The Game

I haven’t described much of the game itself that I’m intending to make so I’ll just take a moment now to describe it in full.  It’s an ambitious project but I would prefer to have a “dwarf fortress” like development cycle in that I have a single game which I iteratively add more and more features and make better.  

The idea of Cultura is a long-term game centered around developing a culture from the earliest days of the stone age when humans first discovered fire to the early modern age when carbine wielding cavalry rode alongside steel plated lancers.  It is meant to be a wide world of exploration and imagination with the “FSM” tech tree, where societies can be fantasy or steampunk or mundane (mimicking the real world).

Controls are designed to be RTS-like, with an interface that will be a cross between Anno series (trade system), Settlers (industry chains) and Civilizations (technological research).  The intent is to have a game focused on the diplomacy and trade to give a real sense to cultural development.  War is more personal, trade is intricately tied with diplomacy and your society’s success depends on your ability to deal with your neighbours both in politics and war.  Really, in this game, war is meant to be an extension of politics of the more aggressive factions.

Ultimately, what I picture is that you develop your own society, building industry chains.  You interact with other societies via “diplomatic-trade” routes.  When you are nomadic you can interact with other societies when you meet them.  Eventually you can build an automated trade route which will both exchange goods and allow diplomatic communication when it arrives at your neighbour.  As your society grows, more tasks can be automated to allow you to focus on the “bigger picture”.  The technology itself will be much more “micro” oriented than Civilizations.  It will involve lots of small technological enhancements and “add-on” techs that improve specific items.  This way there is no dividing line between ages, it’s simply a slow progression.

The game is meant to last indefinitely in that you should be able to develop complex relationships within a particular tech age, fight wars, rebuild armies, fight more wars and play with shifting politics.  All within the same tech age.  I’d prefer it to be a game where you can do a lot but technological change is slow unlike in Civilization where either you fight a war that spans 500 years and three tech ages or you try to play marathon pace and the same thing happens except slower (they slow down both production and tech research equally making the game speed option basically totally pointless).

Resources in the game are split between mundane and fantasy.  As an example, metals would be like “copper”, “tin”, “iron”, “aluminium” and then a fantasy set would be “moonstone”, “viperstone”, “treerock”, “dark iron”.  The random map generator will place mundane and fantasy resources beside societies of respective tech trees.  Steampunk societies use both.  There’s no actual limitation on use, these are just for aesthetic reasons (to appeal to the sense that you are developing an interesting culture where one tribe of dark elves somewhere might produce dark iron swords while your mundane society to the south uses copper and tin to sell the dark elves some farming tools for their blades).