The river of peoples
Every band is a culture; thickness is its population through time; children branch from their parent lineage. Colour = culture identity (the same hue it wears on the map). Click a band to trace it.
Economy
Firms & guilds produce wares, priced by supply & demand; revenue pays wages (→ wealth) and builds capital (→ more output). Institution rulesets evolve — the exemplars are the most successful, imitated by new institutions with drift.
Dynasties
Every culture that reached statehood — its rise, peak, and fall.
| dynasty | lang | subsist | peak era | rose | peak pop | territory | status |
|---|
Named resources
Mappa's geology — ore on the volcanic arcs, gold in cratonic rivers, deltas at river mouths. Cities cluster on them; whoever holds them develops faster.
| resource | name | held by |
|---|
Institutions
The composite actors that self-assemble from agents — companies on the ore, guilds in the cities, warbands on the frontier, states over them all. An agent belongs to its most-specific institution; each rolls up to its state (the dynasty). Click a row to trace its culture.
| kind | name | leader | culture | members | treasury | capital | strength | conq. | ruleset (tax·wage·merit·invest) | status | org chart |
|---|
Great persons
Named individuals who led an institution to eminence — reputation is earned (credentials + office + standing) and runs in families (apprenticeship + sexual selection). Each carries a résumé.
| name | led | culture | reputation | era yr | résumé (credentials) | person |
|---|
Faiths
Belief is a second heritable program — orthogonal to culture & language, so it cuts across them. A prophet founds a faith in a city; it converts by contact (universalizing creeds spread fastest), passes mother→child, and schisms into sects. A faith spanning many cultures is a world religion; one ≈ its culture is folk. Late-era faiths read as philosophies / ideologies. Doctrine axes couple to the sim: moral → cohesion & fertility, martial → holy war, universal → conversion reach.
| faith | register | doctrine (lead) | from | followers | cultures | lands | born | profile |
|---|