Restarting the game from an earlier stage

In awakening stage, the players species starts by doing the same things as in aware stage, but slowly develops technology, eventually invents farming which results in a population increase and that population concentrates in a society center, starting the society stage. But what if the player gets invaded and loses all of the cities, or a disaster makes them uninhabitable, how do we deal with a game over situation[1]?

A possible solution is to let the player take control of another civilisation, but to me, getting the AI’s city and having the problems solved this way feels cheating. That civ wasn’t designed by the player.

I say lets return to awakening stage in such a case, but I don’t mean undoing all those years. In earth, there were many places not suitable for farming, the people there stayed nomads, but adopted the technologies of the civilisations around them. The player can start as a “new and previously unheard clan” in the nearest[2] nomadic confederation, and have a second[3] chance at building a civilisation, in the enviroment he[4] is familiar with, and it is faster to do this time. It would even make multiplayer more juicier, returning as a nomadic army to get revenge from the other player. The permenant game over comes when all the planet gets civilised[5]


  1. without forcing the player to restart from the previous stage, or a previous save file ↩︎

  2. or at a random place in the planet ↩︎

  3. and third, and more ↩︎

  4. imagine every “he” I write is gender neutral ↩︎

  5. playing as the sentinel island in the 21st century wouldn’t be interesting I suppose ↩︎

I adjusted the title of this thread based on a quick readthrough of your post.

To provide the answer I’ve given before: it is very hard to implement going back through stages so I 100% believe that we should not even think about that feature before we are working on the ascension stage as this is a very unnecessary feature in my opinion (we have saves for a reason) that adds a bunch of maintenance burden for whenever a stage is modified.

1 Like