KEEP SACRIFICING OR THE WORLD IS GOING TO END!
In KEEP SACRIFICING OR THE WORLD IS GOING TO END! you play as the king of a vaguely Sumerian/Akkadian city state. As king of a vaguely Sumerian/Akkadian city state, you have One Job: Perform the annual sacrifices that appease the gods. The vaguely Sumerian/Akkadian gods are extremely angry all the time, and they will destroy the world if not appeased.
At the beginning of each year, your loyal and skilled advisors will inform you of the state of your domain, and you will have the opportunity to take an action to improve your realm. (Or not. You're the king. You decide.)
For example, you can hire more of your all-important scribes, barter for needed goods, or engage in diplomacy with the other neighbouring city state (even if they are probably bad people who make very serious errors in their annual sacrifices).
After that, you will be presented with an annual event that you need to deal with. These are sometimes good. But they're usually bad. (Sometimes they're very bad.)
At the end of the year, if you have at least 20 heads of cattle left in your herd as well as 50 priests left alive, you can perform an adequate sacrifice, calm down the gods until next year, and then do it all over again. If not, the gods will destroy the world in a fit of divine rage.
As in real life, there is no way to "win" this game. You can only delay the inevitable. Good luck.
PS: Actually, I lied about not being able to win the game. There is one way to win. Keep your eyes on the heavens, and when in doubt: sacrifice.
-------------------
NB: Twine saves are stored in your browser cache and may get deleted without warning. To keep your saves safe, use the "Save to disk" option instead.
Development log
- Update 1.0.2May 05, 2024
- Update 1.0.1May 02, 2024
Comments
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.
Played through five times.
Has random difficulty. The only random element is how many soldiers each other city will have. The other city will ALWAYS have that many soldiers. You can't dwindle it down. I am not sure if they ever stop paying you your annual tribute. If you beat enough of them there is a bug where they just give you 10 cattle in total instead of however many they all owe in total. Anyway, this randomness of enemy soldiers amounts is the only difficulty and it is random.
Game is simple. Get soldiers. Defeat enemies. Make them give you cattle. And that's the win.
Having a vassal takes too much time, not worth it.
If you want to make other cities build temples to your deity you cannot vassal them anyway.
Other than what I have listed nothing else matters. There is no permanent win end game scenario that I discovered.
Great game for itch.io standards. Cannot wait for the update.
Thanks! :)
Thanks so much for the feedback! There is a win scenario, but it is deliberately hard to find.
I'll probably have an update out later today.
It keeps saying "we have sacrificed 20 cattle to the city, and 5 additional to Inanna"
Who is Inanna? How do I stop doing that?
I agree with Alan, can you please make it so that a vassal can be forced to build a temple to Nabu.
Also, it seems sacrificing cattle in response to omens seems to work wonders to have good events happen instead of bad ones.
I do wonder how one can win other than getting enough annual cattle tributes.
Also, can you make it so that I can declare war on a vassal state, in order to get them to start paying annual tribute.
What does entering into a marriage even do?
Vassals seem useless.
You can accumulate Loyalty Points with vassals, which can be spent to make them pay tribute.
The NaN population thing happened to my scribes when there was a famine as a result of not enough grain. Just thought I should let you know.
Great game. Does sacrificing even do anything? Building temples, etc. Any tips would be nice. Do the "Gods" actually exist/care? Do the different classes actually care if you kill their people, etc?
Can you please make it so that
A) The population grows. Unless there is not enough grain. In which case the population decreases. The peasant and craftsman populations would make sense to grow/decrease.
B) Can you make it so that the other city's soldiers do not magically go back up to their number? If a city has 800 soldiers, let's say, it will always be 800. If you kill 200, if you kill 20, by next turn it will always be back to 800 exactly. It makes it impossible to wither down.
I have no clue how to get more than 6 VP after a war. And I do not know what the enemy king's characteristic does. Or the other city's title of "City of Heroes" or whatever.
Let me know :)
Thank you for such a great game.
Thank you, glad you like it! And thanks for letting me know about the NaN, that gives me an idea for how to fix it.
- The city titles are just a bit of historical flavour. For example, Uruk is "City of Heroes" because the hero Gilgamesh was from there. It doesn't do anything else.
- The enemy king's personality determines the battle tactics he's likely to pick. For example, a "cowardly" king is much more likely to pick a defensive tactic, so an indirect tactic would work best against him.
- You can get a "Crushing Victory" that gives 9 VP. You'll probably need to outnumber the enemy, pick the right tactic, and be pretty lucky as well.
- As for whether the gods exist, or sacrifices do anything – I'm afraid that's not for mortal humans to know. All I can say is that the Mesopotamians certainly believed they did. Have you tried sacrificing to a star yet?
I'll think about the population growth and the soldiers. That would add a lot of additional complexity to the system, though.
Very fun and replayable! Trade and war are indeed the only ways to gain a profit.
I was trying to set temples in all cities, but there's no option for that if they are your vassal...
Anyways, here's a few bugs:
As you can see, I have Large Tribute from 4 city-states, but I'm only receiving 10 cattle (the grain tribute works fine though.)
Thank you very much! I'll have a look at those bugs.
Hi , remember to fix the link of your site in the game!
Done, thank you!