Colonies and Population

Status: Historical strategy-mechanic lineage. This note defines a player-facing model for settlements, work, services, movement, and collective response. It does not assign canonical psychology to any species, culture, faction, or population.

A settlement is not a production total with housing attached. It contains plural households, workforce groups, institutions, organizations, dependents, and people whose needs and interests overlap without becoming one mind. The player can alter conditions and make offers; they do not directly author culture, desire, consent, or obedience.

Population State

The model should preserve only state that creates decisions:

• households, support relationships, dependents, health, injury, and care burdens;
• skills, credentials, work experience, training, employment, wages, schedules, and contracts;
• access to food, housing, transport, medicine, safety, privacy, and maintenance;
• legal status, debt, mobility restrictions, outside options, exit costs, and credible destinations;
• organizations, representatives, mutual-aid networks, infrastructure, and routes;
• source, age, confidence, excluded voices, and internal disagreement in player-facing reports.

Two groups with similar material conditions may respond differently because their institutions, commitments, information, and histories differ. A dashboard may summarize a dispute, but it should retain who produced it and which voices it excludes.

Player Authority And Response

The player allocates budgets, infrastructure, service capacity, training, safety, transport, housing, and emergency reserves. They may propose employment terms, schedules, relocation, expansion, or closure through the governance model defined by Corporate Strategy Layer.

Offers are not commands. Workers and residents may accept, refuse, bargain, organize, leave, disclose a hidden condition, slow work, strike, or attempt to take over a viable operation. Their response should follow visible relationships and pressures rather than a hidden loyalty roll. Representation matters: an agreement with one manager, union, household elder, creditor, or local council does not silently bind everyone affected.

Demand emerges from people and institutions trying to live and operate. A clinic needs medicine and power; households need food, privacy, care, and transport; a repair yard needs parts and skilled shifts. Markets can cultivate habits and dependence. Shortage, advertising, status, familiarity, coercion, and genuine preference remain distinguishable causes where the scenario can observe them.

Colony Formation

A new colony begins with a proposal and a destination, not subtraction from a parent population. The plan identifies purpose, sponsors, transport, housing, life support, services, work, governance, destination rights, emergency authority, and a survivable route back or onward.

Recruitment and coercion must be represented explicitly. People may volunteer, negotiate terms, refuse, be assigned through an authority they contest, or face conditions that make nominal choice thin. Household dependencies matter: moving one specialist may separate caregivers and dependents or require the project to support them all. Departure also changes the settlement left behind by removing skills, labor, relationships, and demand.

Arrival does not complete colonization. Housing may be unfinished, promised work may not exist, services may fail, and emergency command can outlive the emergency. Residents need ways to challenge rules, communicate conditions, receive outside help, and leave. A settlement that cannot support exit should expose that dependence rather than labeling it unity.

Smallest Coherent Proof

A minimum scenario needs one settlement, two or three distinct household or workforce groups, one production obligation, limited housing and transport, one care or medical constraint, two jobs with different risks and skill needs, visible representation, and at least one credible exit route.

The player must decide how to allocate services and maintenance, what terms to offer, whether to stop unsafe work, who receives scarce transport, whether to honor a promise during shortage, and how to respond to refusal or collective action. One relocation or supply shock should force those commitments into conflict.

Failure can mean preventable injury, refusal, strike, migration, household fracture, lost legitimacy, abandoned infrastructure, or production collapse. Success should report who remained healthy, housed, represented, and able to leave alongside output and growth.

Economy and Production owns goods, facilities, production commitments, and market exchange. This note owns the people and institutions those systems depend upon, while Corporate Strategy Layer owns the player’s bounded governance and corporate operating loop.