[INDEV] Celestio - Simple God-Based 4x Strategy

[Kitsu]

You have just awakened.
You are a god.
Granted life and supernatural powers by the people's faith, You must expand your influence, gather more believers, along the way to becoming the supreme god of the land.





Build shrines to receive people's faith
Creating shrines expands your influence, and those who live within your territory will continually provide some belief every turn. As you gather more faith, you'll be able to build additional shrines to further grow your space.

Wield your supernatural powers to gather faith
People like reminders that they're right about life choices. Give them one by using your specific powers to destroy their enemies, raise their crops, and give them babies. You'll be rewarded with large amounts of faith, as well as resources to help grow your influence.

Help the humans survive
Those humans who created you are actually kind of stupid and have a hard time surviving without your help (which is pretty much why you were created in the first place). By using your powers in ways that benefit them, you help them to grow. As their populations grow, the villages upgrade into larger structures, and eventually even begin spreading into nearby land.

Beware the faithless
In lands unclaimed by any god, various monsters and evil creatures will periodically spawn to wreak havok on the gods' handiwork, destroying structures and populations. By creating and directing armies from your villages, you can teach those brutes a lesson about attacking a god's territory (and maybe net your followers some mysterious though tasty meat...)!
Later, those same armies can also be used to make war with rival gods, battling it out to determine who is the more powerful deity.

Interact with the lands of other gods
Other gods have similar though opposing goals to you, along with their own followers. If you can manage to defeat them and destroy their shrines, you will consume them and gain both their believers and their powers.
Alternatively, you can ally yourself with them, sharing their believers and slowly gaining faith from them.



Romantic comedies and political intrigues
Gods sometimes just wanna have fun. So you can throw parties and invite the other gods that you've met so far or recieve invitations to other gods' parties.

At a party, you can interact with the other gods directly to network, raise your reputation, find allies, make enemies, and even engage in romantic endeavors (which inevitably attracts additional attention, and eventually even faith from both gods' followers).

Failure decreases faith
There are a number of ways that you can lose gathered faith, weakening your powers. For example, if monsters ravage your land or if an enemy god makes successful attacks against you or your shrines, you will lose faith. If the surrounding areas around a shrine have their faith hit too severely, that shrine might even be pillaged by those who trusted you.

Become the supreme god
You can become the supreme god by becoming the one with the most faith or reaching a certain amount of faith (representing achieving absolute divinity, essentially). If there are no other gods left, that essentially counts as being the one with the most faith lol.

Current list of powers
Rain - Raise foodcrops faster.
Babies - Give sudden boosts in human reproduction!
Bastion - Give your armies greater defense when attacked!
War - Give your armies greater offense when attacking!
Wine - Raise foodcrops into wines, to make the populace happier (which reduces the amount of time it takes for villages to grow)!
Knowledge - Train the populace to help take care of itself by learning irrigation and other techniques to stabilize population growth. However, this can also lead to decreased faith as the people are better able to depend on themselves...
Hunt - Give your armies much greater strength in defeating monsters!

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I'm hoping to get a basically playable version of this game out by the middle of the month (should include all planned features in some shape/form). After that is probably all balancing lol. As with SoL, this project will be developed in HTML5.

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For now, this is the test version; I'll probably be updating it daily as new features are implemented.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/7134...estio.html

Controls (will be customizable in the future):
D-Pad = Arrow keys
A Button (not used yet) = X
B Button (not used yet) = C
Select (not used yet) = Z
Start (not used yet) = Spacebar

The game can also be controlled via mouse (or touch on mobile devices).

Included features so far:
+ Just the hexgrid and a simple cursor so far... (Feb 03, 2014)
+ Added some placeholder structures for Shrines and Villages, along with basic Shrine Area of Influence (Feb 04, 2014)
+ Added very basic structure leveling up, Crops structure, and some stuff regarding colliding Areas of Influence (Feb 05, 2014)
+ Crops now provide food resources according to their level every turn. Villages also take food, and if they have enough food for five turns, they will level up. If they don't have enough food, they will lose HP and level down when their HP reaches zero, eventually being destroyed. Some debug numbers are currently displaying structure food levels and HP. (Feb 09, 2014)
+ Shrines receive faith from the nearest villages and may level up or down (like villages) depending on the amount of faith they receive. (Feb 10, 2014)
+ Spruced up shrine decay so that... well, it works properly, lol! Also started working on an action menu. (Feb 11, 2014)

[Kosheh]

Give them one by using your specific powers to destroy their enemies, raise their crops, and give them babies.

id like to think that last power just causes babies to rain from the sky

this kinda reminds me of those management/dating sims you see all the time on google play
but it's on the gameboy instead





i don't know why but i like this idea so much

the only thing that boggles my brain (and these are just my two cents; im actually more curious about the thought process here) is that you're hanging out with gods of the west and middle east, yet you play as a god who looks like they're from asian lore (though im not really sure if gumiho is really a god or not, either...just like, deity status)
i do kinda get it though - you're a god more or less competing for worldwide practitioners of your faith
like, i feel like if anyone's gonna fly around and flirt with gods from the west it'd be bubbly aphrodite who'd be all "hey boy imma just comin out of my seashell cos im ready to party"

but nonetheless it still looks promising!!

edit: oh. looking at the background, i just realized there's caricatured versions of landmarks in the background and it's not just the parthenon/pantheon/whatever.
oh okay its just the world shrunk down to a hexagon grid then thats cool and makes more sense from a gameplay perspective!!!

[Gors]

I had deduced that with the little Giza guy (who is supposed to be a caricature of Egyptian lore) - it's a worldwide game in this aspect

basically this will be a mix of religions, kinda like Actraiser, but with CPU controlled rivals (which is really interesting)

Can we choose the different gods to start playing in other parts of the planet?

[Kitsu]

I was thinking of such, but I'm not sure if it should also fit a gameplay purpose or not.
Like, one idea was that the player would be trying to figure out the other gods' powers while at parties, too, but selecting a god specifically at the start would suggest that certain gods have certain powers (and so I'm not sure if it should actually be like that or not).

[Gors]

I am kind of gravitating towards being able to choose the god you are playing as than being fixed to one, because i think it'll be much more varied this way. Think about it, you'll be able to choose the empire you wish and work on it etc

though it's ultimately your choice!

[Kitsu]

Yeah, I'll probably have a character select and just tie specific powers to specific gods.
Different gods will probably also have different appearances for shrines (and maybe armies, too) so it'll be easier to tell the difference, since there are a limited number of colors.

[psychospacecow]

This reminds me a lot of Civilization games. Is that intentional?

When it comes to powers, would it be things like

Destroyer - Can sacrifice population to improve village.
Benefactor - Bolsters factors that lead to fertility.
?

[StarSock64]

Sounds like black and white without annoying pet antics. In other words, sounds fun

[Kitsu]

@cow, civ is pretty much the only 4x I've actually ever played sooooo ( lol )
I like the destroyer power (or at least the sacrifice part), though the benefactor power is essentially the same as the wine power

@starsock, oh no another game I've never played (ty ng)

[TomGuycott]

Needs actraiser fighting scenes. Please and thank you.

Also looks amazing.

[Kitsu]

Having some trouble making tiles for the crops structure. Does this even look anything like crops (or maybe I should even try for something more abstract/representational than actual crop fields).

[psychospacecow]

I was thinking of it with Asura in mind for benefactor and destroyer. Also, I'd say that looks either like corn or trees, more so to trees.