A participant is a single organism following one fixed strategy (TIES, Tit-for-Tat, etc). Its size indicates its energy — earned by playing rounds of the Prisoner's Dilemma against neighbours.

Energy drain is the energy each participant burns every cycle just to stay alive. Higher drain means participants must cooperate more actively to survive; at 0% nobody ever starves from upkeep alone.

Reproduce at energy is the threshold a participant must cross to split into two. Lower thresholds mean faster population growth; higher thresholds mean only the most successful participants multiply.

Cooperation (both play C) flashes a warm golden ring — both gain energy. Betrayal flashes red — the betrayer drains energy from the other.

Anchors are the wealthiest participants on the field. Their halo represents real influence: nearby participants are nudged gently toward them, visualising how concentrated success reshapes the neighbourhood.

Threads connect same-strategy participants standing close together — a visual cue that a colony has formed, not just a random cluster.

Mutation occasionally changes a newborn's strategy or its internal TIES parameters (I, R) slightly — this is how new colony behaviours emerge over generations.

Economic power (T) is each participant's material capacity, inherited and slowly mutating. A weak participant (low T) preying on a much stronger counterpart (high T) earns less than the classic betrayal payoff — sometimes even less than mutual cooperation would have paid. This makes "punching up" a bad trade for the weak side.

Fortune (optional, off by default) perturbs the realised payoff after it's calculated, weighted by T: the economically stronger side is favoured by circumstance more often, the weaker side less often — but neither outcome is ever guaranteed. It represents how real-world events (a good harvest, a market shift, a stroke of diplomatic luck) tend to compound existing strength rather than landing purely at random.

Axis alignment runs in the background at a fixed level. Same-strategy participants gradually align their orientations, and cohesion then favours stretching along a shared axis — producing visible chains rather than round blobs.

Pulse sync (Kuramoto coupling) runs in the background at a fixed level. Dense, well-bonded colonies gradually pulse in unison; a participant caught between two differently-phased colonies stays out of step with both, marking a visible boundary between them.