$ open ~/projects/before-destiny
Before Destiny
In developmentFork history. Choose the future.
Before Destiny is a civilization strategy game about history's roads not taken — a 4D grand-strategy sim where freedom, not conquest, is the victory condition. Configure societies from the inside out, watch Turchin structural-demographic pressure build across generations, intervene when belief-action contradictions turn into crisis, and collapse the multiverse into the timeline you choose to make real.
Grand strategy for histories that almost existed
Fork the past. Scout the future. Save a civilization from the story it was heading toward.
A playable civilization simulator where every reform, crisis, agent, and alternate timeline pushes societies toward freedom or collapse.
22
civilizations in a research foundation for belief versus action
MFI
freedom-first victory score: liberty, equity, flourishing, harm reduction, resilience
PSI
political stress from mass unrest, elite rivalry, and fiscal breakdown
3+
parallel timelines to test before you make one history real
What you do
Tune a society, watch structural pressure build, intervene with limited influence, and decide which alternate path becomes canon.
- 1
Build the civilization
Pick starting societies and configure economy, government, religion, population, cohesion, military posture, and agents.
- 2
Read the warning signs
Track wages, elite capture, institutions, trust, violence, MFI, PSI, and where the secular cycle is dragging the world.
- 3
Spend influence
Trigger land reform, public education, judicial reform, trade expansion, anti-corruption campaigns, peace accords, and more.
- 4
Choose the real timeline
Fork possible futures, compare outcomes, collapse the best branch, and archive the roads history refused to take.
Globe strategy view
Watch societies evolve in real time.
Territories, events, interventions, advisors, and cycle phases turn abstract history into a playable map.
Freedom is the win condition
You cannot conquer your way to a good ending.
MFI rewards balanced civil liberties, political rights, economic equity, flourishing, harm minimization, and resilience.
Contradictions become gameplay
Ideals are easy. Systems are not.
A society can claim justice while its structures produce extraction, unrest, elite rivalry, and institutional decay.
Agents make history talk back
Advisors interpret the simulation, civilization agents give societies a cast, and chaos agents break the illusion that history can be perfectly predicted.
The Advisor
Your advisor reads the live world state, flags risk, estimates confidence, and suggests interventions before the next crisis lands.
Society agents
Leaders, generals, and scouts carry names, backgrounds, roles, and attributes that shape how a society feels.
The Antagonist
When mass mobilization rises and trust collapses, an unpredictable disruptor ruptures the cleanest forecast.
Not just what happened. What could have happened if someone acted sooner.
The fantasy of being history's impossible observer: powerful enough to intervene, limited enough to feel the consequences, and haunted by every branch you prune.
Product pillars
- Belief versus action — civilizations defined by the gap between stated ideals and lived systems
- Freedom as victory — MFI rewards balanced liberty, equity, flourishing, harm reduction, and resilience
- Crisis as structure — collapse emerges from pressure, extraction, weak institutions, and violence
- Multiverse play — fork, compare, and collapse possible histories via the Library of Roads
- Agent-aware strategy — advisors, society agents, and chaos agents make the simulation interpretable and alive
Under the hood
- Simulation — cliodynamic tick engine: Political Stress Index, mass/elite mobilization, eight stock variables, crisis countdown
- Victory metric — Maximum Freedom Index (geometric mean of liberties, rights, equity, flourishing, harm, resilience)
- Multiverse — parallel branch forking, per-branch MFI/PSI reports, canonical collapse; Library of Roads archives rejected paths
- Stack — Godot 4 client (3D globe, Terrain3D) + FastAPI/WebSocket world server; Docker deploy, SQLite persistence, federation-ready
- Observatory UI — navigable spacetime chamber with diegetic stations, live HUD, pre-game civilization config (economy, gov, society, religion, military)
- Agents — The Advisor (Ember A2A with deterministic fallback), configurable leaders/generals/scouts, Antagonist chaos disruptions