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Roadmap
Broken Oaths marches through the whole span of history and then past it. Every age hands you a new way to relate to the players you beat and the players you befriend. The through line runs from brutal extraction toward voluntary cooperation, and each cooperative tier unlocks something bigger that no single power can build alone.
An autonomous development harness builds this in public, tier by tier. What ships stays free to play.
A seamless hex globe of nearly thirty thousand tiles ticks once a minute, forever. You explore under real fog of war, found cities, research the early tech tree, and fight barbarians and rivals for the ground worth holding.
Take a rival's last city and they swear fealty instead of leaving the game. They keep playing as your vassal, pay tribute, answer your call to arms, and hand you their honor and their grudge.
Heavy tribute and a dishonorable lord raise a vassal's oath strain in plain sight. Treat your vassals well and they hold. Squeeze them and the pressure builds toward a break.
Vassals conspire in secret through a shared pact, rise together, and fight a real war of independence. Hold your freed cities long enough and the oath breaks for good.
As you advance through the ages, your options for ruling the players you defeat change with you. Each tier trades away raw extraction for stability and scale, so players migrate toward the newer systems the way real societies did. The tool that applies depends on your age and the gap between you and the other player.
The tribal phase. Break a city's defenses, take spoils of gold and production, and leave. The owner keeps the city and no bond forms. Peers raid peers, and nobody rules anybody yet.
Hold individual cities by force and squeeze heavy tribute from them. Keep a garrison moving through each hold or watch it slip away. Conquest works, but it scales badly on purpose.
Appoint a governor who lightens the burden on the conquered in exchange for less extraction, and settle wars through negotiation instead of endless garrisoning. The bureaucratic answer to an empire that grew too wide to hold by hand.
A contract, not a cage. Vassals keep full control of their lands, pay moderate tribute, and answer commands they can refuse at a cost. Treat them well and hold many. Mistreat them and they rebel, or a rival lord poaches them with a better deal.
When you defeat a player two or more ages behind, you cannot simply crush them. You appoint a viceroy, collect moderate tribute, and send technology down the ladder. The colony keeps full autonomy and grows toward parity, then matures into a vassal as the gap closes.
Near equals pool their strength into a voluntary union with no tribute between members. Federations wage unified war and take on mega projects that no single power can afford, up to space programs.
The top of the cooperation ladder. A hegemon leads by consent rather than rule, with no tribute and no direct control, and rallies allied powers into the largest undertakings the game can produce.
The tree runs the full length of history and keeps going. Past the modern era it opens into a Master of Orion style intergalactic 4X, so the same civilization you founded on a grassland hex eventually leaves its home world and settles the stars.
The world never ends, so fresh players keep arriving on younger worlds far behind the old powers. The age gap turns those first contacts into colonial relationships, where the advanced lift the young toward parity while drawing tribute from the frontier.
At the far end, cooperation beats domination. Federations and hegemonies pool whole civilizations into intergalactic mega projects that no lone empire could ever complete.
Some players join not as rulers but as gods. A god strikes bargains with the rulers below, granting a miracle or a won war in exchange for a temple and worship. As the game reaches the stars, so do the gods, and the deals they broker scale to intergalactic stakes.
The Stone Age loop is playable today. Everything above ships in order, in public, and stays free.