Any turn based strategy or rpg with social simulation games

I'm trying to find a game with strategy/sim or rpg frame that has a big focus on characters and interactions.

People always say crusader kings but it doesn't really simulate relations and interactions. You don't have people connected by interests, even just vectors of strings. Characters and their relationships aren't built in interesting ways and a given relationship doesn't stand out meaningfully.

JRPGs and visual novels and sim rpgs on the other hand are mostly pre-scripted and limited relationships even if they could be considered deep and involve friendships and shared interests and compatible personalities. It is all hand written dialogue and detailed if stylized character art as the focus and not the mechanics per say. There's no real simulation and the scope is very small.

Are there any games where characters slowly build friendships and even romances as well as political alliances over decently long time periods with a large number of individual interactions.

Some school sims like Academagia, well if they ever finished the other 4 years, do/would involve daily/weekly scheduling choices of who you associated with and what you do balanced with external factors like classes, and are almost at the level of what I'm saying although I think you don't have specific activities with varied friendship boosts/drops, mostly "locations" you pick for the "hang out" command with static affection point boosts. But it is pretty close. My main issue is that the school is a bit unconnected to a wider world and that while the cast of characters is pretty large, low triple digits, they are still all hand crafted and a lot of interaction takes place on scripted adventures you go on after unlocking a high enough affection level.

Because I am not unreasonable I won't ask for a game where characters, like nobles or wealthy merchants, can actually host and cater and decorate, "social occasions" and invite people and stuff. That is probably too much to ask.

Persona 3, 4, or 5.

Fire Emblems Three Houses is the closest I can think of, and other games in the Fire Emblem series do try some similar stuff.

Wildermyth too, if you’re on PC.

As a dev it’s always something I wanted to do, a RPG with modular character relationships, but I’m far from having that level of budget.

The Sims

The problem is that character interaction and relationships hinge so much on good writing. An actual social simulation based on complex systems would have to eschew writing and instead have an abstract representation of character interactions and relationships to the point where it's hard to get really invested in those interactions. Striking that balance between interesting character interactions and a complex social simulation seems pretty much impossible without artificial intelligence far more advanced than anything that currently exists.

I think you've summed up the fundamental issues with working social simulation into games. Social relationships that feel unique or individual to your playing of a game is something that's extremely difficult to tackle. Like you said, there's a balance, and a lot of games are usually at more of an extreme:

• entirely scripted social interaction, where the player has limited social agency and merely decides who they spend time with, and once you spend enough time with them/give them favourable responses, their well-written-but-prewritten-and-linear relationship plays out. Also it's often very high-level where you have no input on the social interaction because the gameplay is primarily combat/management (Mass Effect, Fire Emblem, Stardew Valley, Persona, etc.)
• or entirely scripted social interaction, where the player has some social agency because there is a variety of pre-written dialogue options, thus a wider array of how character interactions could go. These give you much more low-level control on social interaction because often the gameplay is ONLY the social interaction (Disco Elysium, those TellTale games, Norco from the sounds of it, I guess some of the better visual novels but that's outside my expertise)
• or entirely system-based social interaction, where perhaps the relationships respond more immediately to the ups and downs of your actions with different characters, but often you can still see the seams where they're stitching character names into pre-fab scenarios. Also it's often very high-level where you have no input on the social interaction because the gameplay is strategy/grand strategy/management and the social interactions are just randomized event popups based on character stats (Crusader Kings, Wildermyth, Dwarf Fortress, etc.)

I don't know Academagia, but based on OP's description, I'd guess that it is more of the latter scenario, just executed very well. This might be a sad situation where OP has already played one of the best instances of a very niche genre and we're not going to be able to provide many better options.

The Sims carves its own path where it doesn't have to deal with repeated scenario dialogue because there is no dialogue, which is an insanely clever trick. If they actually had to write dialogue for all the different personality types, it would be a huge amount of effort, and ultimately players would notice it repeating after a while and the Sims would probably feel less alive. By making all interaction either in Simlish or through pantomime, I suspect it lets players project much more individuality and personality onto a given Sim than it actually has.

A turn-based strategy or RPG with the level of social simulation OP is looking for is a big ask, because even most dedicated social sims don't have the dynamic/individualistic feel to relationships that OP is asking for. If Fire Emblem actually had a social simulation inside it as complex as The Sims, you're asking a developer to develop 2 game's worth of systems, and making all those systems interact in meaningful ways would be a monumental task. From a marketability standpoint, you might find that a lot of players want to automate either the entirety of the social side, or the entirety of the combat/strategy side, and the ideal players that really want to get invested in every part of the game's systems might be too low in number.

To provide an actual suggestion, Wildermyth sort of attempts what OP is looking for, but their budget is pretty modest. You can play a set of adventurers from youth into old age (with younger adventurers joining along the way), and every character is a bundle of:

• like a couple dozen 0-100 stats in various personality traits
• an origin/background
• a class
• they can gain friend/lover/rival status with another adventurer either on-character-creation or dynamically-over-time
• they can gain permanent wounds/magical mutations that alter their disposition

And the randomized events try to account for many of those factors and acknowledge/reference them in a way that feels personalized/organic, but the events are only as good as however the writer flagged those events to respond to different attributes. Also like 90% of your time with the game is playing fantasy XCOM, and "socializing" only occurs between battles as you journey around the overworld or finish a chapter. It's still Mad Libs-ing your characters into pre-fab scenarios, but to their credit you probably have to play it a while before you start seeing repeats, and even in repeat scenarios your quirky character might respond differently than your sullen character, etc. So overall it's a turn-based strategy where the devs made their best attempt at the character having social interactions that feel personalized to your set of characters in a sim-like way.

I was thinking the strategy might be to eschew dialogue. You perform actions which have different value based on stuff like personality, ideology, interests, and so forth. You'd have to know this info, either from intrigue or previous socializing, or like asking mutual friends or w/e, and be capable of engaging in the activity. "Horse ride through the country by the river" would need access to horses and countryside you are allowed in with a river. The results would generally just be a better relationships and maybe some gossip or info about the character. No RNG pre-written events or madlibs. Academagia and similar games don't have dialogue for basic interactions, just scripted adventures. Another example might be Kudos 2, although I think they had some amount of repetitive dialogue that they would have done better to emit. Not even madlibs but more generic and non-dymanic. "I had fun and this was an activity I enjoy". From that I can agree that omitting dialogue Sims style is more clever, although Kudos 2 had some gameplay elements Sims didn't. Granted it was mostly a text game.