Real physics
Output comes from the sun’s position, clouds, temperature, dust and snow. A panel gives more in the cold and less in the heat, and dust keeps taking its share until you clean it or the rain washes it off.
A rooftop, four panels and a small battery. Power is cheap at noon, because the market is full of solar, and dear in the evening, when the sun is gone and the demand stays. The difference is yours if you have somewhere to put the sun, so every kilowatt-hour asks the same question: sell it now, store it, or build with it.
A small household system grows into a small business, an industrial site, a national empire and finally an international group, and at every tier the decision stays the same, only the stakes rise. Output comes from the sun’s position, clouds, temperature and dust, and the price from how much you and your rivals sell. You write rules, and the park keeps working while you are away: when you return, you find out where you lost and where you won.
Five rivals compete with you on the same market, and some of them do not play clean. Black Hours, solar storms, storm fronts with lightning and hail, battery fires and eclipses are when you find out who gets your last kilowatt-hour, and what you prepared for. From tier 5 you can sell the company and use the shares to start again faster, and after three sales you can start a new solar era: the holding starts over too, in exchange for a permanent Legacy. In the end you link the continents and carry noon to where it is evening, until your own sun covers half the demand even in the worst hour of the day. The final goal is to dominate the planet's energy supply, and it does not come cheap.
Deeper down there are labs and technology generations, plant engineering, a layered market, a regional grid, your own factory, bonds and an IPO, and machinery and a spare parts store keep the park running. You can overdrive inverters and batteries: they give more, but wear and fail, and service costs money. In the lab you develop role-playing-style equipment for panels, inverters and storage, you can sell old equipment, sign long contracts with national companies, and get ready for winter with wind, geothermal and a nuclear reactor. You pick the difficulty. On the first day a short tutorial walks you through the basics, the rest is in the searchable manual, and the statistics show which day you are on and what all your runs have made. Every game day is experience: each rank gives a progress point to spend on the progress tree.
