Society Stage
| Stage Details | |
|---|---|
| Gameplay Type | 3D, Strategy |
| Previous Stage | Awakening Stage |
| Next Stage | Industrial Stage |
| Editors | Nation Editor |
| Internal Name | society_stage |
In a nutshell: in this stage you develop and expand your first settlement and build more. This is reminiscent of the Middle Ages. It ends when you have sufficiently advanced technology.
One of Thrive's seven gameplay stages, Society Stage begins after your sapient species (developed in Awakening Stage) begins to form larger groups, or societies. At this point, Strategy Mode becomes the primary focal point of the game, rather than Organism Mode (although the player can still access is at any time, though this is low priority to implement). The Nation Editor is also unlocked for use. Finally, the player's species can begin to form Society Centers to form settlements.
Throughout Society Stage, one of the major goals is to develop more and more advanced technology. As such, the Society Stage ends when your species develops sufficiently advanced technology to enter the Industrial Stage.
Overview
The Society Stage marks the transition of the player's species from a simple tribe to an advancing Civilization. The Society Stage is highlighted by certain technologies that enable the viewing and investment of the Research Web, the enabling of government policies, the emergence of religions, and the beginning of larger scale conflicts. The Nation Editor becomes more and more important throughout this stage, as does the Tech Editor, and the Squad Editor. Although the player is free to return to playing as individual organisms within their species, all of the important events and decision take place on a large scale, and management of larger and larger numbers of people becomes essential. The player will have to balance the needs of their people, and the interests of their nation, to lead their civilization forwards.
As it will be a huge amount of work to keep organism mode working for the later stages, it is not a priority to make sure that it does. After all the Strategy Mode is the most important and intended way to play the stage, and is required to advance. It has also been brought up that the impact of a single individual will be small at this stage, so allowing organism mode for just really walking around is nice, but a lot of effort for very little gameplay impact.
Transitions
The Society Stage begins when your first Society Center (settlement) is built. Collective Residence enables the forming of Society Centers. The Society Center building acts as the central hub for a settlement, which is a group of buildings that behave as a collective and get a procedurally generated name. New stats would also appear for that settlement, such as happiness, health, and stability. Controlling the game will switch to Strategy Mode and Nation Editor becomes unlocked. This allows the player to finally detach their perspective from that of the specific individual they were playing as, and instead zoom out to access the species from an RTS perspective. They can give orders to the different units of their tribes, and they can control multiple at the same time. Species members can now be designated to Populate these settlements, which means they disappear as a controllable unit and instead become a digit in the population (pop) of that settlement. By default pops will become assigned as Labourers. Although populating units into settlements takes away lots of their capabilities on the field, it opens up a whole new range of opportunities. And reduces the burden of controlling too many units at once. Now the label of Labourer, Artisan, or whichever other Pop type they are becomes important, since the computer now treats all of the members of that Pop as a whole. For example labourers perform manual work available in the settlement, and artisans perform selected crafting tasks. Taxes can be collected from the pops, they are subject to Population Growth, and they can be employed in buildings that require operators. They essentially become just numbers on the screen. Their models will no longer be important other than to arbitrarily walk around the settlement to make it look busy. This is part of the reason why Organism Mode is no longer important (but planned to still be available, though it is a low priority feature). To enter Organism Mode the player can select a tribesman and begin playing as them in Organism Mode, with access to all the same abilities as before.
Nevertheless, members of the Pops now inhabiting these settlements can always be Deployed, which takes them out of the settlement and put them back as a unit in the game. Founding new settlements works in this fashion. Units, specifically Labourers, would have to be deployed from one settlement, and then travel to a new destination and build a new society center and support buildings to get the new settlement started. The Labourers used to build the settlement could then be used to populate it to get it off the ground. As a note, only Labourers can build buildings.
Social Tradition unlocks Procedural Culture Generation, leading to the spawning of Arts in your nation. Societal advancement will gradually unlock more features of the Nation Editor.
Conversely, during this whole period of advancement, other tribes of the player’s species would also begin to emerge. Each tribe that would arise out of the player’s species would take a part of the species’ population with them, so there would be a limited number of tribes that would form from the same species. Other species can also achieve sapience and begin forming tribes. How often that happens needs to be tweaked to be realistic as the timescales mean that multiple species would basically have to become sapient at the same time to a very small margin in the scale of overall evolution on the player's planet. If one species advances much faster they can wipe out other competitors with their technology very fast (in just a few tens of thousands of years). Only the tribe, and later the nation, formed by the player would be controllable by the player. These other nations would be the AI nations, and would be the source of competition with the player in the long history to come. They will still be part of the same species as the player, but will not be controllable, and may even become hostile towards the player. They would discover their own technologies, form their own society centers, and take their own path towards civilization.
The stage ends once the player unlocks and builds the first industrial machine.
Features
Coming soon.
UI
Coming soon.
Current Development
Development has not started on this stage. Theory and gameplay discussions haven't happened much in recent years for this stage. Discussions will need to resume once we have actually reached the Society Stage in official development.