I've always thought about plugging LLMs into the simulation, even pre-generated naratives could be interesting. But I'd have to give it more thought as it seems pretty hard for such big scale interactions (50k citizens?)

>I like to think too that with sufficient fidelity a simulation of this sort may be useful in real world city planning/economic modeling/geopolitics.

This was one of the early vision I had for this project: Simulating different economies to see which ones fared better. However I have kind of abandoned this as the realy world is just far too complex! Making a "normal" but different city builder seems a bit more achievable.