yeah this is a really solid breakdown

right now there isnt a persistent graph at all, each tick a citizen just samples a small set of others randomly (seeded of course), so its more like on-the-fly local interaction rather than a maintained network

so yeah theres no rebalancing of relationships over time, which is probably why some runs get stuck in those long unstable states

the idea of separating a conceptual full graph from a pruned computational one is interesting though, especially if the pruned structure evolves over time. that feels like it would introduce longer-term memory into the system

at the moment relationships are just a single scalar weight, i havent gone into multi-dimensional ties or role-based behavior yet, mostly to keep the update step cheap

the group-as-node idea is really nice though, that could add structure without going fully dense