Escape from Earth: design v3

Status: agreed design, November 2026. Builds on the playable version 2. Implementation is phased; see the end.

Decisions already taken

• A people's attitude toward you is a blend of the opinions of whoever holds power, and the blend is visible in the UI.
• Councils have named seats.
• You never choose a people's government. It changes only as a result of what you do to them and what happens to them.
• Wealth exists only once Currency has been invented (your base knows Currency).
• Hover tooltips on buttons, ideas and map features.
• More human peoples at the start (18 instead of 11, cap 40).
• You can move your base, and where it sits supports your chosen route.

1. The map: regions

Generation (land only)

• About 900 points spread evenly over the sphere (jittered Fibonacci lattice); keep those on land (about 300). Every island without a seed gets one.
• Each land pixel of a 1024×512 world map is assigned to its nearest seed on the same landmass: spherical Voronoi cells, about 5–7° across, smoothed once.
• The ocean is never a region.
• Neighbours: regions whose pixels touch. Coastal regions also get sea lanes: short (about 9°, needs Boats) and long (about 26°, needs Sailing).

Region properties

• Terrain (dominant biome): glacier, tundra, steppe, grassland, forest, jungle, desert, mountains, wetland.
• Food, materials, defence from terrain (table below), adjusted by technology and damage.
• Coastal; river valley (about 15% of grassland, steppe and desert; double food once irrigated).
• Deposit (about 1 in 4 regions): copper, tin, iron, coal, oil or uranium, weighted by terrain.
• Condition: fertility 0–1, deforested, desertified, polluted, irradiated, flooded.
• Population, settlement name and size, monuments, ruins.

Deposits: copper and tin speed up Bronze ×1.5 and make it stronger. For the ship they are hard requirements: the Hull supplier must hold (or trade with a friend who holds) iron, the Reactor supplier uranium.

Holding land

• Roaming bands own nothing and walk the region graph.
• With agriculture or herding a band settles and claims its region (the capital).
• Population lives in regions; each region has its own food limit; a people's total is the sum. Pressure moves people between its regions.
• Expansion: at about 80% of capacity, settlers move into the best unclaimed neighbouring region (2 regions out with the wheel; across sea lanes with Boats/Sailing). Dominion expands ×1.5; ambitious rulers and roads help.
• Holding limit before outer provinces grow restless: 3; Writing 6; Engineering 10; Printing 15; Electronics unlimited. Over the limit, provinces break away as new peoples.
• Splits take territory with them: rebels take restless provinces, heretics take regions.

Settlements: one per owned region, at its best spot, with a generated name. Size by regional population: hamlet; village 300; town 1,500 (needs writing); city 6,000 (needs medicine); metropolis 25,000 (needs steam). Capital marked. Monuments belong to a region.

Conflict

• War is fought along borders: each season, a battle in one contested border region. Strength = population, military technology, the general's martial skill and the region's defence (walls double it). The winner can take the region with its settlement, monuments and most of its people. Taking the last region ends the people.
• Raids without war: warlike, hungry or Dominion peoples raid an adjacent region for food and goods; some die; no land changes hands.
• Your base sits in a region. Unclaimed: left alone. Claimed: you have neighbours every day (taxes, exposure, raids). Neighbours raid you. Palisade and camouflage protect your own region.
• On the globe: contested borders pulse red, raids show a marker.

Roads and trade

Roads run settlement to settlement through region borders: dirt track (Wheel), paved road (Engineering), railway (Steam), highway (Electricity); sea lanes dotted (Boats, Sailing). The network decides trade, idea and rumour spread, your travel speed, and supplier reach for ship parts (road hops from your base instead of a fixed 40°).

Environment

Recovery: abandoned land heals; irrigation and engineering reclaim desert; nuclear power slows warming; Benefactor can teach conservation. A flooded base must move.

Map layers (toggle on the globe)

Terrain (default, faint ownership), Politics (by path: Dominion reds, Commonwealth blues, Covenant golds), Faiths, What they know of you, Trade and roads, Environment. Hovering a region shows terrain, owner, settlement, population, deposit and damage.

2. Politics

Every people starts as a Band (Elder). When it settles it takes one of three paths, weighted by temperament, its leader's personality and recent history (war → Dominion; trade and writing neighbours → Commonwealth; your miracles or worship 40+ → Covenant).

Dominion (autocratic, military)

Commonwealth (balanced, council)

Covenant (cult, theocratic)

Switching paths

Modernisation within a path follows technology with a lag; reformers speed it, traditionalists slow it.

Opinion blend

Attitude = weighted blend of power-holders' opinions:

• Dominion: ruler 60%, general 20%, people 20%.
• Commonwealth: council 40–50%, ruler 20%, people 35–45%.
• Covenant: ruler or priesthood 50%, people's faith 50%.
• Band: elder 30%, shaman 20%, people 50%.

The Power section of each people shows every holder, their weight, opinion of you and what they know of you.

3. Characters

Attributes (1–10)

State values: opinion of you (−100..100), knowledge of you (none, rumour, met, knows), legitimacy (rulers), loyalty (ministers, generals, foreman), age.

Core personality (one)

Secondary traits (0–2)

• Skills: Scholar (research +10%), Builder (monuments, supply +25%), Strategist (martial +2), Orator (charisma +2, wins elections), Diplomat (relations drift up), Mystic (your dreams ×1.5), Spymaster (detection ×2).
• Encounters: Blessed (healed by you: opinion +40, loyal), Scarred (survived your strike: −50, passes grudge to heir), Disciple (taught by you: spreads your ideas faster), Puppet (installed through you: obeys, low legitimacy).
• Background: Heir of a dynasty (legitimacy +20), Usurper (−25), Veteran (martial +1).
• Conditions: Ill (heal chance), Young (regent), Mad (erratic, prophecies), Beloved / Hated (stability ±).

4. The three routes

All share one base, one energy pool and one suspicion meter.

The Faith

• Founded when a people with Ritual reaches worship 40, named after their name for you.
• Each people holds religion shares. Kinds: folk faiths (one per people), your Faith, anti-faiths (treat you as a demon, hunt you, decode records), Rationalism (with Philosophy and Printing; debunks miracles, decodes scripture).
• Spread through neighbours, roads, missions, conquest, holy wars, radio. Temperament and leaders' piety resist or help.
• Doctrines (target set by you, drift about one step per generation; faster with a strong Prophet bond and high worship, slower once scripture exists; a Revelation moves one step instantly at an energy and suspicion cost and risks a schism):

• Commandments (about one per generation per believing people; obedience from worship, zeal and priests' piety): make war on / peace with X; seek the stars (lift a ban); build the vessel (supply ship parts at any distance); spread the word; send me your young (acolytes). Zealots may over-obey: wars become crusades.
• Recruitment: pilgrims (passive, worship 60+), acolytes (commandment), offerings (Blood doctrine: terrified, obedient workers).
• Myth versus evidence: believers' records count about half toward permanent suspicion; where Rationalists or an anti-faith take hold, they are decoded and count double.
• Map layer: dominant faith per region, minority rings, holy sites, crusade markers.

The Hidden Hand

• Personas (Vel from the start; others with the Hologram projector (Optics + Electricity) or Androids (Computing)). Live as one of them and climb: Stranger → Respected (healer, merchant, elder) → Officeholder (council seat, priest, adviser, general; via election, appointment, vacancy) → Head of the people.
• Persona actions: Advise (research focus), Agitate (war or peace with X), Vote, Appoint (your agents into offices), Divert (their materials to your base), Hire (workers who don't know who they work for).
• A Vel persona needs you there; while you are away it can't climb and its cover slips. Holograms and androids act remotely.
• Personas age; about every 40 years you stage a death and return as your own heir. Cunning, suspicious characters and spymasters investigate. Failure: impostor scandal (the people learns what you are, opinion crashes, rumours spread, neighbouring personas suspected).
• Dreams (energy; can target a character; mystics receptive, suspicious resist): Inspire, Unease, Calm, Ambition, Vision, Doubt.
• Wealth (after Currency): from crafts and goods sold, a trading post, companies. Spent on wages (covert hiring; hired hands quit when unpaid), bribes, funding factions and elections, contracts (pay a people's industry for ship parts without friendship), companies (Banking: income, industry, hidden influence), pamphlets (Printing).
• Recruiting no longer requires revealing yourself.

The Benefactor

• Gifts: food; tools (Copper); medicine (Chemistry). Teaching. Healing (plague, ill leaders).
• Embassy: permanent goodwill, remote open recruitment, trade; also a permanent record.
• Mediation in wars; Justice (punish raiders openly: warlike respect, kind resent); Teach conservation (halves environmental damage, output −10%).
• Risks: records; envy of neighbours toward your favourite; dependency (heavily gifted peoples research ×0.9); a Nativist faction in councils once your influence is high.

Mixing routes

• Revealing yourself to a people collapses any persona there (covert → open is one-way per people).
• A god is not an alien: worshipped and still covert elsewhere, until Rationalists decode the myths.
• A Vel persona as High Priest of your own faith speeds doctrine change hugely; exposure is the biggest scandal in the game.
• Revelation doctrine + teaching: scripture spreads lessons.
• A zealous faith may crusade against a people you secretly run.
• Mixed workforce: pilgrims, hired hands and open recruits clash; the foreman's background decides who listens.
• Miracles, dreams and holograms share energy; everything feeds suspicion.

Moving your base

Your base can be moved once you are idle in the destination region (not glacier, flooded or irradiated; not after the first ship part is built). The move takes months; buildings are packed at a material cost; workers from far away may leave. The kind of place supports a route:

• Sky temple: inside a people worshipping you (50+). Pilgrims ×2, that people never raids you, very visible.
• Merchant house: inside a people where you have a persona or company. Discovery ×0.3, wealth ×1.5.
• Hideout: no people within 2 regions. Discovery ×0.2; recruits are reluctant to come.
• Embassy compound: inside a friendly people that knows you. Recruiting easier, raids from them impossible, records +.
• Camp: anywhere else.

5. Technology (30 ideas)

Every idea does something for humans and something for you. New: Ritual, Boats, Currency, Sailing, Optics, Banking.

Ship parts: Hull (Iron, Engineering, iron deposit), Life support (Medicine, Chemistry), Thrusters (Rocketry), Navigation (Computing, Astronomy), Reactor core (Nuclear physics, uranium deposit).

6. Interface

• Hover tooltips on all buttons, resources, ideas, map layers and regions.
• Map layer toggles; region hover card.
• Per people: Power section (holders, weights, opinions, knowledge), characters with six attributes and traits, council seats.
• Faith tab: your faith's doctrines (current and target), commandments, world faiths.

7. Phases

1. Regions, settlements, roads, raids, war fronts, environment, map layers, tooltips, more peoples, base relocation.
2. Politics paths, councils, characters, opinion blend, Power section.
3. Technology tree.
4. The Faith.
5. The Hidden Hand and the Benefactor.

Balance is checked with scripted players after each phase.