Zero Orders Tactics is a clever turn-based god sim with a touch of From Dust

Image credit: Pauloondra

Classic god sims like Populous and Black & White teach that deities love to reach their horrible holy hands into our world and mess with us directly. They teach us to see 1-1 divine intervention in every random house fire and every lightning bolt that miraculously strikes our enemies. By contrast, the forthcoming Zero Orders Tactics teaches that god prefers to operate via covert means, because after all, personally lobbing some electricity at somebody would be inelegant. It’s far more graceful to trap them behind a mountain, instead.

Developed by Pauloondra – whose weighty works include the well-received arcade physics smasher Castle Break – Zero Orders Tactics is a hexagonal turn-based strategy game in which friendly units always move from left to right, enemies always more from right to left, and your job is to alter the terrain in between so that the forces of light prevail. In other words, it’s an autobattler where you fox the geography to suit the quirks and foibles of your battlers.

For example, a perfidious goblin is menacing a princess as she walks along a road to a castle. One way you could intervene is to conjure up some cavalry, but ah, even given the “goodies go first” rule, they won’t reach your ambling damsel in time. However! That goblin is very partial to flat green countryside. If you swap a nearby mountain for some meadows, you can lull the pesky varmint into walking in the opposite direction.

Now, imagine there are several of these units on the board, each with specific preferences about what they walk on, and different criteria for performing an attack. Where will you bestow your forests, your swamps, your hilltops so as to pluck the needle of victory from this haystack of competing pathfinding?

I’ve just given the demo a quick shake and it seems quite promising. The visuals and sound aren’t anything to write home about – certainly, nothing like as marvelous as From Dust, which also favours tactical terraforming over moving units around – but the mechanics are swiftly engrossing. I think part of it is that once you’ve done the brainwork, you get to sit back magisterially and watch the pieces fall as predicted, which feels very divine. Yes, god has a plan for you too, rando minotaur in the woods.

The full game has a roguelite campaign with the chance to build up a deck of terrain types and units. It’s out on 4th November, and you can find the Steam page here.