No Peaceful Ruleset: What Simulations Can't Imagine

Disclaimer:

This series of articles, unlike most of my other publications, was largely written and edited by AI, and so are the images. I have edited and removed some slop later, making this series even more erratic and eclectic. I hope you enjoy it nevertheless.

Upcoming articles will be totally(*) hand-written again.

(*) up to 99%

Why Can't There Be Peace?

One of the most overlooked modifications of most civilization games is the lack of a consistently peaceful game. Not only is it hard to achieve, if at all, but it doesn't seem to be in high demand, either. You can still do that with only human players that agree and stick to the idea without forgetting their peaceful intentions later.

I don't know if it's a problem of Civilization and freeciv specifically, or with the game industry's clichés, or a lack of utopian vision in human nature or society?

The Limits of Simulation

I mentioned the "unknown unknowns". Is it truly impossible to achieve a truly peaceful and sustainable society, at least within the constraints of a game server like Civilization, FreeCiv, or SimCity, and why?

Simulation games combine utopian and dystopian aspects. A sophisticated player could strive to dominate the game as a benevolent dictator, balancing freedom and happiness with strict constraints and invincible economic and military power. History has seen similar rulers praised for periods of stability, trade, and progress.

However, progress might imply disruptive innovations. Rulership will eventually give rise to rivalry, at the latest, after the death of a unifying leader.

That's disruptive like the literary turn I'll take, inspired by the image below that AI created based on the previous paragraph. What is this? Tron meets New York City? The mythical monolith from outer space in 2001: A Space Odyssey?

The monolith would be a fitting metaphor. In Arthur C. Clarke's and Stanley Kubrick's vision, it appears as an object that cannot be understood from within the cognitive framework of those who encounter it. It does not merely represent a new technology on the tech tree. It represents an entirely different tech tree or philosophy.

In an old forum post dating back to 2009, Peaceful ruleset for freeciv, my younger self suggested a peaceful ruleset and described what was impossible using the offline scenario editor plus editing the ruleset files on their local computer. A related recent discussion in the freeciv forum mused on how not building a defensive army makes you depend on your neighbor's behavior. Playing peacefully in a solo game without barbarians without crashing the server might be possible with recent software versions, but that's not the point. Quoting my 2009 post:

the AI computer players will find a way to establish attacking units no matter what. I tried to set attack=0 for all units, but the AI got attack points from barracks and veteran system

Note that "AI", back then, just meant an autonomous player character controlled by the computer.

This is a screenshot of a freeciv web session with two AI civilizations and random barbarians against a single human player getting caught into a foreseeable narrow-minded gameplay forcing them to focus on military build-up and defence spending, neglecting what we could only imagine building with a similar game engine.

Peace isn't Boring

I thought it must be self-evident that a peaceful world is not boring. There can still be competition, and there can be creativity for sure.

• there are aspects besides military strength that can be used to still have interesting and different units: firepower (== working power for workers and engineers as well), range of vision, speed of movement, special flags and roles like Diplomat, SuperSpy, IgZOC (ignore Zone of Control), IgTer (ignore terrain) etc
• aspects for civil research, trade, flight, diplomacy that were neglected in classical military gameplay - change the rules to emphasize these aspects ...

The biggest issue with those kinds of changes were that too unexpected changes made the engine crash eventually. There were implicit requirements and assumptions, thus invisible limits, of how substantially a ruleset is allowed to change.

Simulating Future as an Extension of Our Present

Most strategy and simulation games are built around the assumption that the future is an extension of the present. New discoveries unlock predictable branches of development. Bronze leads to iron. Steam leads to electricity. Literacy leads to democracy. The player is invited to optimize, accelerate, and prioritize, but rarely to question the structure itself.

This reveals a deeper limitation of simulation. A game can model uncertainty, but only uncertainty anticipated by its designers. Every possible future already exists somewhere in the code, waiting to be unlocked. Even random events are predefined categories selected from a finite set of possibilities. The truly unknown cannot appear because it has never been encoded.

1256 years later, still the same (tourist?) horse carriage in front of the same university, the same containers at the port, and still exactly 12.9% garbage (afval): Based on the fictitious year 670 scenario shown in the previous article, this implausible image perfectly illustrates machine's lack of imagination.

And their unquestioning acceptance of false assumptions. Like in a mixed toy collection assembled by a little child, the scale of the buildings and figures did not match in the original image and in the simple graphics of the game it was inspired by: gigantic windmills overshadowing the historical university campus, a larger than life factory next to a small modern port with miniature oversea containers, all crammed together in a village center that is rather a symbolic data visualization than a realistic city simulation. That's part of the fun, however.

Unforeseen Glitches

Enter the glitch: some classic games weren't remembered for their original intent alone, but for accidental features and glitches that added surprise, chaos, and creativity.

As with LLM-based AI, we're trying to contain the chaos and undesirable side effects of a system that already feels out of control. While it's still too restricted and predictable in some ways, it's already going beyond what we, as human designers, can foresee.

Columbus never found the route to India he was looking for. What he started instead was a permanent exchange of plants, animals, people, and disease across two hemispheres, and the genocide, empires, and global capitalism that followed from it.

Errors of Mass Destruction

Ironically, colonization wasn't only unintended; it might have been unnecessary after all, even though it might have stabilized Europe's economic situation. By the time Christopher Columbus initiated the Columbian Exchange in 1492, the foundational shifts of the Early Renaissance, led by figures like Dante, Petrarch, Giotto, and Brunelleschi, had already taken place.

In the Civilization series, this historical trajectory is explicitly mechanized through the interaction of the Tech Tree, Great People, and Cultural Wonders. A civilization can lead the world in cultural and scientific advancement—much like the Islamic Golden Age—but if its infrastructure is pillaged by external invasions (such as barbarian hordes, crusaders, or rival military empires) or if it lacks the economic capital to fund universities and labs, its technological lead evaporates.

When the Technology Tree fails to fit

A civilization game can simulate the invention of gunpowder because the designers know gunpowder exists. It can add a cure for cancer and deep space travel, because scientists are currently working on it. It cannot simulate the equivalent of an invention that neither the designers nor the players can imagine.

Perhaps this is why every technology tree eventually feels artificial. It transforms history into a sequence of expected upgrades, while many of the most transformative shifts in human history were not upgrades at all. They changed the rules, the goals, or even the definition of progress itself.

I still like the idea of obsoletion, although it lacks accuracy. Cars might have obsoleted horseback riding. But if AI obsoletes literacy, then what will we do when we no longer have access to our commodity?

What I liked most about science fiction though, at least when I was young, is the possibility of total surprise. Deus ex machina obsoleting every expectation. A spaceship passing a black hole to apparate where no human has been before.

Beyond the End of the Map

Real progress begins where that process ends: at the edge of the map, beyond the tech tree, facing questions for which there is no walkthrough, no wiki, and no prompt that can tell us what comes next.

The future belongs to those who stay curious and don't rely on the fast answers that they already found.