Societal Stage Fundamentals

I wrote this as a brief thought train due to some discussions on the community and developer discords. I don’t really see this being reasonably expanded upon for like 10 years, but I think it has some nice ideas, so I wanted to share. If nothing else, it’ll give some sort of discussion to point our insisting society-stage and onwards fans towards.

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How will the later stages of a game look, where you will be controlling a civilization instead of an organism? A big and unanswerable question currently, but to get a better idea, we must reflect on what exactly Thrive is and isn’t as a game.

The Society Stage onwards is a bit of a different game design question due to the fact that there are a great number of strategy games focused on the progression of a society - a human, Earthly society. We have a lot more examples of what makes a good civilization-management game, so we tend to think of things on that context. Cities, armies, resources, a map, culture and science trees, etc.

But we cannot just be another “civ-game”. There is a larger philosophical/design crucible at play here, but there is a more immediate consideration too: there are other fabled, legendary franchises, like Age of Empires, Civ, Total War, and Crusader Kings, that have nailed a formula down so well, that a familiar strategy game repackaged with random organisms just won’t have anything to offer. We can make something fun of course, but I sincerely doubt we will outperform or “take enough inspiration” from these older franchises enough to make the player think that our game is fun. Eventually, they might think “why should I play this one, when these older and more established games with the same mechanics exists in a way that will probably be more in depth?”

Furthermore, with the amount of effort and detailed mechanics required towards making a groundbreaking 4X game, I think swinging fully into a “strategy game just reskinned with different organisms” will take away a lot of connection to and meaning for the prior stages of Thrive.

But, the larger point: the common assumption and thread unsettling each of these games is a representation of HUMAN history and culture. Rationalism is an ideal that is based on human forms of rational; romanticism accentuates individuality in a human sense: an aqueduct was made by humans for organisms with human-needs: subsistence farming was oriented towards our own diet; our settling patterns are a result of our biological tendencies. Other 4X games model themselves off our own civilization and its history, but that is not a luxury we can fully replicate in Thrive. Because if we do, are we really representing the effects of evolution adequately?

My ultimate point is: our concepts of political systems, societal contracts, philosophy, interconnection, and ultimately, self, have such a ubiquitous impact on our history that assuming these fundamental ideals to be very similarly present in Thrive, for organisms with completely different characteristics, would be counteractive to the game we are trying to make. If we are a game that is meant to represent the evolution of an organism from sludge to the stars, our focus isn’t fully on making a good 4X game - we have to set ourselves apart in some capacity.

Of course, it is important to note that our only reference to concepts and a society is limited to our own species. We can’t truly account for every possible difference in foundational concepts that underpin our civilization. And ultimately, there are some hard bounds. Having a civilization which reaches industrialization likely requires the utilization of energy and heat, starting with fire and likely utilizing harvested resources. Even if an organism is entirely carnivorous, irrigation will be beneficial to research because the things you eat need to eat something too. So it’s not like we entirely have to be hippies that ditch the roofs over our head and act snobby towards other 4X games. We just need to represent an aspect of society which other games tend to not worry about so extensively.

I don’t have any hard-set recommendations. But you know me, I always think some general guidelines and principles can be helpful for any little thing. What could be some takeaways we consider when it comes to conceptualizing the the societal stages?

  • Culture should be REALLY important and definitive to your game, and I think it should receive the bulk of conceptual attention. It won’t only be something that you can shrug off as long as you are making cultural buildings and slightly tweak for some bonuses, like +5 stability, +3 combat strength, etc. And it’s not just the “we are a more liberal society with oligarchic influences, giving us economic bonuses” culture, it’s the “we give birth to dozens of children at once and do not give much paternal support beyond the first year, so we have an immense infant mortality rate and a cut-throat society - how will that influence our attitudes towards social networks, technologies, and the way we settle?” type of culture. The way your organism thinks, influenced by its evolution, will have an immense effect on the rest of your gameplay. As such, a big part of designing the game should focus on exactly how this culture shows up, is influenced, and how it manifests itself.

  • We might consider a different type of “character” in the societal stages than as is traditional in the strategy genre. Most games have you control a civilization or a faction, but a focus on culture opens up different possibilities - as well as the need to transition towards the space age. I do ultimately think we should have the player control a specific group of people, but given the focus on culture, and the nature of empires rising and falling throughout most of human history, maybe “losing” and “winning” should be defined differently. Perhaps your existence shouldn’t fully be tied to a specific “empire”, but to a culture or a people. In effect, being conquered won’t necessarily be a loss. It is important though not to turn this into a “you can’t really lose/can’t encounter setbacks” stage, as that would be somewhat boring.

I ultimately think that the societal stage onwards, and even a bit of the awakening stage adding some flair, should serve as a continuous story of your species - a break from you taking control of a succession of species as you fight for a place on the planet. You’ve secured a spot, and should worry a bit less about complete extinction; now, the focus is on the trials and tribulations of an individual species.

Across the sci-fi genre, there are always aliens with unique and interesting backstories which give the universe depth and flair. And I ultimately think that a goal we can set out for these stages is that once the player reaches a societal stage, they essentially are writing their backstory, influencing their current gameplay.

In Halo for example, you fight a religious, fanatical, and technologically advanced coalition of alien species. One species in this alliance, the Sangheili, are the most skilled fighters, coming from a feudalistic society influenced by their predatory nature. Their home planet is arid, so control over resources encouraged the development of a very power-centered society. They are skilled fighters and immensely intelligent, but as a result of their relatively brutal culture, have a strict and sometimes restrictive sense of morality. They may give their opponents time to prepare for an honorable fight, have a disdain for doctors and prefer to die rather than getting captured or injured, and have a strict sense of loyalty. Another species, the Kig-Yar, had very loose economic federations based on their historical clans and a tendency for piracy. Their home planet was very oceanic, necessitating a more mercantilist and occasionally illicit view on the exchange of goods, which stays with them to this day.

I think if we can get Thrive to having aspects of storytelling similar to this, we will have a solid set of societal stages to justify the inclusion of more traditional 4X mechanics.

WILD SPECULATION INCOMING, BUT YOU KINDA ASKED FOR IT.

(I have had some similar thoughts, so I’m going to set a bad example and idea-dump here)

I always thought that the awakening stage is an important opportunity to really define your social structures from the bottom up. Start with controlling a small party, maybe not fully loyal to you, and set “rules” for your tribe members: don’t join hunting parties under x age, take max Y food from the stockpile, etc. Maybe you can even create mythologies and stories as tools to justify these societal rules.

My hope would be that, by the end of awakening, the rules the player made out of pragmatic needs can now be translated to early society institutions of religion, gender roles, childcare, etc. This is the “society” you play as, currently represented by one country. As time goes on, you might spawn daughter civilizations, or convert other countries to your way of life (no I don’t know how that works), and those states are options to switch to (maybe when your current country collapses, or maybe at any time). Since it’s a single player game, you wouldn’t even need a state to belong to just one “society”, so this doesn’t need to turn into social darwinism with family trees of civilization if you don’t want it to.

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I actually have a strict policy against speculation. /s

Very interesting, and I do think that would be a very cool way of showing the evolution of a society. Especially with religion, I can also imagine that the situations you encounter and hardships you deal with will influence cultural motifs and ideals as well. There are theories that the Garden of Eden was based on traditions passed down revolving around the now submerged land under the Persian Gulf, which was a sanctuary during the Ice Ages. Motifs are also shared across different religions - for example, a child being found in a basket floating down a river, like Moses, is found in ancient Sumerian religion as well, and there are numerous great flood stories which could have arose from catastrophic weather events.

GameDungeon passingly mentioned the use of text-generating AI being able to create narratives in the societal stages, so I wonder if that could be a clear use case.

I think this is a really good point. We can look to space 4X games to see what kind of gameplay variations they offer between different species.

I still think we should aim to make a good 4X strategy game, but focusing also on making sure that technologies and other gameplay constraints change in a major way based on the properties of the player species. This is in my opinion what makes the game interesting compared to other 4X games: the ability to affect the gameplay style in a major way with the way you built your species earlier.

So even if Thrive isn’t the best and most interesting 4X game, there’ll still be a lot of replayability and interest in the terms of the overall “story” of the game about controlling a species from start to end (which is something that no 4X game offers).

So in summary I think we should first aim to make a really good 4X game while taking ideas from space 4X games that have different gameplay styles for different species and making sure the earlier species editing controls those gameplay styles. This way we’ll have a lot of replayability in the game and ensure the later game depends on the first parts.

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