Simulations vs Emergent Behavior

Hi everyone,

I’m at the point in my game development where I want to implement some high-level behaviors. The game is a single-player trading game on a large overhead world. Imagine that you control only a single caravan out of many, each belonging to a cartel, that travel from city to city buying and selling and occasionally skirmishing with each other.

Some of the behavior I would like the player to see while traveling about the game world:

  • Caravans traveling from city to city occasionally staying parked in a city
  • Monthly changing supply/demand prices of commodities
  • Cartels either peaceful, hostile, or at war with each other

Now the tricky thing is that I can see many ways of approaching this task but possible approaches appear to be at polar opposites from each other. For example:

  • Completely random prices versus simulated supply/demand based on past amounts.
  • Highly tuned caravan AI versus simple global rules and emergent behavior.
  • Build the entities from the ground up and then place simulation rules on top versus starting from a coherent system e.g. Conrad’s game of life.

Has anyone developed such a system i.e. simulating a highly active world with behavior continuity? Looking for some general pointers as well as pitfalls to avoid.