One World

13) War Games

Posted 29th March 2016

There is a computer game I used to play a lot called 'Stronghold 2'. 'Stronghold 2' is set in a small piece of land in medieval times. You play a lord tasked with developing a successful self-contained village economy.

You begin with a castle keep, the lord's home, next to a campfire where unemployed villagers congregate. You place a granary for storing food and a storage slab for storing other items such as wood, stone, wheat, hops, etc.

Then, you might place a farm to grow wheat, and a villager sitting at the campfire will go there to work as a farmer. Then you place a mill to grind the wheat into flour, and a villager takes up the role as a miller. Then you place a bakery to make bread from the flour, and a villager moves in to work as a baker.

After a little while you may find that your wheat stores are bulging, your mill is operating constantly, and your baker spends a lot of time doing nothing, having made all the available flour into bread and delivered it to the granary for consumption by the villagers. So you place another mill. Now you may find that the wheat is processed into flour at the same rate as it is delivered to the storage slab by the wheat farmer, preventing large stockpiles of wheat growing. Similarly, you may now find that the baker takes the flour at the same rate as it is delivered to the storage slab, keeping him fully occupied. Therefore you now have an efficiently balanced system from wheat growth, through flour production to bread making.

To multiply the rate of bread production afforded by one unit of bread production (i.e. 1 wheat farm, 2 mills, 1 bakery) by x, you need to place x wheat farms, 2x mills, and x bakeries.

To prevent your villagers deserting the village, and to attract more villagers, your villagers must be happy (as well as having available housing) . The happier the villagers are, the more inclined they are to stay, and the more villagers you have to operate the various industries which all act together to provide for the overall well-being and happiness of the villagers. One factor in the happiness of the villagers is the amount of food they have to eat. I aim to give the villagers double rations. This means that food disappears from the granary at twice the normal rate. For double rations to be sustained, I need to ensure the factor x in the above relationship is such that the amount of bread going into the granary is, at least, equal to the amount being consumed. This value of x increases as the number of villagers in my village grows.

The same approach is used in the development of all the economic systems in your village e.g. the villagers grow in happiness when there is ale available. So, I find the optimum ratio of hop farms to breweries to inn's to form a basic unit of ale production, and multiply the number of these basic units until all the villagers are satisfied.

In this way, I slowly begin to develop a totally balanced village, with villagers growing in number and happiness, until an equilibrium is achieved. This equilibrium occurs when all available food types, entertainment types, services (such as apothecaries, fire protection, etc.), etc. exist in the village and in sufficient numbers, without waste, to maximise the happiness of all the villagers. Then, I have one basic unit of civilisation. I could now build many villages using this model and/or increase the size of the village by scaling up the number of all the elements in the basic unit of civilisation, including the villager number, by the same factor (in the same way as was described for increasing bread production).

Harmony and bliss reign. But then...

....You look to your outlying crop fields - a small raiding party has invaded, killing all the villagers that stand in its way. They destroy the farms and other outlying buildings. Suddenly, your village system is out of balance. For example, with there now being a deficit of wheat farms, the millers will produce less flour, and so the bakers will produce less bread, and so there won't be enough bread for all the villagers, and you will be forced to reduce the food rations. Happiness will go down, and some villagers will leave the village. You now have insufficient numbers of villagers to operate all your various industries to provide happiness for all in your village. The enemy raiding party carries on, destroying everything in its wake. You muster some hunters together and, with their bows and arrows, they are marginally able to defeat the small group of attackers. You know this is not the end of hostilities. It's only a matter of time before the enemy sends a powerful army that can sweep the hunters aside and devastate the whole village. You begin preparations for defending your village, and for war.

Now you need to build walls around your village. This drains a lot of stone resources. Even then, the walls have to be manned by villagers trained as soldiers. Villagers who could have been filling their days satisfying their desires and cooperating with one another to optimise everyone's happiness, now stand on parapets, doing nothing but awaiting other such villagers to fight with. You find you do not have enough stone to wall in all the fields you need to support your village, leaving the farms and the farmers vulnerable, thus threatening your overall village system.

You are now pouring precious resources into military development: fortifications, weaponry and training soldiers. All the while, you don't know if your enemy has more power than you, or what their plans are. You may decide the safest option for your village is to attack the enemy. If you annihilate them, you can return to a peaceful way of life, and watch your villagers' happiness soar again. So, you build a massive army, including war machines like trebuchet, battering rams and ballistae. Meanwhile, your village is in trouble: with vital resources redirected into military development, there is a knock-on effect on various economic systems that are now having their allocation of raw materials severely limited.

So, you set off for war. When you arrive at the enemy stronghold, you see how similar their castle is to yours. They have farms, inns, mills etc. There are men, women and children going about their business, all wanting nothing more than to be happy.

You press on, and the fighting begins. You destroy their farms, with a view to starving their population and thus breaking down their whole village system. You attack their castle walls to get to the soft core of the village. After much bloodshed on both sides, you are able to breach their defenses and pour into their village. Then, although your army might have lost 90% of its men, the enemy soldiers have been destroyed. But you can't leave it there. The villagers will rebuild, and present a threat to you in the future, so you destroy all their buildings and the 'enemy' villagers leave.

If you are successful in defeating your enemy, you now have the whole map to your self. You can demobilise all your soldiers, returning them to happiness-seeking villagers, sell your weaponry in your market and pull down your castle walls. However, the reality of the game is that you probably won't achieve such a total victory. You may find yourself the defeated. Or if you defeat one enemy, another will come in and take advantage of your weakened state. Or, more typically, you may simply have to live under the threat of attack at any time. Not knowing from where an attack might come, and in what scale or level of technology. So, your villagers must plod on, compromising their aspirations for systems purely aimed at bringing them happiness, so that they can maintain and develop systems of war.

If only there was a feature in the game where your lord, and the lords of all the other castles could meet. They could then have a conversation something like this:

"We could be enemies, spend vast resources trying to out do one another militarily to the huge detriment of much needed civilian development, and never relent in denying one another peace. In this way all of our villagers will be unhappy.

Or, we can agree to share this land. Share our various technologies and discoveries with one another. Assist one another in times of need. Play together. This way, all of our villagers will be happy."

If 'Stronghold 102' ever comes out, and is set in the present day United Kingdom, the game may involve having to provide a very compromised healthcare system to the 'villagers' partially because of the perceived urgency to pour vast resources into commissioning the latest version of the Trident nuclear submarine out of fear of an attack from a lord from another land.

Individual human beings may be great military strategists or business people, but they only meet up against other such people, thus frustrating one another's plans. Consequently, global suffering continues.

In the movie WarGames, the computer concludes that nuclear war is "a strange game" in which "the only winning move is not to play."

Similarly, humanity at present, as a whole group in economic and military war against itself, is a fool. The only winning move for humanity is to stop fighting one another, to come together as one World, and change its focus from supremacy and dominance over one another to bringing happiness to ALL the World's 'villagers'.    

"We could belong together"