Abstract

Shadows of Dominion (SoD) is a strategy simulation environment designed for the practice and study of influence, power, and value-flow dynamics within a living, agent-driven ecology. Unlike conventional games, SoD operates as a continuous simulation in which non-player characters pursue autonomous agendas, the world-state evolves from the cumulative effect of all agents, and the player participates as one agent among many rather than as a directing controller.

The simulation draws its behavioral content from a comprehensive strategy corpus including The Art of War (Sun Tzu), The Book of Five Rings (Miyamoto Musashi), The 36 Stratagems, The 33 Strategies of War (Robert Greene), The 48 Laws of Power (Robert Greene), The Laws of Human Nature (Robert Greene), The Pimp Game (Mickey Royal), How to Read a Person Like a Book (Nierenberg & Calero), and supplementary material on Dark Psychology, Brainwashing, NLP, and Game Theory. These texts collectively define the rules of human engagement — the behavioral physics of the simulation. Contextual frameworks including Bartle's Taxonomy (1996), Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs (1943), and the Wu Xing five-element classical model provide the analytical scaffolding.

The core economic engine is a five-type value flow system (Force, Intelligence, Influence, Resources, Loyalty) operating simultaneously through three Wu Xing-analogous cycles: generation (生, +1), overcoming (克, +2), and control (泄, -1). This engine drives five distinct regime configurations that rotate through a skip-2 cycle structure, determining which value types are most abundant, which are scarce, and which domain-specific roles are positioned to extract, trade, or accumulate surplus at any given moment.