[bochen787]

Does anyone here know of any games/simulations of population overshoot,
or resource collapse?

Age of Empires III and Empire Earth 2 are good strategy games but don't really simulate or model the 'collapse' of society when resources are all used up. (I wonder why Microsoft??)

I don't know of any simulations except petri dish overshoot simulations but thats way to simplistic.

Maybe the next Age of Empires IV will start at the peak of civilization and end at the post industrial stone age. It would be fun to see society de-evolve from
technologically superior to run down low tech world. Maybe thats what happened to Atlantis?

[bochen787]

maybe as resources run out life will de-evolve back into bacteria,
and then back into the original amino acid chains.

I can't wait for the universe to peak, when half the stars enter their last stages of life and the production of news stars decline.

[mrobert]

Hi there,

Sounds like an interesting ideea.
I run a small games/software development company, and we usually implement unique ideeas.

This would sound like great ideea for a game.

I am just a bit puzzled of what exactly it should simulate.
I hope people will post more thoughts/ideeas here

[bochen787]

Well the problem with games like Empire Earth is even in the Industrial Age the resources are still STONE, WOOD, GOLD, FOOD.

But in reality in the Industrial Age the main resource should be petroleum.
Its silly to be in the industrial age and not have one single oil drill!

In the game the player should be able to drill for oil, and oil should be modeled realistically so that the top is sweet clean efficent oil and the bottom of each 'field' is heavy and takes a long time/energy/money to extract.

THere could be different 'nations', and one any random map the oil desposits are not even, so those nations with more oil will get themselves 'liberated' by other democratic nations on the map. (we are trying to be realistic here)

It should be as realistic as possible. With micro and macro interfaces.
The "world" should be a 3D globe instead of a square or diamond map. (like google earth for example) Players can zoom in or out as much as they wanted to. It would start in the stone age and progress through all the ages including our present day current age.

Nations can choose to rely on cheap oil to be more competitive and outrace the nations that speed money early on on renewable resources.
Or they can choose to address the problems of population and sustainable resources as soon as possible. Nations that choose to ignore the problem will enventually have to use coal. Once coal is gone they will have nothing to support themselves and implode. Once centralization is gone the palyer loses 'macro' interface and can only exclusively use the 'micro' controls which makes the situation even worse, and eventually
that society will collpase. etc.. Its probabbly too complexed to work out as a game, but current games are way to simplistic. We should at least be able to do currency manipulations between nations.

A game of this kind would really incourage intellectual thinking and 'which if' scenarios. Age of Empires and Empire Earth and Nations game are lame.

[mrobert]

Well,

Making a "game" for this is pretty much improbable.
Making small people that move on an animated scale ... won't help in any way ... it will be just a game.

What is doable (quite easy) is a simulation software.
Plug in as many variables as possible and see the outcome:

Example :
INPUT :
Estimated world reserves
Estimated daily consumption
Estimated consumption growth (per year)
Estimated discoveries per year
etc etc etc

A nice magic button that will plot a chart and make some prognosis.

Your ideea for a game is fun, and would be a good game to play ... but it won't have much relevance to the problem.
This is more of a math problem

[Daculling]

Civ 4 is fairly realistic. When you enter the industrial age oil resources appear on the earth. Sometimes they are in your territory... sometimes they are not. Same thing with uranium and fission tech. They do deplete and disappear but not on a curve, you got or you don't.

[mrobert]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Daculling', 'C')iv 4 is fairly realistic. When you enter the industrial age oil resources appear on the earth. Sometimes they are in your territory... sometimes they are not. Same thing with uranium and fission tech. They do deplete and disappear but not on a curve, you got or you don't.

[Daculling]

How do you figure. Just about every game I've played ends with me nuking the entire planet.

[Terran]

In Age of Empires III when you run low on resources you simply can't perfore warfare anymore.

There's also starcraft where the its space based warfare, the resource bases are minerals and gas. Minerals are the background to everything, but in order to upgrade to produce higher technology you need gas. Like all resources those gas vents will deplete faster than other resources. Starcraft is pretty old, something I played when I was in high school, but I have better thing to do now. It's really the resources that keep the war machine running.

[sklump]

http://www.peakoil.com/fortopic18465.html

I've built a corker of a game. If nothing else, read the Events. They're fun stuff.

[Magus]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Daculling', 'C')iv 4 is fairly realistic. When you enter the industrial age oil resources appear on the earth. Sometimes they are in your territory... sometimes they are not. Same thing with uranium and fission tech. They do deplete and disappear but not on a curve, you got or you don't.

[0mar]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('bochen787', 'm')aybe as resources run out life will de-evolve back into bacteria,
and then back into the original amino acid chains.

I can't wait for the universe to peak, when half the stars enter their last stages of life and the production of news stars decline.

[Aimrehtopyh]

I strongly recommend Fallout and Fallout2. It's not a sim like you're talking about but the post-nuclear ambiance fits very nicely with a peak-oil mindset.

It's eerie, depressing, and totally sucks you in. One of my favorite games of all time, I loved it even before Peak Oil hit my radar.

The trouble with Civ is that infrastructure you've built based on a particular resource doesn't disappear with that resource. i.e. railroads can't be built without coal yet they work just fine without coal or oil. Same with power plants, your nuke and coal plants don't shut down if you lose your mines.

Is there a way to edit the rules to make this more realistic? I was seriously considering building a Peak Oil mod for a while, but lacked the motivation to do all the work.