Description
What do you believe? With the Ideology expansion, each person in the game gets a belief system. Belief systems define social roles for leaders, moral guides, and skill specialists. They invoke rituals from gentle festivals to brutal sacrifices. They guide preferences around food, comfort, love, technology, and violence. They venerate specific animals, desire different apparel and tattoos, and give access to different buildings and strategies. Everything is customizable. Make your own story of pirate nudist cannibals, blind undergrounder mole people, charitable ranching cowboys, machine-obsessed transhumanists, or rustic peaceful tribes who link with curious tree creatures. You can build mind-bending temples with colorful drug motifs, terrifying sacrificial altars clad in skulls, winding mazes of underground tunnels full of technology, or beautiful orchards with drifting leaves. You’ll hold unforgettable rituals – sick dance parties with pounding music, bountiful feasts of human flesh, beautiful skylantern festivals, ceremonial blindings, Christmas festivities around the tree, vicious gladiator duels, and more. As you grow powerful, you’ll hunt for the venerated relics of your belief system in new multi-part quests. Penetrate ancient complexes full of diverse threats. Infiltrate wary tribal villages and hack downed spacedrones while holding off other treasure-hunters. Find the relic in its ancient temple and bring it back to your reliquary to attract wealthy pilgrims to your colony and help you convert even more people to your beliefs. And when you’re successful and secure, you can seek transcendence beyond reality in the new, epic archonexus endgame. Ideology makes your story into your story more than ever before. Memes and precepts Each belief system is built around a collection of 1-4 core memes, where each meme represents a core idea in the belief system. By combining memes and changing the details of how they are expressed, you can create a near-infinite variety of different belief systems. The memes are: Animal personhood: Animals have rights as humans do. Rancher: Raising animals is the right way; raising plants to eat is not. Pain is virtue: Virtue is shown through the suffering of self and others. Darkness: Bright light burns and destroys! Darkness nourishes and creates. People ought to live in darkness. Tunneler: Humans ought to live underground, and enjoy the succulent fruit of the depths. Tree connection: Trees are the essence of life, and we must be near them. Nudism: Clothing binds, controls, and suffocates us. We should all hang free. Blindsight: Only the blind can perceive true reality. Cannibal: We must consume human flesh. Transhumanist: Human progress means merging with technology. Flesh purity: The human body should not be debased. Raider: The strong should take from the weak. Proselytizer: It is our duty to spread our beliefs. High life: Exotic states of mind are central to a good life. Nature primacy: Man is a stain on nature’s perfection. Human primacy: Humans are the moral center of the universe. Female supremacy: Women are the superior gender and should rule. Male supremacy: Men are the superior gender and should rule. Supremacist: Our people should dominate all others Loyalist: We stand for our own before others. Guilty: Our people carry guilt from ages past. Others are more worthy. Individualist: A community’s role is to serve each individual. Collectivist: A person’s role is to serve the community. Each meme can give rise to a variety of different precepts. Each precept is a specific rule or guideline which affects a specific behavior or preference. The same meme won’t always imply the same precepts – if you want fine control, you can edit and randomize specific precepts exactly the way you like. Some precepts relate to issues like: Eating nutrient paste: This meal can be seen as disgusting or efficient. Cannibalism: Some believers find eating human flesh abhorrent, others are unbothered, and some hunger for it. Insect meat: The slimy flesh of insects can be gross or delectable. Fungus eating: Mushy fungus food, which can now be farmed underground on fungal gravel, is preferred by some and hated by others. Organ use: Opinions differ on the harvest, sale, purchase, and installation of organs. Execution: This act is potentially evil beyond measure, necessary, and even enjoyed. Venerated animal: A certain animal is believed to have a special moral role. Therefore, it must never be harmed, and people are happier with it around. Animal connection: Some belief systems have a strong connection to animals and consider them friends. Slaughtering animals: It may be necessary for food, but others strongly disapprove. Apostasy: Abandoning one’s belief system indicates character flaws or deep immorality. Autonomous weapons: Views vary on whether machines should be allowed to decide who to kill. Blindness: Some people believe that to be blinded is to be moral and unclouded
