From Macro to Micro: Modelling Change in Sundial

If you want to understand how a society responds to stress, you can’t just look at the headlines. The fall of a regime, a peace treaty, or a natural disaster (macro-level change) sets the stage — but the real story continues in the streets, workplaces, and living rooms.

By linking macro, meso, and micro events, Sundial can show how:

• Large-scale policies influence regional stability.

• Regional disruptions trigger collective memories and cluster-wide behaviours.

• Individual experiences ripple back into group identity and policy support.

Macro Events — Setting the Stage

Macro events in Sundial are time-triggered and deterministic. They’re the major turning points: a war begins, a regime falls, a health crisis emerges. These events change the baseline conditions for entire clusters, shifting traits, beliefs, and tags in one move.

They’re powerful, but they’re not the whole story — they create the conditions for everything that follows.

Meso Events — The Middle Layer

Meso events bridge the gap between the big picture and the personal.
They’re reactive, cluster-level changes triggered by conditions like high stress, political instability, or shared tags. Examples include regional strikes, riots, or diplomatic standoffs.

These events often act as stress relays, amplifying or muting the effects of macro events, and setting the stage for micro-level reactions.

Micro Events — The Human Scale

Micro events are where the simulation gets personal.
They trigger per persona, reacting to traits, beliefs, tags, and memories. A persona might lose faith in authority, become radicalised, or make a major life decision based on their unique history.

By modelling individual change, Sundial allows for variation even within the same cluster under identical macro conditions.

Why the Links Between Them Matter

The power of Sundial’s design lies in how these three layers interact:

• A macro event might introduce martial_law tags to a cluster.

• That tag could enable a meso event like a regional protest.

• The protest might trigger micro events for individuals — some joining the movement, others becoming more obedient out of fear.

The result is a living, evolving model where top-down and bottom-up forces continuously influence one another.

Modelling Change Holistically

In real societies, there’s no clean boundary between big-picture events and individual experiences.
Sundial’s macro-to-micro framework reflects this, allowing you to explore:

• Policy testing — What happens when a reform triggers unrest?

• Divergence forecasting — How small-scale actions shift the path of history.

• Storytelling — Building richer narratives where personal arcs respond to world events.

Change is never just one thing happening in isolation.

By modelling the cascade from macro to micro, Sundial helps you see the connections, feedback loops, and unexpected turns that define real-world change.