dominatus

Build, produce, arbitrate between resources that all run short at the same time. A genre played for a long time and never attempted in writing; the difficulty is not technical, it is in the balancing, which is only discovered by playing.

The loop is playable. A hexagonal island generates with its biomes in clusters, cypress, mountain, arable land, and the year passes in four seasons that really count, winter slowing the farms. Around thirty Roman buildings chain through their resources: wood becomes plank before becoming barracks, stone becomes brick before becoming baths, water feeds the baths, gold pays for the amphitheatre and the Circus Maximus. Events come to upset the plan: storms, raids, caravans, wandering settlers. Two paths to victory close the game, one through population and technology, the other through the monument.

Balancing is not judged by feel. A playtest AI plays a whole game towards victory and returns the game data; alongside, an audit of the logic without rendering and a full regression in a headless browser hold the rest. It is the only reliable way to know a production chain is broken before spending the evening on it.

The whole thing runs offline and installs. A management game that waits for the network to show a harvest is a game you do not launch again.

A sibling project exists as a statement of intent, under the name Telluria: the same urge for simulation, but open-world and across a whole timescale. None of it is written; it is a design document, and counts as such.