Roots of Harmony (RoH) is the philosophical tale of the rise (and the fall?) of a fresh new colony that needs to survive in a new environment, while reforming its identity through ideological choices. There are 12 doctrines in the game, and each of them unlocks a different disciple.
Disciples can be seen as heroes; they represent your army, your workers, your emissaries, your explorers, and even your preachers. They have no experience per se, but you can give them traits that grant them special abilities, and you can also imbue them with different essences that you'll gather while exploring the island.
Exploration
After a series of unfortunate events, you and a group composed of several families end up on a remote island made of different individual lands that you can explore and conquer. There are four directions and climates: the cold tundra in the North, the forests in the West, the desert in the South and the wetland in the East; each with their own land types and points of interest for you to interact with. Replayability being an important aspect of Roots of Harmony, the island is procedurally generated.
Roots of Harmony is turn-based, meaning that every move you make takes a different number of turns. Planning accordingly and moving your units to the right locations at the right moment are therefore crucial for your survival.
Resources & Production
Every aspect of RoH is meticulously crafted to capture the intricacies of a developing colony. As a text-based game, RoH leaves ample room for imagination, unlike graphical games that must visually depict rules and mechanics. RoH distils the essence of city-builders and strategy games into abstract concepts, enabling unique and innovative gameplay combinations.
In RoH, resources serve a dual purpose: they reflect your moral decisions and determine your ability to construct buildings. For example, boosting your Health resource not only prepares you for health-related events that occur each turn, but also enables you to recruit specialised disciples and build structures like Farms or Quarries. Conversely, a deficiency in Health, or an excess of Cruelty or Vanity, can have significant repercussions.
Production works via an input / output flowing system. Every turn, each building requires specific resources to produce others, and some of them gets more powerful when built adjacently to other structures. Planning in advance is therefore very important if you want to be efficient.
Threats
Although the island is remote, you are far from isolated. Several tribes inhabit the region, offering opportunities for interaction. You can form alliances with these tribes, establish trade routes, or even face invasions if your reputation is too low. All tribes and their units are also procedurally generated.
RoH has no difficulty slider. Instead, the choices you make determine the challenges you face. For example, provoking a tribe with numerous allies, adopting a hedonist lifestyle when your neighbours are all ascetics, or making moonshine in holy sites will surely increase the general difficulty of the game!
Each playthrough is unique, presenting different chains of events and different encounters. Additionally, each game comes with six random milestones that will guide and influence your strategic choices.
Combat
RoH is an auto-battler. Instead of controlling everything during a battle, you set combat priority for each of your disciple, and whether they should favour melee or range attacks. Enemies having different armours and different damage multipliers, so it is vital for you to engage the right troops against the right enemies.
Victory
To achieve victory in RoH, you need to complete a set of six milestones that are randomly picked for each new playthrough. Those milestones are designed to make you play differently, and opt for choices you might have disregarded otherwise.
