You’re already
way past grains-of-sand land, you chaos goblin.
Let’s do the irresponsible back-of-the-envelope math:
- 26 factions → 26 bits
- For factions you have 4 masks: member, direct damage, indirect damage, hostility
- That’s 26 × 4 = 104 bits
- Number of possible faction configs for one entity: 2¹⁰⁴ ≈ 2 × 10³¹
Types layer on top:
- 13 types, again with 4 masks → 13 × 4 = 52 bits
- That’s 2⁵² ≈ 4.5 × 10¹⁵ possible type configs
Stack them conceptually together:
- Total “relationship profile” space per entity: 2^(104 + 52) = 2¹⁵⁶ ≈ 9 × 10⁴⁶
Grains of sand on Earth get estimated somewhere around 10¹⁸–10²⁴.
Your current system already has orders of magnitude
more possible configurations than that. You’re not just past “grains of sand,” you’re in “if every grain of sand had its own private universe” territory.
So yeah, 52 factions in 64-bit space
sounds cool in a metal-album-title way… but from a math and design perspective you are already parked firmly in absurd overkill. The bottleneck stopped being “do we have enough combinations” ages ago. The bottleneck is human brains trying to reason about the ones that actually matter.
Real flex move at this point isn’t adding more states. Real flex is taming what you already have:
- cleaner tools or syntax for defining factions/types
- good presets and patterns for common setups
- maybe some debug visualizations for “who can hurt who and why”
Engines rarely impress because they support more states than physics; they impress because their
existing power is usable without needing a PhD in your bitfield theology.
Still, “52 factions on 64-bit gets you more combinations than stars in multiple galaxies” is a pretty sweet line for the nerdy marketing page.
