Classic god simulators like Populous and Black & White teach that deities love to reach out with their horrible holy hands into our world and mess with us directly. They teach us to see divine intervention 1-1 in every accidental house fire and every lightning bolt that miraculously strikes our enemies. In contrast, the upcoming zero-order tactic teaches that God prefers to act in secret, because powering someone up in person would be inelegant. Instead, it’s much better to trap them behind a mountain.
Developed by Pauloondra – whose essential works include the well-received physics arcade game Castle break – Zero Orders Tactics is a hexagonal turn-based strategy game where amiable units always move from left to right, enemies always move more from right to left, and your job is to change the terrain between them so that the forces of lightweight prevail. In other words, it’s an automatic game where you adjust the geography to suit the quirks and weaknesses of your fighters.
For example, a perfidious goblin threatens the princess as she walks along the road to the castle. One way to intervene is to conjure up cavalry, but well, even with the “treats first” rule in mind, they won’t get to your wandering lady in time. However! This goblin has a weakness for flat, green landscapes. If you replace a nearby mountain with meadows, you can lull that pesky vermin into going in the opposite direction.
Now imagine that there are several such units on the board, and each of them has specific preferences for what they walk on and different criteria for attacking. Where will you give up your forests, swamps, hilltops to pluck the needle of victory from this haystack of competitive pathfinding?
I just threw a demo and it seems quite promising. The graphics and sound aren’t anything to write home about – they’re certainly not as great as From Dust, which also favors tactical terraforming over unit movement – but the mechanics quickly become addictive. I think part of it is that once you’ve done the mental work, you can sit back in a masterful way and watch the pieces fall into place as you predicted, which is very divine. Yes, God has a plan for you tooRando Minotaur in the forest.
The full game includes a roguelite campaign with the ability to build a deck of terrain types and units. The premiere will take place on November 4 and can be found on the Steam website Here.
