Management / Sim Godhood - create your own religion game from Abbey Games

[Dickie]

It's out now.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

despite made by many moving parts, they barely interact with each other, if even, and in the end the base gameplay is just watching. not enough to be an idler, miles away from any populous.

 

[Dickie]

I played it today. I chose Peace for my first game and just steam-rolled everything on normal difficulty with Martyr 2 (enemy starts halfway to victory and your guys start battle at half HP) on every battle once I unlocked it. My starting relic gave everybody 50% charisma as initiative, so I just used classes that need high charisma and won almost every fight before any enemy units activated. Even in the final battle, the enemies didn't get a turn. I only used three classes.

By the end of the game, I had people with S rank in charisma, devotion, and knowledge, with more than 100 points in all 3. They were hitting for well over 200 damage before taking into account the 80+% crit rate.

Maybe it's more fun on hard or with a more "complex" religion, like Lust.

 

[BrotherFrank]

Gave it a quick go, got absolutely destroyed on my lust run by the 2nd island boss because my previous go to strat of rushing the economical upgrades asap doesn't work now that they shifted the values to account for a 6 island run, makes me wonder if that isn't a greed only strat now. Still I didn't think it mattered because I was relying on a bunch of high crit dps glass cannon beast walkers and lust priests to nuke enemy discipiles in the first few turns, but this particular boss had a lust priest of their own tanky enough to survive 1st turn nuking and who on the 2nd turn gave all my disciples clouded thoughts (a cc) and did enough morale damage to insta win the round . To put it simply I needed a morale tank and I didn't have any so was auto gg, the only disciple I had which might have done the trick was a dark class weaver but he was just too weak (since didn't invest in anything other then ressource upgrades) and despite having type advantage couldn't take out the enemy lust priest before turn 2 and no amount of dreams or buffs could change the result. Restarted with a generosity god and a more balanced roster and am on 3rd island now easy peasy.

Now that the game is 100% done and won't be changing, think we can conclude by the above description thatgodhood is NOT a god game or even an idler, it's a roster management game pure and simple.
Swap the paintjob around and could easily be about anything from managing a boxing club and its stable of boxers (who fight in 3v3 boxing battles) to a group of magical girls. Ultimately game is all about planning and if you fuck up like I did it'll take a good 30 mins before the consequences catch up with you and force you into a corner.

Is it fun? I had an ok time and fact I was up for a retry after losing is a good sign. But unless you are specifically after a roster management game I just don't see this title having wide appeal and being a big enough title to save abbey games. I also don't see this game having the replay value of renowned explorers or even reus.

The fact they had to remake big parts of the game a short time before launch is really telling, I remember a version a few months back having much more options when it came to customizing your religion, but because they kept reworking tenets and traditions, the final result we have now is barren. In past versions each tenet had its own skill tree or there was a big bunch of 20+ tenets to choose from, or you could adopt a 2nd value (i.e: lust, virtue or charity) in addition to the one you chose at start which in turn unlocked its corresponding tenets and traditions giving you more options to pick from, and rather then build on any of these they just kept restarting from scratch never adding anything new or removing elements like each tenet having its own skilltree.
If that word salad made no sense, then tldr: you have way less shit to pick from now because devs kept reworking how things you unlock works so the final result is a watered down version of what was in past versions. I genuinely miss comboing 2 values like war+madness, but then that was before the devs had to scale back their ambitions and now they "only" have 6 values to chooose (original plan was to have way more, yet in the end we only got greed and madness in addition to the starting 4) from so have to make each one more unique by dividing what traditions and tenets they had among them and impose harsh restrictions (ex: one of big ways you strengthen your disciples is via rituals and each value starts with 4 themed rituals to boost stats unique to them, this was one of the factors that screwed up my lust run and why my dark weaver was weak, as lust i had easy access to cunning and charisma boosting rituals but devotion and knowledge not so much which the weaver needed so classes reliant on those stats weren't progressing at all, thus each value now definitely points you to a playstyle and leaves you with gaps that need an investment to plug in).

Anyways this is all a bit rambly and incoherent but it's because I don't want to say the game is shit and haven't beaten the game yet so haven't caught up with dickie. For what it's worth am playing on hard difficulty and difficulty affects how easy it is to train your disciples and how much ressources you get (neither was the case in past versions) which might be throwing me off somewhat.

 

[Dickie]

Now that the game is 100% done and won't be changing, think we can conclude by the above description thatgodhood is NOT a god game or even an idler, it's a roster management game pure and simple.

Yeah, it really feels like you're just managing a team of gladiators trying to appease the crowd for fame.

the final result we have now is barren

It does seem like a pretty barebones mobile game. What a shame. I backed it solely because I enjoyed Renowned Explorers, but I didn't follow the various versions much. I do remember seeing that you could assign relics to buildings at some point, but that seems to be gone. Hell, all of the relics are so boring. +15 Initiative or 50% of X stat is added to crit chance. I was hoping for some cool stuff like passive abilities or using abilities in battle from left to right instead of randomly.

I started a new game with Greed and it's much harder because I actually have to fight people instead of just filling the bar at the top with a couple of heals or whatever.

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

 

[Kalin]

It's out now.

 

[Dickie]

Another update is coming soon.

Godhood Update 1.2 Coming Soon!
We’ve been working on a new update for Godhood, scheduled somewhere early 2021! We’re not going to give away much here, but it will include some new community ideas to add your religion!

This was the interesting bit:

This newfound joy has motivated us to take a look into the future of the Abbey. We’ve started with cutting down some of our ambitions to focus on bringing better quality games. In the past 5 years, Abbey Games was very busy trying to manage a democratic and safe work environment. However, it seems we went too far. Too many of us were more busy managing and doing HR work instead of bringing you quality gameplay. With the 3 of us, we’re going back to our times during Reus and Renowned Explorers. That means more time developing, less time managing. We’re also saying goodbye to our engine AbbeyCore. It was a fun and enriching project, but we want to focus on our game quality. We hope to use more industry standards to make it easier to deliver our games faster and to more people.

Hmm...

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/917150/view/2928993623244651941

 

[Fedora Master]

Who would have guessed from the art direction alone. Certainly not me.

 

[Dickie]

I wonder if they made "get woke, go broke" their mission statement.

 

[AdamReith]

Wow, interesting thread to follow. Love how in the steam post they basically admit to doing the whole thing over themselves after firing the "democratic" employees.

I had a lot of fun with renowned explorers but will skip this one I think.