Background

A few months ago, I wrote an evolutionary algorithm that initializes 4 isolated societies with variable conditions (such as climate, size, usable land, etc), tracks their inhabitants, and reports on the results after a preset period of time. A demonstration using D3.js to present the results of a single simulation can be viewed here. Certain patterns emerged that really excited me, particularly where the most advanced society by the end of the simulation was invariably the one that began with the harshest conditions: either the climate was not ideal for food production (typically cold environments), disease was more prevalent (in hot climates), and particularly with lands where space was most limited and so inhabitants would have to fight for every bit of real estate.

I was so excited about results that I wanted to create a compelling user experience to share the simulation with others. I initially planned to add a simple graphical overlay on top of the simulation so that the user could observe the results outside of the console, but I ultimately wanted to make something more interactive. This inspired me to create the game you are about to play. I decided on using 'shapes' as the 'beings' that we will play as so as to mitigate some of the otherwise dark themes inherent in evolution and war. You will control the Circle Kingdom and will be tasked with the job of fighting against the Polygons.

Implemented evolutionary mechanisms

All beings begin with three attributes at 100: intelligence, strength, and a general health attribute. Attributes are treated as genetic traits and are passed down to offspring. There are four primary drivers of evolution considered in this game:

Reproduction: Every age, males and females are ordered by reproductive desirability (an aggregation of strength, health, and intelligence) and will reproduce on a 1-to-1 basis (until there are no more partners left for whichever gender has the least beings). Before anything else, the offspring will inherit an average of each trait from both partners.
Mutation: To simulate genetic mutation, each attribute will be modified by a positive or negative amount of 20%, with equal weight.
Genetic Recombination: Genetic recombination is difficult to express in a numeric simulation, but the effects can be treated as a more severe genetic deviation than a mutation, and so the simulation is made with a double or nothing approach to each attribute, with a small chance of 'proccing' (2%) and an equal chance of 'doubling' the attribute and having it go to zero.
Selection: The strongest driver of evolution here is selection, which effectively tests for the positive or negative trend of the previous three. Survival, and the ability to continue to reproduce and pass along one's traits, is measured against several environment conditions that test each of the three attributes: food is better harvested and fought for with strength, efficient food management is determined by intelligence, along with a variety of other intelligence-driven tests, and health determines how long a being will live (in the absence of unnatural deaths) as well as the being's ability to fight off disease. There are other factors as well, which can be investigated in the code.

Playing the game

(1)
(2)
(3)

Win condition: At the beginning of the game, you will decide how many ages you will play for: 10, 20, 30, or 50. The game will take approximately 5 minutes per 10 ages, assuming normal play. The game will end when either the number of picked ages transpire, or the player controls the only surviving kingdom, whichever comes first. A kingdom is defeated when its population falls below 10, or when its land size falls below 100 acres.
Decisions: Most decisions in the game will produce a short explanation of what it does when selected (but not yet submitted). The game begins with several: the color of your king, the number of ages you will play, and the specialty of your kingdom. Future decisions include the allocation of your population, the goal for the next age, and the target of your next action.

General "gameflow"

Turns will generally play out in a similar flow:

(1) Population allocation: Population can be allocated into three roles: workers, military, and educators. Workers are responsible for producing food, as well as defending from invaders (at 50% the strength of a soldier). Military can be used for offense or defense. If they remain at home to defend, they will also produce food at 50% the efficiency of a worker. Educators contibute neither to the production of food nor to the defense of your land directly, but they apply technology-related bonuses to your country, which will have positive effects in the long-run. They are generally the most effective tool to succeed, so long as you can endure the short-term downsides of allocating part of your population to something that doesn't produce immediate effects.
(2) Pick a goal for the age: Each age you will select a goal. Domestic goals focus on non-military objectives and are typically best for solving short-term needs: food production, population growth, etc. Military goals are somewhat self-explanatory, and will increase the effectiveness of your military on offense and/or defense. Technology goals apply a permanent % bonus to all future-goals picked under that category. Increasing technology funding expedites your progress towards the next technological stage, each of which will apply a permanent bonus to most actions in the game. Stages are depicted by your country's shelter: a cave, a hut, a castle, and then a tower. Finally, you can pick an espionage move. These goals provide no numeric benefit to your kingdom and instead aim to sabotage another country. This will be covered in more detail later.
(3) Hold council: Once you pick your goal, you will have a chance to look at the map before deciding on your target for that age. This allows you to determine which country might be the most attactive target for attack or whether you might be better off defending your own land instead. Once you hold council, you then pick the target for your attack, or if you click on your own country, your military will stay at home. All players will decide on a target at the same time, and the result will be based on the relative military strength between the attacking army and the defense at home of the defender.
Espionage: If you selected espionage as an age goal, then you will not actually send a military out to the target you select while holding council. Instead, you will select the target for your espionage move, and your military will remain at home to defend.

A few strategies:

Being aggressive isn't always best: Attacking a country is primarily beneficial insofar as the attacker will gain a % of land from the defender. There is no inherent benefit to having more land except that it allows for a larger maximum population and more land to harvest food. Early on, however, your population is small enough that you will not yet benefit from the extra land. Conversely, since growth is proportionate to your total population, losing even 5% of your population in the first age will permanently affect your population negatively by that percentage.
The defense has a large advantage: Furthermore, the defense will receive a significant bonus to military strength to account for travel fatigue of the attackers, as well as the defense's familiarity with fighting at home. Ultimately, attackers will suffer much higher casualties than the defenders, all else equal.
The purpose of espionage is to dictate the terms of battle: Kidnapping the enemy princess yields no direct benefit to the captor. Instead, it forces the enemy from which the princess was captured to retaliate the following age. This means that you can anticipate with 100% certainty that you will be attacked, allowing you to stack your defense and punish the attacker with significant casualties. The attacker will also be left defenseless at home which might result in further losses if someone were to attack them. Furthermore, framing an enemy, if successful, ensures that they will be attacked by another player, which gives you the opportunity to either double team the framed country, or attack the other country, knowing that they will be left undefended.
Be careful about how you allocate your population: There are 5 ways for a being to die: old age, starvation, disease, war and from internal violence. The easiest is by starvation, which occurs if a being does not eat for 6 cycles. Each age is 5 cycles, so you will have a very small window of opportunity to increase food production if you see that at the end of an age you have 0 food in storage. Additionally, beings who have starved for even a day by the end of the age will not reproduce that age as they will be worried about their own survival.
Don't overextend on attack: Gains are calculated by looking at the relative military strength of both sides. Here's a simplification: you gain 10% of your target's land multiplied by the relative military strength between your attack and their defense. Let's say you send 90% of your population on attack, and they keep 60% on defense. Ignoring modifiers, you will gain 10% * (90% / 60%), or 15% of their land. If they were to attack you at the same time with the remaining 40% of their population, their relative military strength to your defense would be (40% / 10%) which applied to the base 10% of your land would result in a loss of 40% of your own land, or a 25% net loss (assuming both sides started at the same size). Leaving 0% of your population at home is not only dangerous as you will be left completely undefended, but also because no one will be harvesting food, and unless you began with enough in storage, you will likely begin a cycle of starvation.
Finally, please be aware that after age 10 or so, there might be significant (2-5 seconds) pauses after you send out your military. This is because the underlying algorithm is simulating the existence of potentially tens to hundreds of thousands of "beings", tracking 10+ attributes for each, their reproductive outcomes, their eating habits, etc. This gets computationally expensive and because JavaScript is single-threaded, the UI will stall until the event queue frees up. I am currently working on a version of this game that utilizes Web Workers to divide the algorithm computations from the interface handling, but I wanted to release the game as is for now, since the core functionality is still playable.