This game is a grand strategy enthusiast's attempt to find a purified core loop of decision-making. All needless repetitive tasks are unceremoniously discarded. Instead, you get 10 actions that consume or convert 9 primary resources. Each turn, you (and each AI-controlled faction) get to take one action. The complexity comes from a dynamic world with many interactive systems.
The actions you can take:
- Respond to foreign invasions and natural calamities.
- Trade one resource for another.
- Recruit soldiers or labourers from your population.
- Nurture a city to boost its production.
- Steal resources from your neighbours.
- Infiltrate cities in preparation for an attack.
- Capture foreign cities by force.
- Negotiate to induce cities to join you peacefully.
- Build or restore unique landmarks.
- Excavate in search of resources and unique relics.
Some example considerations that you'll need to juggle:
- Each of the 32 playable factions has asymmetric starting conditions and unique goals.
- Cities are populated by various combinations of different cultures, which produce and require different resources.
- Actions affect relations with AI-controlled factions, which modify how they act toward you.
- There are no formal truces or alliances, and any faction can attack any other faction at any time (with a few story-related exceptions).
- Some cities are subaquatic, and require a different resource to capture or raid.
- Cities can be affected by random or circumstance-driven events.
- 67 unique landmarks can be built or restored to give a powerful bonus.
- A faction's capital cannot be relocated, and losing it destroys the faction entirely.
- Capturing another faction's capital lets you seize any relics they own, which are otherwise random finds.
