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Author Topic: Help With "History Generator"  (Read 1904 times)

Servant Corps

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Help With "History Generator"
« on: December 13, 2013, 08:50:18 am »

This website can generate the history of a civilization. You can specify the duration of the historical timeline, though most generated civilizations last for less than 1000 years unless you boost their starting health and vitality to the max and lower their aggressiveness to the minimum. Alternatively, you can decide to opt to get rid of civilization-death in favor of a "Crisis" (one year of doom, then the sim resets stats and continue onward) or a "Dark Ages" (a timeskip of several years before the sim resumes).

The game also generates various other generated civilizations that your civilization can either trade with or make war with. These wars could impact the fate of the civilization, either making them more prosperous if they win, or leading to their possible destruction.

There's a lot of interesting stuff behind the hood (for example, building a library can impact the chances of other events), but there's also a few bugs (for example, the "Rebellion End" event can occur even though there is no "Rebellion" to begin with). Here's a link to the source code, in PHP.

If you set a civilization to be magical, you can gain some new fantasy-inspired events, such as wizards establishing schools and then beating each other up. This might be useful if you are creating a fantasy setting.

I did not make this. It was made by kolvar in 2004, and I discovered it while looking for a History Generator because I was disenchanted with Cult and wanted something to help with easy worldbuilding. This is the thread where I discovered it. I've since been trying to modify the source code, but it turns out that I'm terrible on PHP and I can't even get it to run on a server. So I'm making this post to ask for help. I think is is a great generator that needs some love.
« Last Edit: December 13, 2013, 08:53:17 am by Servant Corps »
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Korbac

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Re: Help With "History Generator"
« Reply #1 on: January 16, 2014, 03:05:55 pm »

This is pretty fantastic, although I must say it pales in comparison to hand - written plots (obviously.) Nonetheless it looks fantastic if you wanted to create a scenario / mod on something like Civ 5 for example.
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Servant Corps

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Re: Help With "History Generator"
« Reply #2 on: January 20, 2014, 07:44:13 am »

I suspect that most people who are going to use this generator will want to use any results that come out of it as inspiration for a "handwritten" history of a civilization.

I've been thinking of starting a thread where I use random world generators to create a single "world", with each generator providing a history of that world. However, the main reason I don't do it is because I find worldbuilding for the sake of worldbuilding to be utterly pointless.
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Korbac

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Re: Help With "History Generator"
« Reply #3 on: January 20, 2014, 09:28:23 am »

I suspect that most people who are going to use this generator will want to use any results that come out of it as inspiration for a "handwritten" history of a civilization.

I've been thinking of starting a thread where I use random world generators to create a single "world", with each generator providing a history of that world. However, the main reason I don't do it is because I find worldbuilding for the sake of worldbuilding to be utterly pointless.

This generator sure is fun to use, but when it comes to worldbuilding you best do it yourself if you want it done properly. Of course, if you want something that can generate a random world for a civ - type game, then this works well. :)
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