Developer: Very Simple Idea Studios
Publisher: Very Simple Idea Studios
Platforms: PC
Tested on: Steam (PC)
Idle Civilization – Preview
Many idle civilization games are often web-browser based games which is somewhat off-putting for the majority of ‘hardcore’ gamers. As of lately these games are marching to platforms such as Steam and with great success. Idle Civilization from Very Simple Idea Studios is one of those idle games that came out of nowhere and turned into a full-fledged civilization builder game within the idle genre.
Idle Civilization starts off as a simple clicker game but as soon as your village starts growing, it’ll turn into an idle game. Not long after, the complexity increases and it becomes a full-fledged strategic population management game. While sharing a similar concept of idle clicker games such as Tap Heroes, Clicker Heroes and Adventure Capitalist, Idle Civilization offers more depth by combining the classic elements of the idle genre with more complex elements of the strategy management games. Naturally you can’t compare Idle Civilization with giants such as Sid Meier’s Civilization but for an indie game it comes rather close in terms of greatness.
While the game does offer a lore, it is not in the form of an actual storyline that’s gradually explained the mightier your empire gets. Luckily we have enough imagination to begin our own narrative when it comes down to population management and city builders. Your town is situated in the vast lands of Communia, a magical planet that has no end. As your village turns into a town, then a duchy and then a kingdom, you’ll recruit writers who will write a newspaper called The Idle Times. Most of the narrative is explained via these philosophical news clips as it tells tales of King Paroh and the wars he conducts throughout the lands of Communia.
No one should expect an idle game to run on CryEngine but the minimalistic old school visuals do have a certain charm. For the most part, you won’t even be looking at your growing empire as you oversee your civilization from various panels which block the view of your village. However the developer has taken it upon him to rework the graphical assets of the game and polish them. The mockups we’ve been teased with certainly looked great and it’ll be interesting to see how they will fit the general theme of the game since the aesthetics are currently blending in perfectly together.
As mentioned earlier, you start small. At first you’ll have two inhabitants available but you’ll need to help them gather food, wood and stones before you can start building your settlement. Once you’ve managed to have a steady stock of the aforementioned products, you can build the main buildings: living huts, hunter’s hut, woodcutters hut’s and and rock cutter’s huts. You can start assigning your villagers to work on the fields, in the mines or in the forests. These production jobs have four tiers of buildings available for you once you’ve unlocked these in the research tab. The higher the tier of a building, the higher the production is. At a later stage you will also unlock metal and coin production as well as shrines and temples that will produce faith. Once you’ve unlocked all of these, you’ll have six types of jobs you can assign your villagers to.
Via the town hall you can reserve a percentage of your coins income to be used as wages for your workers. You can set the wages from 0 to 99 coins. Any higher will effectively stop your coin production. While coin production will be much less by handing out coins to your workers, the wage budget also gives you an increase in production per villager that is assigned to one of the six production jobs.
You can also use your villagers to explore the surrounding region by sending out exploration parties. At times these parties can come back with great rewards such as people who want to join your settlement or supplies but the party can also come back telling tales of great peril in the region. The later one is looked into via the sighting report and holds a bunch of lore to discover.
When you’ve reached a decent population, you can start drafting villagers to become soldiers. What’s strange is that when you are drafting these soldiers, you’ll lose population. You’d think that soldiers are part of a settlement’s population too but apparently this is not the case. There are eight types of soldiers available; Axemen, Bowmen, Swordsmen, Crossbowmen, Knights, Rangers, Marksmen and Templars. The worldmap shows you abandoned ruins, towns, villages and baronies which you can raid. Succesfully owning one of these towns will significantly increase your population and production.
Surprisingly enough the game features an RPG-like system where you can hire heroes with various traits that can boost production amongst other things. These heroes can be sent on adventures and they often come back with loot in the form of wearable equipment with bonuses that only helps your village even more.
The game allows you to choose one of the six deities to worship. Each of the deities have their own abilities that are good for production, war, researches and more. The faith that your clergymen will produce can be used to harness Divine blessing from the God or Goddess your town worships. And trust us, you’ll want to start praying as these blessings are truly godsends. Idle Civilization also offers a culture system where you can host culture events and build wonders to keep your population happy and a marketplace where you can trade resources for other resources in case you’ve gone dry of something specific. Last but certainly not least, you can “restart” your towns by starting a new colony. Each time you’ll start over, your new town will receive bonuses which you can unlock with the colony influence points.
Conclusion
Idle Civilization is much more than an idle game where you have to click like a madman to reach somewhere. While the core concept remains the same, the game features complex systems such as wages, faith, heroes, military and much more which turned it into a full-fledged civilization builder game within the idle genre. It’s one of the best clicker/idle games currently on the market and that’s saying a lot for a game that’s still in early access.
Idle Civilization - Preview,
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