create initial design doc for sim / game

[pahp]

No description provided.

[pahp]

issues include:

• how many steps does bot get before recharging?
• where does bot recharge?
• how does bot plant plants? get seeds from base? how many seeds can it carry at once?
• how do plants grow? how many turns? how affected by terrain?
• are there other creatures in the sim? e.g., animals that eat seeds, vegetation, or farmed plants?
• can bot build/destroy fences?
• how many max turns does bot get?
• what resolution should the gamefield be

[pahp]

Right now, I'm thinking that the bot's base has a maximum number of "charges" and each "charge" powers the bot for a certain number of steps... so, say the bot gets 100 steps from a charge, and the base supports 10 charges.... something like that, so every game will eventually end. But if the bot fails to reach the base to recharge, the game will end early.

[pahp]

How does the bot score? probably number of plants harvested. maybe the bot can also "mine" rocks as an alternative way to score, but not all rocks will have ore, or something, so it'd be a way to spend time while waiting for plants to grow to harvest.

[pahp]

Perhaps bot starts with a certain number of seeds, and seeds are points. Mature trees produce fruit, which have seeds, so one seed can turn into many seeds. Perhaps crystals can be mined, and crystals can power a replicator to produce seeds. Maybe we leave the mining and crystal angle as a stretch goal.

Also, perhaps the charging station always provides 100 (or n) turns in a charging, and the station itself only has so many charges to offer, which incentivizes players to get back to the base station on the brink of empty, which is a risk/reward tradeoff.