Okay, so Tim has recently punished me to eternal damnation or until I finish writing 1000 words. Even if he isn't going to hold me to that, I'm going to hold me to that, because there's this weird game I would watch on youtube all the time that was in Early Access. I never learned what happened to it, and I sure as hell can't remember the name or anything useful that would lead me to it. It was something a bunch of random 1000-sub youtubers played a bunch for an entire month out of the year of 2015, and that's the extent of what I can say about it, as far as shit that could help you find it.
Like Signal Simulator, Man o' War Corsair, Subrosa, (in the early days) Heat Signature, it was one of those games where the concept was spectacular and experimental, the execution was halfway decent, and it was available enough that a handful of lesser known youtube gremlins were able to cover it extensively as it was being updated.
The issue is, unlike the aforementioned, I literally don't remember its name, and I can't find it anywhere. I just remember watching games play out when I should've been doing schoolwork for entirely too long. And I haven't seen a video of it since I graduated.
I can only assume it either went the way of Executive Assault, wherein it was released, it stopped being new, and people with any semblance of a following stopped playing it, so it was never reccommended to me... Or, the exact worst thing could've happened, the game entered into Development Hell and was never finished, and I can't find it because it's a dead game no one covers anymore, with a steam page you can't download it from, buried by the millions of indie titles on top of it. And perhaps I have only my weirdly specific memories and urge to find an internet board game for the CYS community to play bringing me back to this forgotten chapter of my video game interests.
Anyway.
When I was younger, I used to be really into turn-based war games that allowed you to build complicated things and get more powerful as a payoff. Sort of the sensation of setting something up and being able to watch it work on its own. The satisfying thing that Tower Defense games tap into in a very simple way.
The only issue was that I was super terrible at civ-type games, and whenever I played against even a computer my ass would be grass because I wasn't specialized down a pre-planned victory route since turn 3. Of course, I later discovered the Total War series which slaked my thirst for warfare and infrastructure-building in concert, (but mostly warfare) though between the point where I discovered total war and dissatifyingly attempted to git gud at various 4X games, that when I discovered an early access indie game that not only fulfilled my wishes at the time, but was exactly right up my alley in general.
What was my wish? I thought that there should be a mappy strategy game full of logistics, tactics, and warfare that takes the "multiplayer singleplayer" approach that TF2 did for shooters. As in, a multiplayer game is actually many singleplayer games put together. Something that allows you to do relatively well for yourself without having to worry too much about being stomped on and slowly abused in every way by somebody with 10,000 hours, but still difficult and a little competitive so it feels like you get better each time.
But then, weirdest thing about it was, despite all my other game wishes tending not to come true, I found what I was looking for, more or less exactly. The only downside was, it was still in development and there was no way for anybody but obscure youtube faces to get ahold of it. Or torrenters, I guess, but I hadn't discovered that part of the internet until like 2018.
The game takes place in a massive sprawling city, (Implied to be one of the last human population centers on earth) with a Dingy Thief Series aesthetic, that can't decide whether it wants to be the early renaissance or the 1800s. Except this setting has crazy monsters. This gives it a spooky feel befitting of the creeping doom and sallow-faced corruption that this game portrays.
Every faction is competing for victory points based on build-based goals that change throughout the game- It allows them to have more influence over how the game plays out, and whoever has the most gets an ending that's beneficial to them when the game is over. However, screwing over another player entirely is not in anyone's interest. As a player, you need every other faction to be able to facilitate your bullshit. Everybody else needs you to do your specific things in order to keep them from dying.
There are 4 factions, for 4 players. More could be released later, some devs were hinting at that, but these are the ones that you can't play the game without and will be played by AI if you have less people or you're doing it singleplayer.
The King is essentially playing a tile-based rpg outside the walls to keep the numbers of The Massive Citystate happy. He has only a general idea of the in-depth political nonsense going on, and is focused on keeping the citystate afloat amid hundreds of thousands of threats. He needs taxes (decided by him at the end of each turn) to fund war against The Darkness, and victories to justify them.
A shitty king who is repeatedly beaten in combat or who leads men to their death with nothing to show for it only causes terror and dread amongst the commoners and political discord amongst the nobles. If the king is deprived of support, there is naught but a piddly one-man resistance against the Things that live outside the walls. The King is a powerful warrior and can stave off the apocalypse for a turn or so taking extreme damage, but if the situation in the city really is too fucked up not to fund some sort of war effort, monsters start tearing up the city and everyone dies.
On the other hand, if he hunts down a giant horror, his armies bring home a massive feast of meat that raises morale and food and allows him to get away with taxing the commoners a bit more. If he wins a major battle against the armies of wandering dead and reclaims land and relics of the Old World, the victory might bring him new technology to fight wars with and political unity among the nobles since there's more space to spread their political legs.
The king has little idea of what's going on inside the city except a list of all the physical resources the Citystate has (Food, metal, stone, money, etc.) and a list of all the events that happened during the previous turn as told to him by his creepy psychic jester. The jester is a goat-bothering degenerate. Or he likes to take chopped-off thief hands from the displays where they're shown in the market squares to eat them. The gossip changes every game, but the nobles control the jester through a strict system of blackmail to only tell the king of certain news, and can pay him to fabricate events entirely.
This sort of feature won't necessarily be ruined in the age of voice chat, because the nobles can not only provide more useful details about what's happening, but they can also tell more complex lies.
The king's final ability is to launch INQUISITIONS. This is (in theory) where he gets to the bottom of his kingdom's slimy underbelly, but it depends entirely on how they're used. Inquisitions are expensive and often harmful to whatever faction or combination of factions that are getting their toes stepped on.
Actions in that part of the city more or less grind to a halt unless they're completely above-board and no illicitly-obtained resources were paid to start them. If there's any corruption, the action is cancelled and any parties involved are punished, either through fines or execution. This may even be against the interests of the king, as corruption may have been the only means the city had of getting a critical process done. The king has to pick his targets carefully based on what his clown is and isn't talking about.
The Nobles faction's job is to keep the commoners out of danger. Overtime, things like crime, corruption, sewer monsters, etc. ruin peasant morale and just start fucking up the areas and making the game increasingly difficult to manage for a lone Commoner player. Laborers are too valuable to lose and ill-equipped to defend themselves, so it's your job to send in the town guard to indict corrupt officials, shut down crime, and kill sewer monsters.
However, depending on the politicians you have, you can also do things like instantly build things that are supposed to be in progress, build charities and funds that allow you to channel money directly into things that would otherwise require solid resources to build, and expend money and political unity to upgrade important and highly-used blocks of cityscape before the commoners even unlock that ability. It gives them an important degree of all-around utility and a high skill ceiling. The high potential of game-changing ability is good... Because unless you're a god of gaming the system, you're only going to be 100% effective 10% of the time, or 10% effective 100% of the time.
While the city board is definitely in play, Nobles are effectively playing a complicated solitary card game like Cultist Simulator. Each noble is a differing politician with different stats and abilities, and multiple opportunities and events happen each turn (either random events, or based on what other people are doing) allowing them to play differently each game. They can be the most powerful faction in the game, but also the dysfunctional shitstain that can't get anything working. There's only one twist. The player is playing as every noble at once.
The Nobles faction cares little for the solid resources of the game, except for how they relate to the economy of the citystate. The Nobles player can only execute actions using Political Unity, which is usually bought with gold in some roundabout way. They will chew through as much gold as the king if left unchecked, halving the efficiency of the very war effort that keeps the Massive Citystate un-devoured, but it's their job to keep the city itself running like a smooth machine. They cannot control tax rates the way that the King can, and taxes on the nobles will be given directly to the king, but taxes on the commoners pass through nobles first, and nobles then select how much of that to take for themselves.
Nobles, while effective when working together, are a backstabbing and cowardly lot who are only concerned with their own wealth, power, and prestige. The more successful they are, the more corrupt they tend to become, and the more difficult they are to control... And the more destructive they become to the city's productivity.
Because of their corrupt actions, their potential actions increase dramatically in power the dirtier they are, but they become far too expensive to work with for practicality's sake. Corrupt and uncooperative nobles will use up more political unity the more actions they're involved in, and while the effects of politicians' abilities are magnified when they perform actions together, on their own their influence is but a piddly gimmick.
To play as the Nobles is to be constantly plotting- Hosting degenerate Eyes-Wide-Shut orgies to bring nobles together at the cost of becoming more corrupt, keeping crime down while secretly brewing illicit substances so you can sell the opium without competition and rake in the big bucks next turn without the king taxing you... At the cost of becoming more corrupt.
You have to even hatch machiavellian political schemes against yourself, inciting violent peasant revolutions and baiting inquisitions from the other players in order to get dysfunctional nobles killed, carefully choosing who's going to stage a coup or pay off a hitman to kill someone in order to make sure that no one cohort becomes too backstabbing to work with. Will you create family alliances, arranged marriages, and political parties for a powerful longterm source of political unity, or will you break them up in order to keep old powers from becoming criminal leeches who are too big to properly uproot without an Inquisition or Revolution? Can you play chicken with these dangerous ripple effects?
And the ability to use gold to bring more nobility into the fold brings an additional plate to balance. The player must choose between the high risks and high rewards of having many corruptible politicians and spending all your political unity like a glass cannon, or the more consistent functions of a smaller parliament where nobody stays long enough to get the upper hand. If all else fails, they can get all their fuckers killed and then buy a small set of nobles for cheap as a sort of mulligan.
Commoners, unsurprisingly, are the dudes who get shit done. Nothing happens in this game without them. The king needs money, men, and resources en masse in order to wage war. The Nobles need your money in order to squabble themselves into getting something useful done. Everyone needs you to pour resources into your tech tree in order to make things easier for everyone else, and you need to build more tech in order to use cool industrial equipment and get the city prepared for the Endgame. The Sewer Mutants need... basically everything you have right now, but they'll take it in installments.
Resource-gathering is critical in this game. You gotta be all resources, all the time. The factions of this city are almost only able to recover from severe losses by eating themselves and each other alive, and it's your job to make sure they can afford to do that. You will, no doubt, get caught in the crossfire. And it's also your job to get caught tactically.
Almost no progress in this game comes without a cost, but resource gathering is the most bang-for-your-buck option in the whole game. As you construct industry and plan towns for MAXIMUM EFFICIENCY, you'll be raking stuff in. You need STUFF in order to keep your workers happy, build things, stave off starvation, and progress forward on the tech tree. It's sort of a standard civ-adjacent kinda thing. However, you are hindered constantly by the general follies of mankind.
When people work, they get stressed. When bad things happen in the part of the city they're in, they get stressed. When taxes are up, they get stressed. When Sewer Mutants come up to steal things, they get stressed. The higher percentage of stress, the less effective your workers will be. You can build breweries to significantly raise your stress threshhold, but it does this as the expense of resources. When resources are low, your workers get stressed.
Nobles, the King, (And, in some odd cases, the Sewer Mutants... But never count on that.) have various ways of reducing stress directly for certain units, but the only ways you have of reducing stress for your own workers are, A: Firing the workers and replacing them (very expensive, erases all the skills and EXP they acquired) or B: PEASANTS REVOLT.
A Peasant's Revolt is the most useful double-edged sword in the whole game. For the low low price of shutting down an entire city block and all adjacent ones for up to 3 turns, you can solve your problems. Corrupt Noble passing labor-unfriendly local laws to enhance his bottom line? Kill him. Mafia forcing everyone who builds businesses on Main St. to pay a protection fee? Burn down all the mafia buildings. Important machinery getting possessed by oily black ghosts from outside the walls, and for some insidious reason the Nobles won't tell the king to launch an inquisition into it? Tear it down. Completely out of food? Burn down a manor and eat the family inside.
While the aftermath may be expensive, revolts are a low up-front-cost way to take care of your own problems, and de-stress all participants. Just be careful that you have enough resources to fix everything up after that. And, uh... Also make sure that the police don't roll up and kill your most experienced workers. And be doubly certain that you make sure your most stressed workers aren't in any critical areas, because, well... If their Stress reaches 100%, they're going to riot whether you give them the go-ahead or not.
Playing as the commoners is probably the least stressful role in the game, but that's not exactly a high bar. While you aren't going to be whack-a-moling urgent deadly problems left and right as often as the other factions, everything does hinge on you. While planning out and building the city is fun, and so is building up a massive stockpile of resources, the expenses demanded by the King's wars, the Nobles' taxes, the mafia and other natural occurences, and the Sewer Mutants in general, will take their toll.
It's going to fall on you to determine how to divvy up those resources, carefully. You're going to need to figure out how much you can actually spare to the 3 other people keeping you alive, while still staying alive... And, equally important, how much material you can pour into the tech tree and building upgrades. Why? Well, it's not only important to keeping up with your co-player's demands (they're only gonna get worse!) but laying out the city so that it's ready for a siege gives the King some leeway for disastrous defensive campaigns... And also gets you ready for The Endgame...
Even though I'm no good at games like this and would probably only play either The King or The Commoners online so that people wouldn't get pissed at me, it's probaby clear who my actual favorite faction is. The Sewer Mutants are the most rag-tag faction in the game, that do everything sort of well, but nothing good.
The Sewer Mutants have secret routes all over the city that only they can access outside of special events. There are certain cases where the police are can come down temporarily, or during an Inquisition, where the inquisitors inspect EVERY part of a game space, including what's under it. To the other players, your situation is unknowable, your movements are unpredictable, and only the commoners (with a margin of error that gets much bigger or smaller depending on how daily events play out for you) know how many resources you actually have.
Sewer Mutants live in the sewers and all dark corners of The City, and can do minor resource-gathering there. Whenever a building is destroyed or a natural disaster occurs, it becomes a massive windfall of resources for the gatherers you hide in the junkyards and refuse dumps. Whenever an event occurs where people die, like a police battle, peasant revolt, or Inquisition, the scavengers you've left in the graveyards and catacombs have now collected a massive amount of free food.
Just make sure your units are never there on the turn that those who clean up the mess come to dump these things, or you'll freak people out. Not only causing you to lose those resources, but effectively raising your "wanted" level. The more aware people are of your presence, the faster commoners get stressed, and the sooner politicians will become corrupt. They can only purge this level by killing your units. And they need them to be alive just as much as you do.
Why? Well, short of a police invasion of the sewers (Which is expensive and can cause corruption depending on what they find down there) or an Inquisition (which will often shut down an important part of the city) you are the only force in the game between the last vestiges of humanity and the Nameless Subterranean Things that gnaw the very world from below.
While you and your friends are a kooky and disfigured bunch, the eldritch critters that live under you and will bust random holes in the walls of your sewer are infinitely worse, and hell bent on killing everyone. If you let them escape, it'll be the same as letting monsters through as the king, except instead of attacking from the outside and going in, these anomalies can appear in sensitive, poorly-defended areas well within the fortress walls... Which can be helpful for you in a backwards way if you're really desperate for ruined scrap and bodies to scavenge for upstairs.
To you, the game will play like a mix of the other players. You control units and almost constantly fight monsters like The King, you gather resources like the commoners, and you attempt to do everything on a fluctuating allowance like the Nobles.
The catch is, you have a very ragtag bunch to work with, and unlike specialized humans, every unit can do every task with varying efficiency. You're going to have to find out what works for whom. The gangly guy with mouths for hands? Good for digging through graveyards, but the trash dumps might make him sick. The giant fat dude with eyes growing out of random places? Probably best for standing guard at sewer crossways and keeping your fog of war down. Maybe not so great at trying to scout out city streets due to how obvious and visible he is.
It takes a lot to feed these monsters and keep your own guys from going berserk and attacking the surface, but you can stave this off by stealing things and building your own ramshackle infrastructure. Inquisitions will burn your Sewer Cities in any square they find them in, but if you know how to spot high-tension areas and settle in sleepy parts of the city, you can build quite a smelly empire.
The only issue is, it's difficult to build things when you're all slimy and deformed, so you have to play it smart. Your version of the tech tree is inevitably a shitty, ramshackle version of the Commoner's one, and produces inefficient and fragile machines made from recycled material. However, you can send spies out of manholes wearing CLEVER DISGUISES that degrade over time, and use the information you find above-ground to predict your heists.
You still need to have unlocked the shitty version of that machine in the tech tree (otherwise your mutants won't know what to do with it and just take it apart for scrap) but if any small or medium-sized buildings are left unguarded, you can send heavy lifters to steal them and then set them up in your sewer village when nobody's looking... Or you could send a lot of heavy lifters and steal a big building, but that's highly likely to be seen, and sewer mutants getting seen is bad for everyone. Just make sure you aren't actually screwing over the commoners, or they might see pretty good reason to get stingy with the resources they give you.
And yes, the commoners can actually give you resources. Luckily, despite you only being able to collect piddly amounts of resources on your own, and barely sustaining your upward progress by recycling from the tragedies of Above-grounders, Peasants of the land have developed a helpful superstition that will in turn help keep you (and everyone) safe.
In various parts of the city, peasants have dug The Hole. The Hole is believed to be both supernatural and sentient, and sometimes speak to people in broken english, as if from a malformed mouth. The nobles (usually) know better than to interfere in such a superstition, and peasants are allowed to discard some of their surplus resources into The Hole in order to ensure that the good times keep going.
Of course, The Hole can't actually talk, and it's usually just Tommy Slobber or Ol' Mumblenuts (actual randomly generated mutant names) calling back up to edgy teenagers trying to scare themselves, but the stuff that peasants throw in every once in a while is pretty good. In order to prevent a Peasant Revolt, many politicians have a high-corruption ability that allows police to throw workers into The Hole. (The commoners can also choose to give you their spare population, the same way they can give soldiers to the king, but this isn't as funny.) This gives you free mutant units with whatever exp those workers had before they found themselves bathed in toxic poopoo sludge.
Playing as the Sewer Mutants is chaotic and hilarious. It's the finest Computery Boardgame simulation of being a mischievous little goblin, sending your gross deformed critters to the surface and hindering people in order to help them is just the goofiest rush to even watch. There's The King, for people who like War Games, there's The Nobles, for people who like Cultist Simulator, there's the Commoners, for people who find building massive stockpiles in Dwarf Fortress and Rimworld a little too satisfying, and then there's the Sewer Mutants, who prank people just to survive.
The entire game is a matter of tenuous alliances and slow forward progression as you struggle to prevent 8 different downward spirals at once, while also attempting to collectively climb your way back up from the last one. You'll all be directly competing for glory and victory points in The Endgame in order to get your faction's 'Good ending', but unless you work together, you're never going to make it there. Sometimes not even then.
A video I watched progressed something like this, and if they're still up, there's a lot more hilarious ones like this:
The king, down to his last buck, launches an emergency campaign in order to journey into the Cobwebbed Fortress and slay Bazaloth the Blind King.
He brings back his head, and hides it away in one of the treasure vaults. the trophy's eerie nature puts the commoners on edge, but the influx of loot from the castle directly into the king's pockets means the taxes are going to be lower, so they can build another brewery.
The low taxes mean that the Nobles player isn't going to be able to recouperate enough political unity to do much this turn, since his politicians are becoming increasingly expensive. However, he can get a temporary boost for free by starting a cult around the Blind King's head, which has started whispering horrifying eldritch truths into all their ears.
This gives him enough points to buy more police officers and shut down mafia headquarters that have been stressing out workers to no end, but the cultist politicians are too corrupt to ever practically expect them to do anything again. But he manages to gather them all up near the most stressed workers (in a lumber yard) and the commoners player dutifully starts a revolution and kills them.
But this means that he doesn't have enough lumber to throw any substantial amount in The Hole. Sure, the mutants will get plenty of wood in the junkyard when the riot is over, but the Mutants player doesn't exactly have that long.
Some of the giant lumbering monsters that he'd been using to hold the influx of shadowy jabberwocks at bay are getting pretty sad and might climb up to the surface to throw a riot of their own. That would be bad for everyone. The mutant player was really counting on the commoners shoving their logs in The Hole so that he could build a Meat Pit for those giants to de-stress in, but now he just doesn't have that option, so he sends a small contingent of fast-moving crawling freaks to the surface without proper reconaissance because his spies don't have any actions left this turn.
He manages to steal an entire brewery and keep everyone safe from moist man-eating giants this turn, but he still needs a meat pit to actually purge these giants of the stress, and it's up in the air as to whether he's going to get lumber in time since all the workers who saw the mutants crawling through the streets became incredibly frightened! (And now they don't even have a brewery to keep their threshold up to where it used to be...)
The next turn starts with several involuntary riots, and nearly 75% of all the most important resource-gathering equipment is shut down. The King takes his big windfall of money and launches another campaign into the darkness even though glowing eyes are starting to gather around the city walls...
Anyway this game is incredibly badass and I really have no info to give you except this loose, 4-year-old description of how it works and the fact that a bunch of people played it that long ago. I can't remember the name for the life of me, and I can't find anyone mentioning it in other places, I can't even find it doing a genre search on steam (assuming I even got the genres right) which leads me to assume the worst. Can someone please, please tell me they have some sort of evidence that this game existed and it wasn't just a really cool hallucination?
There isn't any. APRIL FOOL! Also yes Mizal this was designed to fuck with you specifically
