This was a loooong weekend...

First of all, sorry for the delay with this devlog entry. I spent most of my weekend trying to fix three bugs that I put off from fixing during the second alpha. These didn't occur very often, but I kept hitting them while testing a particular world. So I decided to fix them for good this time around. Doing that actually involved rewriting one of the oldest parts of the simulation, the event handling loop. There I found a sort of race condition occurring between events and decisions. Previously, I would first tackle all events that happened on the same date before handing any decisions generated by those events. But now I changed the behavior so that the simulation only ever handles one event at a time. This way, I make sure that decisions generated by the last triggered event are evaluated before any other event takes place (even if they both occur on the same date). Which makes sure that simultaneous events do not break decisions that are pending resolution.

Since I took some days off this week, I decided to continue working on the game a few days after the weekend to actually complete what I was hoping to do during the weekend, which was to implement a migration pressure overlay, shown below:

This overlay highlights cells which are being pressure to migrate as bright spots using the colors of the tribe they belong to (similar to the migration event overlay). This allows me to visualize a bit more clearly overall migratory trends and to detect odd migratory behaviors. The above gif showcases a rather old world that has more or less stabilized. So there are only few cells being pushed around relative to the rest.

From the above gif, it's pretty clear that tribes have few motivations to invade neighboring territories even after adding aggression as a factor. I hope this overlay will help me understand better what I need to tweak of the next few weeks to make tribes a bit more pushy and take over neighboring territories...