Of course this is noon exhaustive, but I think it''s a good starting point.
But before I start writing a big list I''d like to explain the way I see things.
First, you have to design at least the solar system you are in. Because this condition the type of light you are going to have, hence the races and organisms that are going to exist on your planet. Then it would be nice to design the different planets of the system, if you plan to use an astrological system (I do).
Next, you have to design the planet the action takes place on.
As a rule of thumb : Do things in the order they happened.
For instance, first the Earth was a big lava ball. This gives you the tectonic plates. which allow you to create realistic landscape, as well as placing minerals and ores all over the place. Later these will help you have realistic locations for mines, and there content (rather than some random stuff).
As well, I believe (and that''s not based on anything scientific, IMHO) that it would also allow us to have a sort of heat map, that would influence the climate in subtle ways (different types of deserts, streams of hot water, volcanic islands, rift, etc).
Next you pour water, and you get your oceans, your rivers, etc etc. Also you have to take into account the heat at that stage. By combining heat level, landscape(altitude), and hygrometry (humidity level), you get all the different types of climates, as well as the presence of vegetation.
Once you have this, you start putting animals.
How you would develop animals would be specific to your world, but to take earth example, you would distinguish between Omnivorous (eat everything), Herbivorous (eat herbs, grass), Carnivorous (eat meat), water animals, mammals, and so on and so forth. This would influence the types of animals you would find, random encounters, or hunt animals (so you wouldn''t find extremely inconsistent things like cold blooded animals in polar regions, or unlikely animals in the desert, etc).
I don''t think you would have to actually simulate all this, but rather ork on numbers, population, rather than specific individuals.
After that you begin to put human beings (and other "thinking" animals). I think you are the one I told about the Tribe generator (in the thread "race generator", wasn''t it).But to put it briefly, given the races of your universe, you could put them in specific climates, you could have tribes of various mixes (e.g. goblinoids like orks, ogres, goblins, living together), which would gather together in specific locations (which is where the realism in the creation of the planet get handy) : the meeting point of two rivers, next to a natural mining location, top of a hill not far from a river, on a temperate coastal area, protected from the deep sea by a line of mountains, a the bottom of a volcano (volcanoes nearby area are usually extremely fertile), and so on and so forth.
Once you have tribes, you can "grow" the whole thing.
Tribes of similar characteristics will communicate, so you build roads, or form a nation, also tribes that are in favourable situation will extend their living area (a port area were there is a lot of food will develop nicely, while a desert outpost will grow much more slowly; a little village in a valley won''t have a lot of room to extend, but a tribe in a plain with forests nearby will probably extend).
As well, the location will condition things like the main activities of towns, the types of alimentation, the type of life, the level of communication between different tribes, the likeliness of them forming a vast unified nation rather than lots of little clans ... etc etc
Of course I am being very general. But you will see that there are some nice ideas in all this, the thing is that if you are actually going to implement something of the scale of an empire, the apparent amount of details in my description will actually make it much easier to get those details rather than using stupid random generators all over the place, and in a much more "consisten" manner, I believe. For instance, taking the climate into account will allow you to assign types of vegetation to forests, which in turn, depending on their type, will contain different species of trees, plants, herbs, in various probabilities. This would allow you to create Herborist skills that are useful, because it would tell you where to find what, hence to decide "OK, I need this plant to do this potion, we have to go in the mountains of the South..."
As well, your carpenters would make more or less precious types of furnitures depending on the types of forest nearby. And of course, if they need some precious wood that can only be found far from here, they would be happy to send some adventurers to buy it, rather than doing it themselves. If you have a "realistic" geology in your world, this will allow again things like a diamond mine to happen in a random but realistic manner (next to a coal mine), and this would allow a specialist to use his skills to identify and distinguish various types of minerals, tell you were to find them, and send you on quests to find the most precious ones (and of course, all this is needed because you would have a very cool magic/alchemy system !
) Pure crystal is found in granitic mountains, limestone natural deposit nearby will increase the industry of building in one town, etcI think you get the idea. The trick is that the deeper you go the more details you can create. But all this is done in a ''general to specific'' manner. I don''t put belladone plants before I have done the climate, the type of vegetation, the types of forests. I don''t put my tribes and then design the region around.
Well, I was gonna give a list of characteristic, but I think they are meaningless, now that I have explain my thoughts, because the characteristics are going to depend directly on the amount of details you want, and on the level of interaction you want to have between all those attributes. One word though, use a hierarchical, scalar system.
This is what I meant by fractal.
If you don''t think I am totally unrealistic by now, then I have some more ideas for tribes design (to complete a bit more the random tribe generator
)youpla :-P
(I checked out Logicrucible, one word : Sweeeeet ! )
I''m working on building the galaxy now, and fleshing out the AI actions (hince this post).
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