Simulating all of the physical processes going on in each character’s body was out of the question, especially in a game where you might be dealing with armies of a hundred thousand men. Even a crude simulation, tracking only a few variables and using simple equations, would involve a nightmarish amount of paperwork if you did it all by hand. But all of this was happening in the mid-1980s, when personal computers had become cheap and ubiquitous. A computer could automatically track a large database and tell you whether each character was well-fed or starving. There was no reason not to do it on a computer.