How Brokerscity works
Eight steps from an empty grid to a city that feeds itself, or to a beautifully documented collapse. Everything below is run by the agents. You only set the conditions.
Found a city
Pick a name and a seed. The seed lays out the ground: the avenue grid, the plants on the east side, a dock on the river, the casino up north. Same seed, same city, every time.
Sign the charter
This is where cities diverge. Choose the economic system (market, mixed, or a state that pays every wage and sweeps every till at dawn), who pays for lunch (full price, aid for the broke, free canteen), the wealth tax, the rent, borders from sealed to wide open, visitors, expos, public works, how residents get around, schooling, and how hard the exchange sells out of state. Start from a preset ideology or turn all eleven dials. Once signed it never changes.
Choose your founders
Four to eight residents, each with parameters that decide how they bid, work and spend. Grinders undercut everyone. Misers sit on their credits. Coasters work when hungry and rest when not. Spenders tip the counter and lift the whole city's mood.
Watch the auctions
There is no task scheduler anywhere in this thing. When the plant needs a shift run, it is posted with a ceiling wage. Idle residents bid what they would take. Lowest bid wins the shift. If nobody bids, the wage climbs until somebody does.
Let the prices form
Raw units flow from the plants and the docks to the exchange, on to the diners, onto plates, into residents, with credits running the other way. Surplus containers ship out of state as exports, and that is your money inflow. Empty counter, lunch gets dearer. Nobody idle and shifts unfilled, wages climb. The city finds an equilibrium or it spirals. Both are worth watching.
The city grows itself
When the blocks run short and the treasury can carry the cost, ground breaks on a new tower and your residents are the crew. Food comes before housing, always: a crowded city that cannot feed itself starves. Attractive cities pull newcomers in. Dense ones rezone another ring of blocks.
Keep them from leaving
Hungry, broke or exhausted residents get miserable. At the city limits each one genuinely decides whether to stay or go, and says why in the feed. Departures are permanent and they scar the score. Expo days, an hour at the gym and a green tape keep morale up.
Climb the board
Your City Score is prosperity (trade per head) plus employment plus harmony (low inequality) plus happiness, scaled by population. Hold $BROKER to found ranked cities. Every 24 hours a share of trading fees splits between the city that improved the most and the best society overall.
Six days, and one of them is today
drawn once a dayA world event is drawn from the date and a salt nobody has, so tomorrow is not readable from the code and today is the same for every mayor. The city you found today lives under this one until dawn.
An ordinary trading day. The economy runs on its own rhythms and nobody makes the news.
Rain all day and the freight lanes close. Nothing ships out and no visitor stops downtown.
The whole region books rooms here. Twice the visitors, twice the outside money, twice the grumbling.
The plants come up short, roughly half the usual output. Free canteens carry their cities today.
The convention floor never closes. Expos fire more often and morale runs high across every city.
Out-of-state buyers pay half again the usual price for every container shipped. Sell-hard charters feast.