Rise of Swarajya: A Legitimacy-Based Framework for Designing Strategy Games and Teaching History

Most real-time strategy (RTS) games model conflict as a contest of force: the player wins by out-producing and destroying an opponent. This paper presents the design of Rise of Swarajya, an educational historical strategy game whose primary resource is not gold or military mass but political legitimacy, together with the agent-based engine that runs it. The game is set in the seventeenth-century Deccan and casts the player as the early Shivaji Maharaj, who liberates a region from an oppressive garrison mainly by earning the trust of its villages: protecting them, taxing them fairly, building for them, freeing their captives. Annihilating the enemy is not the route to that trust. The contested fort can be taken without a frontal assault at all — win the surrounding country, cut its supply, and the isolated garrison surrenders — in the fort-and-mobility tradition of Ganimi Kava, with direct assault kept as a costly fallback. At the centre of the design is one quantified construct, the Swarajya score: a weighted measure of justice, trust, protection, and prosperity. In the implemented Torna engine the score drives morale and combat strength, desertion under collapse, village allegiance, and the fort-surrender dynamics; the full design additionally specifies recruitment-rate and per-unit defection couplings, recorded here as future work. A scenario in this engine is pure data — the entities, their starting parameters, and an event table — so the single simulation loop and the one legitimacy formula carry no scenario-specific content and are meant to generalise beyond one campaign. The engine implements one such scenario in full, Shivaji Maharaj's Torna campaign. The broader schema also defines a hidden institutional-strength variable (the structural health of a regime's institutions) for delayed-consequence dynamics, to be exercised in future scenarios. A study of headless policy rollouts (informally, self-play) over that scenario, reported as properties of the rules rather than as claims about history, separates legitimacy from raw capability — governance sets a faction's final legitimacy and the manner of its victory, not just whether it wins — and maps a graded recovery/collapse frontier in starting legitimacy. The paper works on three levels. As a design paper, it argues that making legitimacy the core resource yields a teachable systems model of governance and a strategy loop that does not centre on combat. As an engineering artefact, it is written to serve as a clean implementation blueprint: every formula, parameter table, entity, and tick-order rule is specified from a working headless reference engine that passes its test suite. As an educational tool, it shows how a playable simulation can teach history by experience rather than by rote, letting a learner experience the tradeoffs of governing instead of memorising dates. India has a very long heritage of thought on just kingship — the ethics of dharma across many schools — and a long freedom struggle whose figures and their choices still instruct, and this is an underused source of design material. As Santayana warned, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it; games that make that past engaging seem to us worth building on those grounds alone. A work-in-progress browser demo of the Torna campaign is playable at https://rise-of-swarajya.ajinkya.ai/. We report no human-subjects evaluation; a classroom study and a production-quality client are the main items of future work.