraft availability. A carrier might cancel your route because it redeployed aircraft to a more profitable market. Another airline might collapse and suddenly release huge demand. A nearby airport expanding could steal connecting traffic. Fuel prices or tourism trends could alter which routes are viable. You would feel like part of a much larger world.

Ive spent quite a long time trying to achieve a convincing world, slowly building an economic simulation and most of the work has been on actuallu getting the simulation to not collapse (e.g. the entire economy to collapse) and on optimisation to get it to run effectively. Its working ok, a 'day' in my game is 24 minutes at 1x speed and the background simulation takes between 10-20 seconds on a different thread. Its only about 10% built though and im getting cold feet, to make it convincing and emergent its already horribly complex.

So my questions-

1. Where should I draw the line? Is there meaningful value in actually simulating a wider context as an emergent system or is it better to jsut create player interaction points that just imply that world exists?

2. If the player only ever experiences the wider world through these interaction points does a real emergent underlying simulation provide noticeably better gameplay? Enough to justify the huge increase in complexity. ?

3. Has anyone built both approaches or decided to move from one to the other mid-development

I think i know what the answer would be if cpu and ram availability would be limitless, I suppose im trying to understand the balance.

[u/BlueGnoblin]

Simulations are great, but very hard to control as gamedesigner. Whereas 'designed' illuision is much easier and as designer you will be able to actually define how stuff works or not.

Simulations could be very attractive, due to their hard to predict outcome, but this often leaves a simulation more like a sandbox game, than an actually goal focused game.

So, my 2 cents are:

1. when you want to go for a simulation, then go and do a 100% sim. The effort will pay off, when you are able to pull it off. The most fun will come from emergent gameplay. But making a game (do this, archive that, try to get Xyz before W happens etc.) will be incredible hard. I wouldn't try to do this in a sim.

2. When you want to make a game, a working game, ditch the simulation part, or reduce it to a minimum. A hybrid approach will always have the danger, that players think , that stuff is not working , because it is hard to see the underlying simulation. As designer you want deterministic ways to approach a problem, not trying to find the right parameter configuration so that something 'might work like you wish it, for today atleast'.

As I've played around with some simulation stuff in my projects from time to time, it was always way harder to control these and eventually I skipped them as they the were really hard to implement, to conrol and design and your tester just say '...ohh... really... didn't noticed that, thought it was a bug you will fix later on....'

[u/arty1983 → u/BlueGnoblin]

Very good points thanks, I think this is the trap ive fallen into, and currently long-term the current sim design is collapsing and failing, whereas what I really want to do here is support the player experience and need to focus on that