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And really, that was it. As the leaders of the simulations, they could speed up time or slow it down at their whim, which made this a fairly quick challenge room. Beyond that, they would have to spend Genesis Energy to spawn rifts and monster breaks throughout the planet at first, until it started to self-propagate.
Their only other way to influence the simulation was to spend Genesis Energy to change the reaction to some of the events that would occur through the process.
There was no hard and firm strategy for this challenge room, but as Aster said, the general rule was to hit the simulation fairly hard, then send waves of monsters until they started to grow stronger.
After they talked it over, they initialized the simulation, and a planet sprung up and started to spin rapidly. Life started to spark and grow. Humans evolved and started to expand on the planet until they inhabited most of the five continents.
Then, the simulation halted, and time froze for those in the world.
The first thing they all did was check the technological level of the world.
It wasn’t great, but it could have been worse, and they didn’t feel the need to spend Genesis Energy to re-roll the starting civilization.
The best was steel age civilization, before it advanced into the gunpowder or space age.
Those more advanced eras suffered the most in the early stages, as they were so used to relying on their technology that there was a pushback on essence and the increase of physical powers. Most of the time, they spent at least a century trying to solve the essence ‘issue,’ which for something like this was just wasted time.
Eventually, they would realize the benefits of cultivation and start to lean into a more melee combat style, but it wasted valuable years as their score was based on how far the civilization progressed in a thousand simulation years. If the simulation lasted longer, those more advanced civilizations with their greater populations and technology would start to pull ahead. But with the limited time, wasting ten percent of the simulation time was a hard blow to recover from.
By contrast, a society that had just entered the steel age effortlessly slipped into cultivation, being already used to smacking each other with metal weapons. Accordingly, they tended to embrace the power of essence almost immediately. The real issue with those simulations was pushing too hard, and sending too many monsters or rifts at them, thus wiping out their smaller population.
Technically, the absolute best for the challenge were the rare societies that had already discovered cultivation independently, extracting it from the ambient essence and using highly complex rituals to awaken themselves without killing rift monsters. But those basically never appeared in the simulations Minkalla made for this scenario.
After reviewing everything, Liz gave them the rundown. “Our simulation was just starting to enter the gunpowder age, which, while not great, isn’t bad. We’ll have the population boom at the start of the technology boom, but there are still a few people and places that have a martial tradition.” She hmmed as she spun the planet in front of them. “These are the four most advanced political entities. It says that they all hate each other and will make alliances with each other only as a countermeasure to any of them looking to get ahead. They just got out of a ten-year war with one another and are in the recovery phases.”
Liz tapped her chin as she thought.
Matt offered up his idea. “These are the most advanced civilizations on planet Simeyer, but they have a strong fighting tradition. From the records, most of their wars are for stupid reasons. I think if we set off a few rift breaks in the outskirts, we can minimize casualties while showing them that there is a new threat. Then, once the rulers know something is off, we start ramping up the rifts and monsters. Eventually, they will get the hint and turn their attention inward.”
Liz nodded but said nothing as she flipped through pages of information.
Susanne spoke next. “We still need to worry about the other countries and their peoples. Can’t leave them in the dust completely, or we will create an imbalance.”
Liz kept nodding as Susanne talked and finally said, “Very true. Susanne, are you offering to take the outskirts while we hit the centers of tech?”
Without saying anything else, Susanne assigned herself to the outer regions with the lowest technology levels in the areas, where civilization hadn’t seemed to reach.
Her goal there was to keep the people from dying out, but also push them forward. Not as easy feat with their limited technology and smaller, more spread out populations.
Liz turned to Matt. “Want to take the middling countries that are mostly vassal states to the four big guys, while Aster and I take the main civilizations?”
Matt had no issue with that and selected the regions Liz mentioned then waited.
Once Liz and Aster were ready, the simulation started to progress.
Immediately, Matt cordoned off his dozen countries by the superpower they were under the influence of, and then spawned a rift in all of them near each of their food production areas.
That would get the royal’s attention faster than anything else. Part of their duties as a vassal state for the four larger superpowers was to send food to keep their massive armies fed.
If they didn’t produce their quota of food, they would become the target of the next campaign.
He spawned the rift early in the morning and sent a small wave of goblins out in every direction.
It took a little Genesis Energy, but he prevented the monsters from grouping up, as most of the farmers were small families, and simulation or no, he didn’t like the idea of anyone dying to a rift break.
They were playing the first few hours slowly, but once their monsters were all defeated, they sped up the simulation to the next day before repeating their actions.
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