Other worlds

Cool take on some ideas there. Those both contain some aspects of what I expected Godus to actually entail.
As your influence expands, and the followers spread out, so does the zoom scope of your vision.
And I always expected more of an "influence" based system than what we currently have - and some challenges would be trying to win them over. So much potential, so little done with it.

As for alternate worlds that change gameplay, maybe an upside-down/reverse world, or under-water world (mer-people). No idea how the first one would he done exactly (my head is too filled with electical flowcharts at the moment), but the second could be cool.
Reverse world would maybe mean that the Followers have godly powers, while all you can do is build structures. lol.
Underwater world would require new resources and structures, but also the AI, pathing, and physics would need adjusting.

Love the idea of basically stacking followers into pieces like in other 4x titles in the event map, that could be interesting, especially if you could unleash god powers on that scale. It'd bring a whole new meaning to burning the game board. =P

I think a bizarre idea that would probably infuriate people would be making a world where the ground occasionally switches to "lava" like in the children's game, forcing you to frantically shake trees to draw your followers' attention and save them. However, when it's not lava, your followers try to break the rules by creating treehouses, so you have to smash them out, but all while balancing out not deforesting too much, else you won't be able to save them when you "decide" the ground's lava again.

Even worse, planting trees to try to save them makes them more inclined to try to build a treehouse in it, so you have to be especially careful with using that ability. You might make it so that all objects slightly above the ground could serve as safe spots, but as the game goes on, some of them get worse and worse. E.g.

Rocks, initially alright.
-few lava rounds-
Rocks, useless, now trees are alright.
-few lava rounds-
Trees are crap, uuh...Abodes!
-few lava rounds-
Bigger abodes are needed!
-few lava rounds-
Okay, okay settlements!
-You kept all your people alive, congrats!-

Another trick might be to tweak wheat/ore to sometimes change functionality. Wheat used to construct suddenly changes to overfill buildings, forcing you to rapidly expand else they start losing happiness/dying, and ore used to construct beacons is sometimes "explosive" distorting and reshaping the land to disorient you.

Surrounding an enemy with abodes and creating a settlement suddenly smashes and crushes them by the flying abodes in the process, as well as sometimes incurring friendly fire.

Forest fires are used as a fuse to set off shrines/beacons/whatever that does something or other to enemies (think that one event where you guide followers to repair a shrine to cast down meteors on enemies, but with forest fires).

Rocks are inexplicably electrified, and if you use Rain of Purity around them, they zap adjacent structures and followers. If you drag the rain from the boulder across a chain of structures, you create chain lightning.

Gifts all become suicide spots as followers become entranced and party too hard, too long, leading to an abundance of gems/other resources but a hard decision between happiness and wealth or happiness and a populous populace.

Holy forests slowly overgrow surrounding structures making ent people because why not.

Miners converted by Astari outparty them, slowly deteriorating their happiness.

Followers refuse to build abodes, instead populating the world around shores and trees. You have to decide how to reshape the world to ensure a good mix of both, otherwise your followers will just all die out. Let's call this hippie mode.

Inside-out world. Instead of guiding followers to higher and higher land, you bring them closer and closer to water, but not just shallow water, deep trenches in the ocean. The deeper the nearby trench, the more belief/happier they are, the higher up they are, less so. Major win if you reveal a terrifying sea avatar of your being. Adding the possibility of ocean draining to bring them deeper and deeper into the seabed would be even better.

I've seen suggestions for "conquest" style worlds, or atleast a conquest style gameplay.
Specifically build around finding new islands or lands and "conquering" the local hazards - be they nature, man or supernatural in nature.

Similarly, the concept of "resource worlds" has come past, where you could get a specific world or island that would serve as the source of new and unique resources that would then function to "boost" the mainland. Offering new techniques and options.


There's indeed the obvious, biome challenged worlds. (Weyworld would currently fall under that catagory with the desert focus.)
However, whatever route is chosen - the key would be to focus on entertaining gameplay.
Don't use it as a cheap bandaid to prevent unwanted behaviour.

So what you're saying is smaller verdant/rugged/hallowed lands with LOTS of granite and swiss cheese style ground that requires lots of sculpting with very few rocks around and still buggy voyages in place? Oh, and to pour some salt in the wound, valleys with beacons every step of the way? =P

You know, we like to criticize them, but if they were really as malevolent or malicious as some of us may think, they could certainly make the game much worse.

Talking about worlds and the micro/macro combination. The best implementation of such in fiction I ever found wasn't in games.

It was in Dune.

The Empire is based on three pillars:

1. Military force of Sardaukar
2. CHOAM
3. Spacing Guild

And all three pillars are heavily dependant one one precious substance:

Spice melange.

Without Spice, Sardaukars cannot practice their military arts and their bashars can't utilise their minds to the max, commanding troops most efficiently. In CHOM, Spice brings about 30% of whole GGP (Gross galactical product, as GDP would be an inaccurate term). And Spacing Guild would simply die out and leave the stars without any chance to communicate, as Spice is highly addictive and denial results in death of any Navigator.

Spice is as limited as it's precious - it cannot be produced, only mined. The only planet it is encountered on - Arrakis - is an unforgiving desert where creators of Spice hog all the water deep underground and you can't survive without a stillsuit. Even the harvester size of a football stadium isn't safe, either, as Shai-Hulud, the giant worm (and also the adult form of the sandtrout, the Spice creator) can swallow it by mistake, confused by the rhytmical sound it produces.

On such high risk-high gain planet, the only rule persists: Spice must flow.

Spice isn't a luxury, though it is the most expensive substance in the known universe. The world order relies on spice. If supply of spice stops, the world stops. Thousands of planets will cease to trade and will become unable to sustain the population. The survivors will be engulfed in chaos.

To keep the world going. To protect the world from utter devastation and chaos.

Spice must flow.


This is the kind of connection between macro and micro I want to see - where the each micro map is drastically different and where macro cannot be replaced by big-scale micro, as it's often done in RTS like Warcraft.

One word; Candyland!

Some good(ish) ideas here. But I for one would not want other re-skinned worlds. I wanted the one big world the promised looking the way they have it. But that is just me. Raspofabs I know this is a thought exercise(so do not take this the wrong way please.) but I would prefer what is broken and deliver more of what is promised.

I'm betting you meant you wouldn't prefer what's broken, in which case I mostly agree. I'd be okay with larger islands in an overworld setup though, personally, if a compromise must be made. However if we could see something more like Sins of a Solar Empire, being able to zoom into the islands and out to archipelagos/continents, that'd be awesome too.

I like the notion of a 'roulette' wheel which spins and temporarily joins worlds, maybe akin to that Star Trek episode where they take a leap and jump through - with that jump through either being a temporary join point between Godus play A and player B - or opens up a pair of different bits of land in smaller world - lets say C- which depending on who wins permanently links to that winning homeworld.