Having spawning occur from the breeding of a succesful lineage of parents is a great idea, however, no doubt, all of a breed will be killed off eventually and you''ll have to spawn them or another new breed from scratch.
The brilliant thing is that the ones that survive to breeding age are the fittest members of that race and so their offspring will be better at defeating adventurers as the game progresses.

Mike

Sadly, this kind of project is not being attempted on any serious level because it''s not worth it. The amount of CPU time spent on maintaining this model which (a) only 10% of which will ever be seen by players, and (b) will most likely just get destroyed by players anyway, is simply not justified.

You can approximate the breeding process. You can also approximate the economical process, to a more limited extent. Let''s put it this way: there are professional economists working on this problem, and even they don''t have the answers. Modern economics is far from being a ''solved'' problem, never mind economics in an online fantasy land where the rules are very different. And originally, Ultima Online had a very developed ecological system, which could never work because the players would destroy anything. And that which they didn''t destroy, seemed interesting from a development point of view but had no effect on the gameplay.

Sorry to be negative, but I''d recommend not even trying. If you want to make a game that people can play, then work out approximations for what you want. If you want to do some sort of ecological and economical simulation, best not introduce human players.

I get the feeling that the word human is from the greek for "that which destoys ecologies".
Natural or virutal, it seems our special talent :-(.

MikeD

Especially ecologies that we can log out of at any point, without worrying about spending years in jail for killing things, or dying or starvation, etc etc.