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arXiv · 2511.15378

Terra Nova: A Comprehensive Challenge Environment for Intelligent Agents

Trevor McInroe
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Abstract

We introduce Terra Nova, a new comprehensive challenge environment (CCE) for reinforcement learning (RL) research inspired by Civilization V. A CCE is a single environment in which multiple canonical RL challenges (e.g., partial observability, credit assignment, representation learning, enormous action spaces, etc.) arise simultaneously. Mastery therefore demands integrated, long-horizon understanding across many interacting variables. We emphasize that this definition excludes challenges that only aggregate unrelated tasks in independent, parallel streams (e.g., learning to play all Atari games at once). These aggregated multitask benchmarks primarily asses whether an agent can catalog and switch among unrelated policies rather than test an agent's ability to perform deep reasoning across many interacting challenges.

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Trevor McInroe. 2025-11-19. Terra Nova: A Comprehensive Challenge Environment for Intelligent Agents. https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.15378

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