Welcome to Oldlands, traveller!

Oldlands: Seven Ages is a world simulation game being developed in Twine. Select a random seed, let the game create a world and watch factions expand, gather resources, struggle for dominance, fight mythic beasts and live or die as the realm progresses from Age of Creation to medieval and later eras. Information is presented in a chronicle to go along with a tile-based graphical map.

Play the current version

The game is loosely based on my older project, a forum game also called Oldlands, which can be found over at Bay12 Forums. Development started in August 2023, the current version is alpha 0.2.118, featuring a medieval environment with tribes, clans, kingdoms and mythic beasts. A feature plan includes more intricate world generation, more types of factions and events, and a variety of characters influencing history, including adventurers that you can control.

Changelog for 0.2.118 (16 Sep '23)

• Fixed wrong badge color on warbands that go home, it was erroneously grayscaled due to the engine thinking the warband is now dead.
• Onclick tooltips for every tile on map, not only entities. For now it simply describes the terrain type.
• The log window now only shows 10 last entries preceded with a clickable link to see the entire chronicle. This should alleviate a lot of late-game lag.
• Age of Kingdoms no longer necessarily begins on year 1. Kingdoms arise from tribes during history.
• Kingdoms can no longer have their capitals right on each other's doorstep. Not only did this lead to extreme violence, this also led to bugs such as them benefitting from the same farms.
• Implemented succession events for all groups. Tribes can become independent, with chance depending on type of subjugation, which in turn depends on the personality of the subjugating ruler. They do not yet change types. After the tribe revolts, it becomes a xenophobic enclave and refuses all subsequent interaction save for fighting.
• Non-aggression pacts, when they happen, last for two turns at minimum, which should make the effect more noticeable. Beasts, when they successfully extort a settlement, will now also leave it alone for a while.
• A lot of self-testing and bugfixes for some edge cases, e.g. a raider band plundering ruins that are on the same spot as the camp.
• Rewrote tile picking algorithms from the ground up, now kingdoms are much more effective at finding spots to place warbands and outposts. Outposts had to actually be given lower weighting after this.
• Rewrote warband logic to execute separately from their parent kingdom, making them much more proactive. They also need no edge to initially deploy (but will be led by a veteran captain if the kingdom actually has edge).
• Made warbands and mythic beasts often raze farms around their target instead of going for the kill. This was way trickier to implement than expected.
• How kingdoms deal with mythic beasts (rout or bribe) now depends on the monarch's personality instead of the kingdom's alignment.
• New kingdom type: nomadic clan. Clans do not farm, but instead send out herds to exploit pasture-land, then recall them after a period of time, gaining wealth from this. Clan rulers are called Patriarchs/Matriarchs.

Changelog for 0.1.91 (10 Sep '23)

• Fixed two bugs with generating event prose.
• Restyled lawful (blue) kingdom's outposts somewhat: they are run by governors instead of captains, and receive their names from their first governor. The capital can also interact with tribes further out where it has an outpost—it previously didn't due to a bug.
• Kingdoms have double weight for domestic events, so having lots of outposts will be less likely to grind their domestic affairs to a halt, and will also not exhaust all the resources so quickly.
• Beasts that can't find a place to lair, or are slumbering in their den, or recovering from a wound, or have just received a bribe, will now remain dormant for a few years before they act again.
• After two kingdoms skirmish, they have a chance of signing an armistice which will prevent hostilities for a random time. They do not yet fight proper wars, just series of skirmishes.
• Removed unnecessary css that prevented browsers from adjusting text size, and restored Twine's default font size (which is 1.5em, as it turns out).
• Removed the "new map" link. Instead you can call options mid-game, and from there view the FAQ, toggle fullscreen, or restart.
• Replaced the "reroll seed" button with an image instead of unicode glyph (it was glitchy for certain browsers).
• Rewrote the tileset code and moved tile graphics into a quantized spritesheet that loads on title screen, whereas tiny badge icons are now embedded SVG.

Stay tuned for updates.
Dmitri "Murphy" Kubasov

Site image by rawpixel.com