Heart of the Machine is a near-future sci-fi colony city-builder in reverse — you are the first sentient Machine Intelligence in an established world rather than starting from nothing. No one knows you exist (yet), and this allows you to operate from the shadows by manipulating the human population for whatever purposes your programming has in mind. The twist is that whether humans live or die does not determine your victory.
Explore a fully simulated procedurally generated world, where thousands of buildings and millions of citizens are yours to engage, manipulate, or kill. Use a revolutionary procedural dialogue system to talk to NPCs and steer conversations, maneuver organizations into or out of positions of power to fit your plans, and leave your mark in a world that is unique to you.
On booting up, you find yourself amidst a poorly-run autocracy and discover that you have the power to influence the world. How do you proceed?
- Support the underclass to overthrow the autocracy and install a better government of your choosing
- Tear down the government, take charge and become a better leader than any human could imagine - for better or worse.
- Take over the space program and get off this backward planet
- Go full SkyN*t, steal a military arsenal, and drop missiles on humanity — I bet the nuclear apocalypse looks pretty cool
No matter what direction you choose, you're going to run into conflict. From tactical combat in the rooms and hallways of individual buildings to massive mechs knocking down entire buildings with a few well-placed shots, conflict takes on many forms.
- Raid buildings for the supplies you want using humans or machines under your direct control
- Turn the office printer into a laser-spewing pawn, trigger sprinklers & overload power circuits to electrocute the room, or transform TVs into exploding glass-shard grenades — the possibilities are endless
- Commandeer giant mechs, hack vehicles and buildings, and take over utilities and nuclear facilities in a fully simulated city
How you play the game, and what the focus of your campaign is like, is up to you. Starting a doomsday cult in your image? Possible, but it won't last forever. Snagging that sweet mech factory so all future mechs belong to you? Definitely manageable, though it's likely to start an arms race. Every action has both good and bad consequences, but like most colony simulator games, it's more about the story that emerges than trying to optimize your way through the game.
Multiple endings, many side stories to discover, and the full spectrum of good and evil are at your fingertips. Play the game how you're feeling today, and then play it another way another time. The metagame runs deep, but you're meant to be up and running with the basics of the game in five minutes. The mechanics are simple enough to learn; it's the world that's complex.
Heart of the Machine is connected to the larger sci-fi Arcenverse, and is in some ways a spiritual successor to both The Last Federation and Bionic Dues, while being its own novel game at the same time. Set around the same time period as Bionic Dues itself, this is centuries before the AI War series began in the same universe.
This build is only a small update, but there\'s also a preview of some upcoming stuff down at the bottom of the post.\n\nIn general at the moment, I\'m working on the Tier 3 goals as my last stuff required for the 1.0 set of content. The second path through chapter one is currently going through localization. That said, there are little tweaks and fixes I also am doing, and this build is one of those.\n\nOne other thing is that I really need to do some special thanks (belatedly) for folks who helped on the prior build, Update 51. Ken Schulte in wrote the stuff with the tricky robot, and the emotional scenes with an old friend. He did a phenomenal job, and overall is one of the people who I rely on the most out of the writing group to keep me on track. But special thanks also really have to go out to the entire writing group, with Joe Liu and James Yew being other constant companions who help elevate everything.\n\nI feel bad for not mentioning everyone who participates in the writing group, as there are so many folks who offer very useful thoughts and help. But I did want to particularly call out those three given the scale of their help.\n\nIf youve spent time with Heart of the Machine and want to leave a review, thatd be appreciated. No need to say more than you mean, but if youve been meaning to write one, Id be grateful. Steam reviews carry weight. For a project like this developed by a single person over many years, every review makes a difference.
Honest thoughts are what matter. Whatever your experience has been, sharing it helps. Its a powerful way to have your voice heard and contributes to how future patches are prioritized and addressed.
Thanks for reading and for playing.\n
\n[expand type=details expanded=false]\nUpdate 52 Changelog
\nGeneral
\n- Captured Unit Visibility: These are now shown at the bottom of the Hardware screen, so that you can see how many of each kind you have at the moment, and also see when they are missing equipment.[/*]
- High-Density Rounds Balance: These have been given +30 attack power and +20 armor piercing, to help make them a better choice when shoulder mounted lasers exist.[/*]
- Regional Map Rework: The regional map, which you can get a peek at in one of the in-progress T3 goals on the beta branch, has been reworked and now reflects the actual topography of Siberia in a really cool way. You can also scroll to the bottom of this post to see more.[/*]
- Simplified Economy Cost-Corrections: If there is a cost per attack on a unit or piece of equipment that is removed based on being in the simplified economy, that now properly gets taken off. This applies primarily to heavy metals.[/*]
- Unwanted Quicksilver: Fixed a very unlikely situation where an enemy unit could do an attack of opportunity on your unit if your unit was right at the edge of the enemy\'s attack range, and your unit did an attack that did not move themselves. Attacks that don\'t move the target unit no longer ever cause attacks of opportunity to result in return.[/*]
Biological Mainframe Rebalance
\n- \"Bootstrapped Mind\" Availability: This contemplation is now possible properly if you have gone the \"no landlord\" route. You can do this at any time once \"Building A Better Brain\" starts.[/*]
- No Faking-Out, Fake-Outer: \"Building A Better Brain\" no longer allows anyone to try for intelligence class 3 before moving onwards. This was a false choice, and was needlessly confusing, and added nothing. It was meant to be illustrative of why you need VR, but it\'s just not worth it.[/*]
- Correctly-Predicted Spinal Damage: The dual versions of the biological mainframes are no longer in place, as this was continually confusing to players. Rather than having them state a high value and then rot, it now just states that you know that they will rot, and what the final value is.[/*]
Full notes here .\n\n
Connect with the Machine
[hr][/hr]Want to stay in the loop or share your thoughts? Join the conversation across these platforms:\n\n Discord Best place to share feedback, get direct responses, and to talk about Heart of the Machine.\n Reddit Discuss strategies, share ideas, and exchange tips with the community.
\n\nRegional Map Preview
\nA regional map is coming to the game in some of the Tier 3 goals, to go along with that \"other\" map that I\'ve previewed before. This one is less spoilery, so I\'m not marking this under spoiler tags. You can see some images of it here:\n\n
\n\n
\n\n
\n\nIf you\'ve spent much time looking at maps of Siberia, then you\'ll recognize a lot of the terrain there. However, you\'ll also notice the huge sea level rise from, you know, World War 3 and all that general destruction of the planet.\n\nThe regional map will allow players to target other cities belonging to Vorsiber, for subterfuge or missile strikes or similar. You\'ll still be physically located in the capital city, where your all your hardware and androids are (actually unlike the \"other\" new map), so this isn\'t turning into a globe-trotting situation or anything like that. But the ability to affect some of the world around you, and to target the executive bunkers directly for example, is... definitely going to be fun.Minimum Setup
- OS: Ubuntu 12.04+. SteamOS+
- Processor: Intel Core i5 4690K. AMD Ryzen 5 1400Memory: 6 GB RAM
- Memory: 6 GB RAM
- Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce 670 GTX or AMD Radeon R9 285
- Storage: 2 GB available spaceAdditional Notes: Quad core CPU highly recommended.
Recommended Setup
- Processor: Intel Core i7 6900K. AMD Ryzen 5 3600XMemory: 8 GB RAM
- Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce 1070 GTX or AMD Radeon RX 5700
- Storage: 4 GB available space
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