Roots of Harmony (RoH) is a unique text-based 4X where you lead a colony through ideology and conquests. Every decision you make — like what you build, whom you recruit or what you believe — can have an effect, not only on your disciples, but also on the procedural island itself.
Roots of Harmony feels like a board game, where you can move in four different directions, explore special locations, and fight tactical battles. The game is turn-based and heavily emphasises replayability, with random victory conditions that guide and influence the way you play.
In Roots of Harmony, the game's difficulty can vary from one island to another. The choices you make determine the challenges you'll face. For example, provoking a tribe with numerous allies, adopting a hedonistic lifestyle when your neighbours are all ascetics, or making moonshine in holy sites will surely increase the overall difficulty of the game!
Humorous and philosophical, Roots of Harmony does not hold your hand and is challenging on purpose. However, the game mechanics are presented to you gradually over time, and the learning curve remains gentle. There are three game modes: Standard, New Game+, and Challenges.
In Roots of Harmony, you start your new colony with one of twelve doctrines. Will you be altruist, or despotic? Rational or mystic? Will you favour collectivism or individualism? Those choices will determine what units you'll be able to recruit, the perks you'll unlock, the events that will shape your fortune, and most importantly, the resources you will focus on:
Resources are the core of the game. They serve a dual purpose: they reflect your moral decisions, and they determine your ability to construct buildings and start production chains, like for instance... the Pillory!
A 4X wouldn't be a 4X without a good amount of exploration, and Roots of Harmony is full of it! Altars to summon powerful units, mines and plantations to earn resources, creepy places that will grant more traits to your disciples, trading posts, shipyards, dungeons, and more! Every map is different and full of different encounters meticulously designed by a proper (?) human brain.
But the island is not yours, you have enemies! When you settle on the island for the first time, with just a handful of people, you are in the dark. However, you'll soon realise that every land is owned by a tribe, and that those tribes have made alliances and have their own procedural units, ready to cause you problems! They will not hesitate to launch waves of invaders that will test your strategic choices if you don't treat them with respect...
Planning accordingly and moving your disciples to the right locations at the right moment is therefore crucial for your survival.
When it comes to combat, Roots of Harmony features what they call an auto-battler system. In other words, apart from a few pre-battle commands, such as choosing whether to fight in melee or at range, staying in the back or going on the frontline, and also picking what blessings to cast, battles play themselves out, and you cannot interact with your units once the combat has started. But don't underestimate the few choices you still have, because they can change everything!
Roots of Harmony is a passion project made by a solo dev. It's written from scratch with its own engine. It has been through three major updates that have overhauled the game's core features and redesigned the UI. Don't let the text and the fancy ASCII illustrations fool you; this game is deep, highly replayable, and it will entertain you for hours!
