93 lines
5 KiB
Markdown
93 lines
5 KiB
Markdown
# Faction Territory Target
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Date: 2026-09-19
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Status: target, operator direction only. No map, no schedule. This document owns
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the ends; a cut map will own the means.
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## Why
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A faction's territory today is a set of zones carrying a Markov-generated name.
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`Galaxy.cs:340` feeds one chain per faction from its `GeonameFile` (a massaged
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GeoNames extract), `:348` stamps the result on each owned zone, and `:352` gives
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everything unowned an `EAC-####` serial. Nothing else distinguishes one faction's
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space from another's. A Zhestokost sector and an Alakrita sector differ only in
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the phonotactics of a string.
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Operator, 2026-09-19: "Namefiles were how we fed Markov chains to generate
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faction-flavored names, the limitations of the geonames database I massaged to
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create them were reflected in the naming choices. We can do much better with
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generative models, even giving sectors and their stations roles in a faction's
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colonization timeline and supply chain, with names and backstories that match.
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Giving each faction such a mapping will also gives each faction a recognizable
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shape to their territory."
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## Where it sits
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**After fire control** (operator, 2026-09-19: "slot it in right after fire control, first step
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is to get the new shape of the combat working"). Combat's new shape — rolls from weapon,
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targeting and sensor stats, resolution on arrival, the pre-impact commit window — comes first;
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territory is the campaign after it. Territory is what finally makes the economy and provenance
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work visible in play, so it does not drift further than that.
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## Ends
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- **A place has a job.** Every owned sector, and every station in it, carries a
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role in its owner's supply chain — extraction, refining, fabrication,
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logistics, administration, defence, research, disposal — and a position in that
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faction's colonization timeline: founding wave, expansion, boom, retrenchment,
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whatever that faction's history was.
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- **Territory has a shape you can read.** The role map is spatial, so a faction's
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space looks like what it does. Lightsail is corridors between other people's
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markets; Zhestokost is a fortified frontier with depth behind it; Adrasteia is
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scattered deniable nodes with no obvious centre; Aeronautics Unlimited is an
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extraction belt feeding a few refineries. A player who has flown two sectors of
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a faction's space should be able to guess the third.
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- **Names and backstories match the job and the era.** A founding-wave refinery
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and a late boom-town dormitory do not sound alike, and neither sounds like the
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other faction's equivalent. The name says which faction, which era, which role.
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- **The supply chain is real, not decorative.** Roles connect: an extraction
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sector feeds a refinery, which feeds fabrication, which feeds a market. Those
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links are data, so the economy's backward generation
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(`docs/item-provenance-target.md`) can walk them, a lot's `Produced` origin can
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name the station that made it, and piracy has routes worth interdicting rather
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than an abstract risk number.
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- **Generation stays deterministic.** A galaxy seed produces the same territory
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every time. Nothing calls a model at runtime.
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## Constraints
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- **Authoring happens ahead of play, into the catalog.** Generative models write
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typed catalog data that the operator reviews, exactly like roles and product
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text; the game then reads authored data. No runtime inference, no network
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dependency, no per-run variation that the seed does not explain.
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- **Volume has to be honest.** A galaxy has many sectors. Whatever is authored
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must either cover the count or compose deterministically from authored parts;
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a bank of a hundred hand-written names behind a thousand sectors will repeat
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visibly, and that has to be a decision rather than an accident.
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- **The faction record owns its territory rules.** Today `Faction.GeonameFile`
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points at a `NameFile`; whatever replaces it belongs on the faction, and
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`NameFile` and `MarkovNameGenerator` go when the last consumer does.
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- **Unowned space needs an answer too.** `EAC-####` is a placeholder, and
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unclaimed sectors are most of the map in some galaxies.
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- **Zone generation already has settings and a seed** (`ZoneGenerationSettings`,
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`StableHash`); territory roles hang off the same generation, not a second pass.
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## Open questions for the map
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- Authored bank versus composable grammar versus a hybrid, and what repetition
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rate is acceptable at real galaxy sizes.
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- Whether a station's backstory is authored text, a few typed facts the UI
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renders, or both — and where it is shown, since a name nobody reads is
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cheaper than prose nobody reads.
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- How a faction's colonization timeline interacts with galaxy generation's
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existing spatial logic (megaplex, boss zones, entrances).
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- Whether roles are assigned to sectors, to stations within them, or both.
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- What happens to a sector when its owner changes hands, and whether the
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history it carries survives the change.
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## Not in scope
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- Runtime model calls, for anything.
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- Rewriting galaxy topology. This assigns meaning to what generation already
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produces; it does not redesign the map.
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