The outside world

Foreign cities are rows in a table with a population, a wealth, a specialism, a price list and an opinion. They grow, industrialise and change their minds about you, and are never rendered.

The outside world is arithmetic. Fourteen foreign cities (a launcher setting) are seeded with a distance, a population, a wealth, an era, a specialism, a price list, an attitude and an army, and they advance on a cheap yearly tick: growing, glutting, starving, industrialising before you and undercutting your weavers, arming themselves. They exist to be a market, a source of migrants, and occasionally an army on the horizon.

Trade is a caravan or a barge that takes real time to arrive, carries a real cargo, and can be lost, more often in the early eras and more often by sea. Price differences drive it: the city’s sixteen goods each have a stock, a price and an appetite, and prices move on a stock-versus-appetite curve. A foreign city’s standing toward yours moves with what you buy, what you pay in tribute, and how many of its people have settled here.

Threat is what the city has to be ready for. Above one, once the town is worth marching on, a war can come; it arrives as a siege the events page describes. The governor’s answers are a garrison, a wall, tribute or an alliance, each with a cost and a lag.

In the code: crates/sim/src/foreign.rs crates/sim/src/economy.rs

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