Roots of Harmony

Text-based 4X with a focus on turf war and resource management. Roots of Harmony is a strategy game where you have to lead your colony to different stages of development, while facing various threats and managing your doctrines and disciples. 100% gameplay, no graphics!

Doctrines & Disciples

Roots of Harmony is the philosophical tale of the rise (and the fall?) of a fresh new colony that needs to reform its identity through ideological choices. There are 12 doctrines in the game, and each of them unlocks a different disciple.

Disciples can be seen as heroes; they represent your army, your workers, your emissaries, your explorers, and even your preachers. They have no experience per se, but you can give them traits that grant them special abilities, and you can also imbue them with different essences that you'll gather while exploring the island.

Exploration

After a series of unfortunate events, you and a group composed of several families end up on a remote island made of different individual lands that you can explore and conquer. There are four directions and climates: the cold tundra in the North, the forests in the West, the desert in the South and the wetland in the East; each with their own land types and points of interest for you to interact with. Replayability being an important aspect of Roots of Harmony, the island is procedurally generated. You explore all those lands with your disciples.

Roots of Harmony is turn-based, meaning that every move you make takes a different number of turns. Planning accordingly and moving your units to the right locations at the right moment are therefore crucial for your survival.

Resources & Production

Everything in RoH has been designed to encapsulate the complexity of a growing colony. Being entirely text-based, the game is open to your imagination, and while other graphical games need to visually represent rules and mechanics, RoH often summarises several aspects of city-builders and strategy games into more abstract concepts. For instance, all resources both represent your moral choices and your ability to construct buildings. For instance, increasing your Health (one of the resources) allows you to better respond to the health-related events that can happen at each turn; and it also allows you to recruit unique disciples, and to construct buildings such as a Farm or a Quarry. A shortage of Health has consequences, as well as an excess of Cruelty or Vanity (two other resources).

Production works via an input / output flowing system. Every turn, each building requires specific resources to produce others, and some of them gets more powerful when built adjacently to other buildings. Planning in advance is therefore very important if you want to be efficient.

Threats

The island might be remote, but you're not alone. There are several factions that you can interact with, and there are also four major empires that will regularly send waves of enemies against your lands if they see you as a threat.

RoH has no difficulty slider. Instead, your choices will make your playthrough more or less difficult. For instance, if you choose to capture a land in the North and another one in the South, or if you choose a doctrine that your neighbour doesn't like, then be prepared to defend yourselves against more enemies. Different playthroughs will always offer you different challenges.

Combat

RoH is what they call an "auto-battler". Instead of controlling everything during a battle, you set combat priority for each of your disciple, and whether they should favour melee or range attacks. Enemies having different armours and different damage multipliers, so it is vital for you to engage the right troops against the right enemies.

Victory

To achieve victory in RoH, you need to complete a set of 6 milestones that are randomly picked for each new playthrough. Those milestones are designed to make you play differently, and opt for choices you might have disregarded otherwise.