Production chains, and the page that could not be extracted

Pharaoh's production chains came out of Akhenaten cleanly: what each building takes in, what it puts out, how many labourers it wants, and the rate the engine steps its progress bar with. No other game gets the page, and the reasons differ — Caesar III's rates are in the file mods rewrite, Emperor's exist only as a walkthrough author's estimates ("about 6-7 per year", "I assume the bump is like 15%"), and the remaining three have no engine carrying them. Reprinting somebody's assumption as a reference figure is worse than an empty column.

One parser bug is worth recording because it is the buildings join-by-index problem wearing different clothes. The config files indent their nested definitions, and anchoring the block pattern to column zero silently merged each into the block above — producing 25 producers instead of 39, with a fig farm holding a grain farm's numbers. It looked entirely plausible.

Then the mechanics essay, which is the first thing here that could not be extracted from anything. Its claim is that an Impressions city runs two opposite systems at once: employment is a global pool across nine categories with no geography in it at all, while a service is a person who walks out of a door and covers whatever they pass. You can employ every doctor in the city and still have a plague, because those are different questions, and only the map answers the second.

Writing an argument to the same standard as a table

Prose is where a reference site usually gets sloppy, so the essay was held to the tables' standard: every figure in it names the engine file it came from — the two-tile box a walker services around wherever it is standing, the point eight tiles out it heads for, the roam direction that advances by two each time a building sends someone out, the coverage cap of 96 — and the closing callout says plainly that those numbers are Caesar III's and have not been checked against the other three engines.

That is also the honest summary of the whole project so far. Nearly everything here was read out of something that can be checked, and where it could not be, the page says so instead of rounding the gap up into confidence.