Clio: Playing History

Clio is the Greek Muse of Epic Poetry.

That is what I want this game to feel like: playing history. 

My major inspirations are Sid Mier’s Civilization IV, V, and V; Sega’s Humankind; Total War Warhammer III; and mods of those games. 

However, I want to make an original game not constrained by any of the inspirations.

I want to call it simply Clio. 

The player is in charge of a polity.

That polity can range from small band of a couple dozens people to vast empire over a billion people. 

Part of the game is building your polity.

It is also about survival.

Part of the challenge is just surviving the onslaught of history. 

Players start in charge of a band of 50 people. 

The world can start with anywhere from one to as many as the game could comfortably fit. 

It may be interesting to make the game always start with one band the player controls with no other players. The player would open in a world where their greatest threat is the wild beasts and winter. The player’s band perhaps inevitably divides into rival bands and tribes and later countries so that as the game progressed in time the challenge transitions from mastering the environment and beasts to competing with other human polities.

That band is a single unit on the board, which is an oblate ellipsoid world like our own with varying terrain and climate. 

Units should be able to circumnavigate the poles but the extreme conditions should make it virtually impossible without advanced aircraft.

The beginning should take note of Humankind’s beginning where there is a hunter gather phase before the sedentary phase.

Players start as the chief of a band of 50 that engages in foraging, hunting, exploring, and so on. They navigate around the map collecting advantages from the terrain to survive and grow. To grow they must secure food surpluses.

As the population grows, the polity becomes more complex. More technological advancement leads to evermore divisions in labor.

Hunting and foraging strategy polities should not disappear entirely as small bands remain in the Amazon to this day. Such strategies can in theory lead to Mongol Empires. There should however be sedentary polities that emerge through bands of people falling into what has been called in Big History the trap of sedentism, where they settle in an abundant area and come to rely on the more food to sustain a growing population, one that becomes too large to hope to go back to hunting and gather, especially with evermore competitors around.

Players can make their way along whatever path: nomadic, sedentary, semi-nomadic, semi-sedentary, and so on. I want this games polities to be more dynamic and complex than the games I listed.

In Clio, you don’t play some preset civilization or race, like China or Brettonia, you start with a blank slate band that you can name whatever you want. 

The cultural character, the memic code if you will, of the polity emerges based on your game play, your interaction with the map, events, other units polities. 

Wild beasts shall interact like primitive polities with units moving across the map. Like in humankind, the player can chase the wild animal units, generally only the larger ones of significant economic consequence: herds of large mammals, packs of wolves, and so on. But make for a large and dynamic set of animals with nuanced effects that subtly influence the polities cultural code. 

You should have an option to try cooperating and taming wolves. This should sometimes backfire, but come with dog power ups if done successfully. 

Domestication should be an option for engaging with large animals and eventually lead to power ups like animal husbandry. While these are researched like technologies in normal games, in Clio these things should be like milestones triggered by accomplishing certain things or something like the missions or quests in Total War. It could be something like: have ten positive taming attempts on this one particular species in order to gain your own domestic breed, giving the player a resource of something like a domestic herd of 100 cattle. This herd could be grown to be much larger and traded to perhaps become the most widely used particular type of cow, or be one of the many less popular cows, or die off completely because your people didn’t do too well or found better cows. Cow breeds have different stats based on the conditions of their development and can change overtime. 

Instead of having a technology tree, perhaps these advances are embedded as parts of the culture in a knowledge tree. That way the discovery of new technologies/advancements like animal husbandry aren’t just set power ups, they are junctures in the development of the culture, with the domestication of a dog on the plain is different than domesticating a dog in a forest. In this way, cultures are on something like the ideological axes of humankind or the axes of the big 5 personalty psychology but elaborated to represent a continuous but evolving human society/culture.

Most cultures that emerge will be absorbed by larger composite cultures overtime. Players become more powerful by being at the helm of one of the polities carrying the winning composite culture.

Let’s make it turn based but not confine the turns to any strict unit of time so the game can be optimized for playability. 

Let’s make this a standalone app with a descent original graphics map. I was thinking Language: C#
Engine: Unity 6
Renderer: HDRP
Initial platform: Windows desktop
Shaders: Shader Graph plus HLSL where necessary
Modeling: Blender
Project structure: Engine-independent simulation library with Unity as the presentation layer

Take a substantial amount of time and effort to build a good graphic interface map design.


We can start with hammering out the early pre-bronze age period, from the small hunter gathering bands to larger tribes, confederacies, settlements, villages, and small towns. We can start building an advancement web that is something akin to the tech tree and also serves as a way to organize and measure the ages.

I want there to be languages in the game and have them tied to cultural development. Languages should branch off and diversify overtime. Whole languages do not need to be built out, but creating basic language maps with some key words an characteristics could go along way in adding flavor. Take substantial time to flesh out the language system. If the game starts with just one player, one band, then everything should descending from that one proto-language. Names for things then evolve organically overtime. Players can set characteristics of their initial base language in the settings. Otherwise there would be randomizer that generates phonoaesthetic new languages.

Lets also add a fantasy twist to this game like Total War Warhammer III.

There are different races. Let’s say to start: humans (balanced adaptabilty across most climates and terrains), elves (adapted extremely well to forests), dwarves (adapted extremely well to mountains and to a lesser extent hills), goblins (adapted well to mountains, barrens, and hills). Wild animals can include dragons as well as great mega fauna of Earth’s past.

Races are set from the initial band, so the base game can be to start with the human controlled single human band and see the game advance from there. Or you could startwith four bands, one human, one elf, one dwarf, and one goblin.

The map design matters significantly: hexes, a grid, territories like humankind, and so many possibilities. Help me design this to be optimal for the game I would like to see here.