WorldBox - God Simulator

I started playing a pretty fun game I just learned about:

It's a true God Game, more so than other games I've enjoyed like Populus or Black and White. You have limited capacity to directly command a huge variety of sapient creatures, but have absolute control over the world.

Instead of a "tech tree" in this game like a lot of builders there's instead an achievement system where achievements unlock traits you can set for your populatino. Each achievement isn't tooooo difficult to unlock, and most are just learning the basics of the tools available, so it's almost a tutorial.

After unlocking most of the achievements I set a goal of creating a diverse world of islands segregated by an ocean, with a gap in the center.



And then populating it with a variety of each sapient creature, then letting that run unhindered for about a thousand years to build up some impressive civilizations.

Then, I built an island in the center for "my" race, who I'm giving some advantages and will help them along the way.



My goal is world domination, we'll see how it goes!

Looking at hte world map there are several decent civilizations. The southeast has evil mages holding a corner of that continent, they have powerful magic. The northeast island is being dominated by Lemonhead guys. The cat culture is taking over several races, including the garlic boys to the south and north. In one run that culture took over the entire map, including "my" race, literally every person and every village has some variation of the word Meow, which is funny and annoying. I killed the entire culture using the "Grin Mark" Fate that destroys everyone.

Here's the start of the Imperium of Man, let's see if they will fall to the Xenos?

A mere 40 years later the island is full, but no wars have broken out. "Woof" to the southwest has encroached on Terra, so I might create a divine order to assault it.



Later... uhoh they all declared war on me. 3.2k vs 452.



Much later, the war still exists but their ability to keep it up is massively reduced.



Meanwhile, the island has grown nicely.

I started a great crusade with everyone and riggity wrecked them, I mean, brought them into compliance.



The land is now fully under Imperium control...



Now we begin an age of peace and I'm going to give the title of Warmaster to my strongest leader to keep the peace.

Bandwagon said:

I'm not a fan of the pixel games in [modern year]

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I imagine my RTX 4080 watching me spin up a Unity engine game and start to lace up its work boots, only to see me load up the most pixelated nonsense I've seen since SimCity (1989). Here's a pic of my GPU at work:



Meanwhile, my Ryzen 7800 X3D is suffering under unoptimized C# code that processes 30,000 sapient creatures a single thread. It's like it's single arm curl day every day.




There's not even a good high resolution texture mod which would make this game sooooo much better looking. Half the time I can't even tell wtf I'm looking at.

Hatorade yeah, I'm a hypocrit.

But really it's because this is a world simulation with a graphic UI and god powers, where as Escape the Mad Empire is a tractical RPG. There are a dozens of similar RPGs out there competing for my time, many of which look beautiful. There are basically no beautiful god games like this.

Tuco said:

Hatorade yeah, I'm a hypocrit.

But really it's because this is a world simulation with a graphic UI and god powers, where as Escape the Mad Empire is a tractical RPG. There are a dozens of similar RPGs out there competing for my time, many of which look beautiful. There are basically no beautiful god games like this.

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and the reason why it matters that this is a world simulation is that I'm "playing" the game by having it run at max speed while I'm recording it in OBS in case anything weird happens and I want to see it again. Meanwhile I'm checking out some options for AI upsacle of sprites. I don't know how this would translate to multiple, interchangeable sprits but it's kinda interesting.

from Image | Krea




prompt: A pixel art image of a barefoot soldier standing with a bronze shield, copper chestplate, copper helmet and a bronze sword. The helmet has a red plume.





A pixel art image of a round slime creature. It is a king and has a white beard, blue robe and golden crown with a saphire gem. It is wielding a steel bow. The image should have a neutral, pixel art style.




I don't know what it'd take for an artist to build coherent, animated sprites from this, but I'd bet it's getting easier to do that with AI every year...

Hatorade said:

Wrong Hate I am guessing?

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lmao, sorry.

Hateyou , see above

I am beyond shocked that Horus Lupercal betrayed the Emperor and rallied the majority of the Imperium against Terra, triggering 18 wars against the empire.





Fortunately the traitors were handled and the empire resumed its peaceful rule.

But seriously, one of the goofy features in this game is the genetic makeup of a given subspecies. They are generated differently for each species (or something) and can be customized. Originally I optimized toward birth rate and stewardship, which increases loyalty to the King. When I wanted to trigger a rebellion I replaced the genetics with a bunch of Warfare, like below:



That did nothing and I'm not sure why. All my cities were negative loyalty and should've rebelled. So I just blasted a bunch of villages with the rebellion power, "Inspiration" and kicked off a massive war. I tried a few different amounts of rebellion, some resulted in a total loss, some were an easy victory.



I'm done with the game now and can recommend it at $20 for anyone itching for a God game. The two biggest things that would motivate me to play more would be:

1. Multithreading so I could make a bigger map and have more units. I originally created a world that was some 10x bigger and it just got lower and lower FPS once the population started to increase. I think this will never happen because the developer isn't really trying to build mega civilizations, but people who make maps all build these absurdly large ones.

2. A "campaign" mode with rules similar to Populus or Black and White. Basically a tech tree, restriction of powers to your kingdom, mana to limit your powers and some kind of gameplay goal to tie it all together. Right now there is only a sandbox mode and you can kinda sorta make your own campaign, but it's not the same. I also doubt this will ever happen because the developer isn't trying to make that kind of game.