EXTROPIA’S RETRO GAMING
‘POPULUS 2’
In ‘Populus 2’, you the player took on the role of an Olympian god. The gameplay centred around a map depicting a territory you are attempting to populate with worshipers.
How much power you have depends on how many followers you have, and how much they praise you. As well as the map, there is a small half colosseum, and the purpose of this is to give you some indication of how many people belong to your tribe. The more your population grows, the more blue dots occupy the colosseum.
In order to increase your population, you have to work to make the land fertile and pleasant, thereby raising people’s spirits and health and encouraging them to raise families. Early on in each round, your first duty is to carry out terraforming by raising or lowering the land in order to create flat plains, which seems to be what the little folk need to build homes on. The more flat land you provide, the grander the settlements built by your people will be, ranging from simple tents to gleaming castles complete with battlements and spires.
As your population grows in size, it becomes necessary to create more liveable space. However, you are not the only god who is trying to expand his territory. Somewhere on the map there is a rival population that worships a different god. At first these opposing tribes are separated by large expanses of unclaimed territory, but as their populations increase and spread out they inevitably come into contact.
As god, you not only must make life as comfortable as possible for your own people, but also make it impossibly difficult for the tribe of your rival. You can go about this by subjecting them to calamities like plagues, fires or earthquakes. You can also order your people to go out and attack any rival folk they come across.
Of course, as he is also a deity your rival can attack your people in similar fashion. The more your own people are killed and demoralised, the less ‘manna’ you have and the less potent powers you are able to wield.
Ultimately, the aim of each round is to either kill off the rival population or to achieve sufficient manna to be able to trigger Armageddon. Once the latter is triggered, both tribes head toward the centre of the map and brawl it out, with whoever’s tribe is biggest emerging victorious.
This was a good game. There was lots to think about as you balanced the various pros and cons of each action. For example, is it really worth using up a great deal of manna in unleashing some spectacular show of strength like a volcanic eruption, or should you concentrate on less costly alternatives?
Anyway, this was a pretty good strategy game.
Thanks to Bullfrog for the images