Welcome to the first dev diary for The Long Century.
If you've played Paradox grand strategy, you've already met the idea behind this project — even if you didn't see it. EU4, Crusader Kings 3 and Victoria 3 are very different games, but they sit on top of the same foundation, the Clausewitz engine. The map, the time loop, the save system, the scripting — shared. The games are the content layered on top.
The Long Century starts from that same idea, but pushes it further. We want a world where the rules of politics, economics, diplomacy and war emerge from interacting simulations rather than from a pile of hand-written scripts. Fewer special cases, more systems that talk to each other.
What "generalizable" buys us
- One source of truth. Provinces, states and nations are described by data, not baked into bespoke code paths. A scenario is just a fully scripted starting state.
- The AI plays your game. There's no separate "AI economy" — the same market that prices your goods prices everyone's. That keeps the simulation honest.
- Modding is first-class. Game logic is exposed through embedded scripting, so the rules are something you can read and change, not a black box.
Over the next diaries we'll go system by system: how the market clears, how populations move, and how the engine renders and simulates a whole world fast enough to be fun. Thanks for reading — and come argue with us on the forum.