Roots of Harmony
Guillaume Beaumel · 2024 · Turn-Based Strategy, Exploration, Auto Battler, Text-Based, Procedural Generation
PC
Positive100% · 21
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About Roots of Harmony
✦ AI summary
Lead a procedurally-generated island colony through ideology, tactical battles, and meaningful choices that reshape both your disciples and the world around you. This turn-based 4X blends board game exploration with philosophical depth, featuring randomized victory conditions, a gentle learning curve, and challenging gameplay that rewards strategic planning and respects player intelligence.
Roots of Harmony (RoH) is a unique text-based 4X where you lead a colony through ideology and conquests. Every decision you make — like what you build, whom you recruit or what you believe — can have an effect, not only on your disciples, but also on the procedural island itself.Roots of Harmony feels like a board game, where you can move in four different directions, explore special locations, and fight tactical battles. The game is turn-based and heavily emphasises replayability, with random victory conditions that guide and influence the way you play.In Roots of Harmony, the game's difficulty can vary from one island to another. The choices you make determine the challenges you'll face. For example, provoking a tribe with numerous allies, adopting a hedonistic lifestyle when your neighbours are all ascetics, or making moonshine in holy sites will surely increase the overall difficulty of the game!Humorous and philosophical, Roots of Harmony does not hold your hand and is challenging on purpose. However, the game mechanics are presented to you gradually over time, and the learning curve remains gentle. There are three game modes: Standard, New Game+, and Challenges.In Roots of Harmony, you start your new colony with one of twelve doctrines. Will you be altruist, or despotic? Rational or mystic? Will you favour collectivism or individualism? Those choices will determine what units you'll be able to recruit, the perks you'll unlock, the events that will shape your fortune, and most importantly, the resources you will focus on:Resources are the core of the game. They serve a dual purpose: they reflect your moral decisions, and they determine your ability to construct buildings and start production chains, like for instance... the Pillory!A 4X wouldn't be a 4X without a good amount of exploration, and Roots of Harmony is full of it! Altars to summon powerful units, mines and plantations to earn resources, creepy places that will grant more traits to your disciples, trading posts, shipyards, dungeons, and more! Every map is different and full of different encounters meticulously designed by a proper (?) human brain.But the island is not yours, you have enemies! When you settle on the island for the first time, with just a handful of people, you are in the dark. However, you'll soon realise that every land is owned by a tribe, and that those tribes have made alliances and have their own procedural units, ready to cause you problems! They will not hesitate to launch waves of invaders that will test your strategic choices if you don't treat them with respect... Planning accordingly and moving your disciples to the right locations at the right moment is therefore crucial for your survival.When it comes to combat, Roots of Harmony features what they call an auto-battler system. In other words, apart from a few pre-battle commands, such as choosing whether to fight in melee or at range, staying in the back or going on the frontline, and also picking what blessings to cast, battles play themselves out, and you cannot interact with your units once the combat has started. But don't underestimate the few choices you still have, because they can change everything!Roots of Harmony is a passion project made by a solo dev. It's written from scratch with its own engine. It has been through three major updates that have overhauled the game's core features and redesigned the UI. Don't let the text and the fancy ASCII illustrations fool you; this game is deep, highly replayable, and it will entertain you for hours!
What Steam players say
Recent verbatim reviews from Steam — separate from playze.io community reviews below.
✦ AI summary
Players praise Roots of Harmony as an engaging text-based 4X strategy game with solid UI design, responsive developer support, and addictive gameplay that rewards planning and resource management across multiple playthroughs. The main concern is that the game has a steep learning curve and can feel overwhelming initially, though players report it becomes intuitive with time and watching others play, and late-game turns may experience performance slowdowns when managing many groups.
If you are on the fence at all you should buy this game 100%. I don't feel I have played long enough to review this game as it deserves, but for now I would like to leave my thoughts to be updated in a few hundred hours of playtime. I recommend this game wholeheartedly, and even though I was one of the first people to purchase the game I have not been able to play it as much as I want to. Since I purchased the game I have seen the developer respond quickly and effectively to sincere feedback about the game, which I find admirable. Going into the game I was a bit worried at the developers ability to pull off an engaging user interface in a game that is entirely a text based UI, and I was pleasantly surprised. I feel that for the most part the game is comfortable to control with mouse and keyboard, with avenues for more effective usage through light automation and group management. I do, however, feel that the readability of those menus can diminish in larger list sizes, like late game disciple management, and I feel that a filtering or sorting system would be useful. Something like being able to filter out all units but scouts and sort by distance to cell, or filter out all scou…2 found this helpful
I'm really enjoying Roots of Harmony. Got into my text-based game phase now and started digging for some games, and this one called my attention. It's a very interesting CIV (4X) game, with some RPG elements here and there, things like inventory, light combat strategy, resource management. Very interesting game indeed. If you're looking for some text-based adventure, I can do nothing but recommend this one.2 found this helpful
(Note: Actual playtime is around 5-6 hours, due to playing mostly directly from the application rather than through steam) ROH is a complicated and complex strategy game that requires one to think multiple turns in advance. Surprisingly, it scratches both the colony-builder genre and the automation genre, for you need to manage a variety of resources (including limiting excess resources!) and need to develop a constant stream of inputs/outputs. While this can be intimidating for even an experienced strategy game player, it begins to click the more you mess around with it, and watching someone else play through it first can be really beneficial to understanding the game. The audio and presentation is excellent (I can't say graphics, but the Ascii art is really good too) and the tongue-in-cheek humor sprinkled throughout the game is very charming. Menus are complex, and require a lot of clicking, backing out, and mousing over, but there is usually a setting or shortcut included in each menu to help show what you want to see or get you to the menu you want to see next. Overall, its a excellent and nuanced game, and as some other reviewers have mentioned, about the price of a …1 found this helpful
This game is way cool1 found this helpful
First game took me like 31 hours, but I could not stop one-more-turning. Developer is very responsive, and honestly had a blast. Would do some things differently next time. And late game turns can get long if you try to maximize everything. But groups is the key. Late game I had like 12 groups and it was manageable. The game will receive probably a few quality of life improvements, but the events are fun and it really is 4x game.1 found this helpful
A fun text-based auto-battler and resource management game where you build your own story.
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