Most simulations ask students to reverse-engineer a black box. Ours prints its own rules inside the game — and then proves, on every release, that no strategy owns the season. This page is the short version of how.
Every demand weight, cost curve, scoring ladder, and market rule is visible inside the game: info popovers on the controls print the engine's own numbers, the Spec Book collects them, and the Score Ledger shows every point to the decimal. The pro forma students consult before locking a decision is the actual engine running their whole year in advance. Nothing in the interface is an approximation of the game; it is the game.
The demand model itself is published too: buyers respond to price against the cell average — hardest in the economy segment, gentler in premium — and a product whose competitive index beats the average earns price headroom before that penalty binds. A bare markup bleeds share; a justified premium holds. There is a best price inside every band, and finding it is the curriculum.
Before any release, five rival strategies with genuinely different playbooks — a cost disruptor, a premium builder, a contract specialist, a sustainability leader, and a fast follower — play the full season across sixty seeded worlds, and each must win between 10 and 35 percent of them or the release does not ship. Scripted exploit strategies (price dumping, cash hoarding, market cornering, leverage games) must each fail. A deliberately badly-run company must struggle visibly without dying every time, because watching mismanagement compound is part of the curriculum. This is real harness output from the current release:
Balance tests catch unfair strategies; they don't catch clever ones. So we also attack our own economy: fleets of AI adversaries play thousands of seasons hunting for degenerate strategies — the price trick, the finance pump, the lever nobody should ever touch. When they find one (and they have), the economics get repriced until the exploit is just a strategy with a real cost. A separate audit forces every decision lever across its whole range to prove each one is a genuine decision, not a trap or a freebie.
The world events are hand-authored from documented industry history, not generated. Before the Motors edition shipped its realism options, we ran a research pass across the 2015 to 2026 EV industry — demand curves, battery costs, policy shocks, the price war, the labor settlements — and compared every finding against the engine's numbers. Where reality disagreed with us, we changed the game; where our simplifications were deliberate, we wrote down why. The same discipline built the airline edition.
Same seed, same decisions, same world: every season is exactly reproducible, which is what makes grades defensible and post-season debriefs honest. There is no hidden randomness to blame.