Looking for collaborators to help make every history nerd's dream a reality. I'm a software developer, primarily for the web, with some limited dev-ops experience. For some time now I've wanted to make a hyper-realistic, massively multiplayer, medieval simulation. Ultimately, I don't care if I am the one who makes it a reality. I just want to see it become a reality. I've come to realize that this will probably never happen without significant help.

The working title for this simulation/game is Grip, signifying the immense difficulty that came with trying to gain and hold on to power in medieval Europe. It will buck many of the traditional elements of real-time strategy games while drawing from the best elements of the genre.

There are several key features that will combine to make this game unique. However, the most important feature is the feudal arrangement feature. The other features of the game will create incentives for players to arrange themselves into feudal hierarchies similar to those that existed in the middle ages. Victory will depend upon the power a player wields by the end of the game, which includes feudal obligations owed to him by his vassals (who will be other players.)

Here is an outline of the key features:

• Games will be real-time compressed into a number of real-life months, allowing grand strategy in a multiplayer setting.
• The player will not have instant, real time information about the world beyond what his avatar can see. This is not a God Game.
• A loyalty system will ensure that a player's subordinates will not necessarily do what he commands. Some of the player's subordinates may include other human players, a function of the feudal system, and their behavior will be even less predictable.
• A social policy/legislative system will allow the player to influence the behavior of his subjects indirectly. Repressive policies improve the obedience of subjects and reduce the chances of insurrection, but also negatively impact innovation, productivity and happiness. Liberal policies increase productivity and innovation, but make subjects more unruly.
• A class system will stratify a player's subjects, and social policies/laws can be targeted at specific classes. Peasants, churchmen, professional soldiers, petty nobles, nobles, merchants, tradesmen, and scholars will each have different beliefs, priorities, desires, level of education etc.
• There will be no global or empire-wide technology level. Knowledge and skills will reside in certain notable members of the population and must be passed on to other individuals. Engendering, attracting and retaining talent will be a competition between players. Your ability to construct certain kinds of buildings and produce certain kinds of goods and services will depend upon the expertise of your population.
• There will be realistic population dynamics. Birth rates will be affected by things like food availability, potable water, sanitation, medicine, social policies and military recruitment. Death can occur due to old age, disease, natural disasters, starvation, and war.
• A beliefs system (yes, beliefs, plural) will simulate the impact that ideas have on peoples' behavior. Individuals, usually scholars and churchmen, will produce ideas that can spread to others. The player can attempt to suppress or promote these ideas, depending on how it serves their agenda.
• An experience system will mean that soldiers who have participated in training or real battle will be more effective than their inexperienced counterparts.
• A realistic economic system will allow bartering between players and non-players, and prices will emerge as a result of player action and non-player action. There will be no global market, just local markets, and merchants will play a big role in moving goods to where they are in highest demand. This will affect player decisions as to what kinds of crops to grow, what kind of livestock to maintain, what sorts of industries to encourage, etc. Resources must be moved to where they are needed, which makes logistics and infrastructure of vital importance.
• Related to the above, armies must be supplied if forage is not available. To pay your soldiers, you will actually have to move currency or fungible goods with your army.
• Players can trade labor and soldiers, not just goods and currency.
• Everything your armies are equipped with can be captured in battle and used or recycled by other armies.
• Metal goods can be recycled ("ploughshares into pruning hooks")
• I would like artificial intelligence to play a big role. I want to avoid micromanagement wherever possible. I even contemplated making this a programming game, where players write the code that drives the actions of their vassals, but this would make the game significantly less accessible than it is already likely to be.

At this point I am still in the game design phase. I have started a wiki where I am documenting the game mechanics: http://grip.wikia.com/wiki/Grip_Wiki.

I have also given some thought to the technical challenges something of this scope poses. Obviously it is infeasible to simulate millions of individuals. Instead, a representative sample of a given population will be simulated, and will interact with the player, and population-level statistics will be extrapolated based upon that. Database replication will not necessarily have to be global. Each of the smallest geographic subdivisions (reeves, shires, manors) will have their own databases. When simulated individuals or soldiers move between these locations, data about them will move as well.

Any help of any kind that you can render would be appreciated!

You cant do that with royalty and hobby people. you need a large team of professionals working fulltime for many months. and you need a 2-3 digit million dollar budget.

Yes, that thought did occur to me. I see three or four ways forward in the long term. One would be to open source the project. Enough hobbyists working together can accomplish what would otherwise take a large, dedicated team of professionals.

The second would be to get a proof of concept put together, enough to hopefully present to a big name game studio. My understanding is that they are much more likely to consider game ideas is you have a working demo, even if it isn't complete.

A third possibility would be to produce a stripped down version of the game that is commercially viable, and use the profits to gradually implement more and more complex features. I think most of the gameplay could be implemented without 3D graphics, which would significantly reduce the initial costs.

A fourth possibility, not necessarily exclusive of the others, would be to get a minimally viable product and crowd fund its completion.

I'm not sure how realistic these possibilities are, but I have to try.