The size of the environment, number of agents , and number of plants in the simulation is all related . For a balanced simulation, the number of plants must be at least equal to the number of herbivores (half the number of agents in the simulation). Any less and herbivores quickly die, followed quickly by the carnivores. The number of agents must not be so large that the species are crowded within the simulation. If the number of agents and grid dimension are similar, the simulation will be balanced.
The simulation parameters are provided within the header file ( common.h ). The simulation can also be adjusted using the command-line parameters, as shown in Table 7.1.