The budget system creates realistic financial constraints that mirror real-world infrastructure projects. Budgets arrive in cycles, operational costs are ongoing, and budget delays can occur in expert modes.
Starting Budget:
NBE × 0.515 × difficulty_multiplier1.120 (20% bump)1.095 (9.5% bump—tighter constraint)Recurring Budget:
NBE × 1.095 × difficulty_multiplier1.095 (9.5% bump)1.055 (5.5% bump—tighter constraint)Normal Budget Expectation (NBE):
NBE baseline per turn: $487,500
Starting budget: $487,500 × 0.515 × 1.120 = $281,148 (available Turn 1)
Recurring budget: $487,500 × 1.095 × 1.095 = $584,625 (every 5 turns)
Total over 25 turns: $281,148 + ($584,625 × 4) = $2,619,648
Average per turn: $104,786
This creates a challenging early game where players cannot afford to build everything immediately, requiring strategic prioritization.
Build Cost:
Operational Cost:
operationalCost / 5 per turn)$30,000 hosted connection (within region) started on Turn 2, completed on Turn 5: Turn 2: Pay $10,000 (build cost—paid immediately) Turn 5: Pay $6,000 (operationalCost/5 = $30k/5—first per-turn payment) Turn 6: Pay $6,000 (second per-turn payment) Turn 7: Pay $6,000 (third per-turn payment) Turn 8: Pay $6,000 (fourth per-turn payment) Turn 9: Pay $6,000 (fifth per-turn payment) Total operational cost paid: $30,000 over 5 turns (Turns 5-9)
Budget Delays (Expert/Custom Modes):
The budget structure creates realistic financial constraints through controlled scarcity and recurring cycles. Starting budget provides approximately 50% of Normal Budget Expectation (NBE), forcing strategic prioritization in the early game when players must decide which sites receive connections first. Recurring budgets arrive every 5 turns, simulating annual budget cycles in real organizations where infrastructure funding comes in periodic allocations rather than continuous streams.
Operational costs spread over 5 turns as per-turn payments rather than upfront charges, reflecting how ongoing operational expenses work in practice. Build costs are paid immediately when construction begins, mirroring real project commitment patterns. Budget delays (3% probability in Expert/Custom modes) introduce controlled uncertainty that requires maintaining cash buffers without being punishing. Difficulty multipliers scale both starting and recurring budgets, creating meaningful differences in financial pressure across difficulty levels.
Players can build three types of connections, each with different characteristics that reflect real-world network connection types:
| Type | Speed | Build Time | Build Cost Range | Operational Cost Range | Use Case |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dedicated | 10 Gbps | 3-5 turns | $40k-$60k | $40k-$60k | High-throughput requirements, primary connections |
| Hosted | 1 Gbps | 2-4 turns | $10k-$20k | $30k-$50k | Cost-effective, partner-managed, moderate throughput |
| IP Tunnel | 1 Gbps | 1-3 turns | $5k-$15k | $20k-$40k | Fast deployment, lower cost, backup/redundancy |
Strategic Differences:
Region Alignment Impact:
Build Time Randomization:
Players can create bidirectional site-to-site connections that allow sites to share capacity. These links enable redundancy, cost optimization, and capacity pooling.
Hub Limit Rationale:
Regional Cost Differences:
Site-to-site connections enable bidirectional capacity sharing between sites, supporting cost optimization and redundancy strategies. Players can concentrate expensive direct connections at key sites and distribute capacity through site-to-site links, reducing overall infrastructure costs while maintaining throughput requirements. When a site loses direct connections due to events, it can receive capacity from neighboring sites through established links, providing automatic failover without manual intervention.
The hub limit (maximum 4 site-to-site connections per site) creates strategic topology decisions, preventing simple star patterns where one site connects to all others. Cascading capacity sharing generates network-wide resilience, where sites with excess capacity can support multiple needy sites simultaneously. This architecture mirrors real network patterns like hub-and-spoke and mesh topologies, teaching players how capacity pooling and geographic distribution create robust distributed systems.
The event system introduces unexpected challenges that test network resilience. Events reflect real-world network outages and require players to plan for failure, not just success.
1. Colocation Outage
2. Site Outage
3. Specific Connection Outage
4. Site-to-Site Connection Outage
Event probability escalates as the game progresses, creating increasing pressure:
| Game Phase | Turns | Probability Per Turn | Rationale |
|---|---|---|---|
| Early Game | 1-5 | 5-10% | Allow infrastructure building |
| Mid Game | 6-15 | 10-15% | Test emerging resilience |
| Late Game | 16-25 | 15-20% | Maximum pressure and challenge |
Escalating Event Frequency
Event probability increases from 5-10% in early turns to 15-20% in late game, creating progressive pressure that matches infrastructure maturity. Early game provides space for initial deployment without constant interruptions, allowing players to establish baseline connectivity. Mid-game escalation tests emerging resilience as infrastructure expands. Late game maximum frequency applies sustained pressure that reveals whether players built genuinely resilient networks or minimum-viable architectures that collapse under realistic operational stress.
Events encourage:
Players start with 100 mission points. Points change each turn based on requirement fulfillment. The system rewards resilience under pressure, not just meeting baseline requirements.
| Requirement Status | Points Per Turn | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| < 50% Met | -15 | Significant penalty for poor progress |
| 50-99% Met | -8 | Partial progress, manageable penalty |
| 100% Met (No Events) | +5 | Base reward for meeting requirements |
| 100% Met (1 Active Event) | +15 | Bonus for resilience (3× base) |
| 100% Met (2 Active Events) | +25 | Excellent redundancy planning (5× base) |
| 100% Met (3+ Active Events) | +35 to +55 | Outstanding network architecture (7-11× base) |
Event-Based Bonus Scaling
Mission points scale dramatically when players meet 100% requirements during active events, rewarding resilient architectures that maintain capacity under pressure. Meeting requirements with zero active events awards +5 points (baseline), while meeting requirements during 1 event awards +15 points (3× multiplier), 2 events award +25 points (5× multiplier), and 3+ events award +35-55 points (7-11× multiplier). This scaling creates strong incentives to over-provision capacity and build redundancy, recognizing that systems maintaining operation during multiple simultaneous failures demonstrate exceptional architectural quality that justifies disproportionate rewards.
Win:
Loss:
Immediate Loss Condition
The game ends immediately when mission points reach zero, preventing extended "death spiral" scenarios where recovery becomes mathematically impossible but the simulation continues. This mechanic creates urgency around maintaining positive momentum, requiring players to build sufficient resilience that they can absorb temporary setbacks without catastrophic point loss. The immediate termination forces strategic thinking about risk management, since sustained capacity failures drain points rapidly and recovery becomes progressively harder as points decline.