Once a civilization gets enough tech to build airships: Awesome. Mid-air fights. Canons, or occasionally seeing an air caravan pass by
Or being hired to escort caravans would be nice. A major problem though... Since the world will be endless, will you make it so that if a village is far enough away, it will become inactive or slightly active? And kingdoms could have a farther inactivity range?
Actually, that's more or less the whole point of this.
Point 1: when a town is balanced then no calculations need to be done at all. I can assume that whenever you get near everything is just cruising along. The game only need to worry about specific amounts of things at that point. In other words, a town far enough from a player requires zero processing time.
Point 2: when a town is at the edge of the known world, the things it can't get from the known world can be exported/imported "over the horizon" to the towns that haven't been generated yet.
For example, in the process of balancing the town it turns out that it has an excess of lumber that none of the current towns need and that it cannot produce enough iron to meet its own requirements... and none of the existing towns can supply it. So it sends its wood and receives its iron from some imaginary town that hasn't been generated yet. When that town is finally generated then it has built in requirements for import+export that it must factor into its own balancing... and if it can't meet the export requirements then it can always import from the next imaginary town over the horizon.
By the time a town is generated to the point of being "resource balanced", the site of the town over the horizon and the road to it have already been decided.
And the benefit is that without that, a town becomes really hard to balance on its own just with known stuff... and the world becomes much more boring anyway because the chances are that towns would never import or export because I'd have to build some other slop into the system.
Point 3: towns don't just operate as a random collection of NPCs working through scripted motions. This is ok for regular RPGs and it's possible that I could have generated towns that act this way... but what would have been impossible is letting a player create their own town that operated appropriately. With this system, a player can interject at ANY point in the process. All the way from helping an NPC rebuild his house after a fire, through running a cargo line, all the way up to creating your own populated town from scratch and managing it to prosperity. At least that's the idea.
Point 4: NPCs have a built in awareness of how their local world is going. The NPC knows its role in the town and the role of its "friends". It has goals, etc. and built in knowledge of the surrounding towns because of trade.
IF (and it's a big "if"), I can find a way to translate this knowledge into non-stupid NPC dialog then we really do have a world where many of the normal RPG style quests can generate themselves.
...and if you do something like release a dragon, it will have a profound and real effect across a huge section of the world.
