Automata Empire challenges you to control swarms of cellular automata creatures rather than individual units, shaping their chaotic patterns to destroy rival castles and expand your territory. Drawing inspiration from Conway's Game of Life, it blends RTS strategy with emergent systems where indirect manipulation replaces traditional command-and-control. Players seeking a genuinely novel take on strategy games will find its learning curve rewarding, though those expecting conventional RTS depth may be disappointed.
About this game
Seize power and build an empire of fuzzy cellular automata monsters! Herd hundreds of mindless subjects to smash your rivals' castles and steal their territory in this RTS inspired by Conway's Game of Life.
What players are saying
▲ Recommended9 hrs
This is excellent! I got to try a demo of it at PAX South a month ago, and I thought it was a cool concept, but I wasn't sure how well it would actually work as a strategy game. I can now confirm that it works rather well indeed!
It's very different from any RTS I've played before. Instead of issuing orders to individual units, you're trying to shape an every-shifting pattern into something resembling an army. And, seemingly inevitably, the whole thing grows out of your control: you can't be everywhere at once, and if you spend a minute focussing on one side of the map you're likely to find that your monsters on the other side have mindlessly spread out and populated whole areas.
The standard "WAR!" deathmatch mode is pretty easy once you've learned some basic tactics: just flood the map with your units and you'll probably win. The other modes introduce some interesting twists; I've tried Capture the Flag a few times now, and every time I think I've got it figured out the AI does something unexpected and ruins me. The AI seems quite clever; it's pulled a few sneaky manoeuvres on me.
I can't wait for multiplayer! Will this be the first RTS I'm actually good at? (Probably not.)
Games mechanics are quite interesting. Takes a bit of time to get the hang of it, definitely one of those 'easy to learn, hard to master' experiences. Main gripe is the music track, there is only one, repeating track which while quite nice, will destroy your soul after half an hour.
Game modes, difficulty settings, customisable number of AI per match, even an autoplay mode where you 'do not' play, but watch AI duke it out. Needs multiplayer, but apparently it is coming.
Game seems to be worth the price all in all. Defininitely recommend assuming you like the genre.
Extremely basic game. I started a game on highest difficulty without going through the tutorial and was able to beat the game simply be eliminating all my own buildings. Any game that can be beaten without interaction from the player isn't worth any money or time.
As some of you may have noticed, leaderboard scores strangely weren't uploading for anyone except me, the developer. With a little help from a few people sharing their seemingly unrelated crash logs, I've been able to fix both the crash issue and the missing leaderboard scores, which turned out to be related. I've had a lot of fun playing multiplayer this week and a handful of people have already gotten the achievement for beating me. I hope I can get a team of 4 together to try pushing back the undead on Migration so we can all unlock the Alliance of the Living achievement too. http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/11728301/946db80e787acbdf94babc27b551503e1da07232.png Time to start filling up the leaderboards with your high scores. If you don't see anyone else online when you're playing, you can try scheduling matches with other players in the Multiplayer forum or you can challenge me by tweeting at @Nonadecimal.
As some of you may have noticed, leaderboard scores strangely weren't uploading for anyone except me, the developer. With a little help from a few people sharing their seemingly unrelated crash logs, I've been able to fix both the crash issue and the missing leaderboard scores, which turned out to be related. I've had a lot of fun playing multiplayer this week and a handful of people have already gotten the achievement for beating me. I hope I can get a team of 4 together to try pushing back the undead on Migration so we can all unlock the Alliance of the Living achievement too. http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/11728301/946db80e787acbdf94babc27b551503e1da07232.png Time to start filling up the leaderboards with your high scores. If you don't see anyone else online when you're playing, you can try scheduling matches with other players in the Multiplayer forum or you can challenge me by tweeting at @Nonadecimal.
Automata Empire's online multiplayer is here! You can now play 2-4 player matches against your friends around the world, proving yourself a master strategist. Or form an alliance to drive back the undead hordes on Migration and unlock a rare cooperative achievement. Show off your skills on Steam's global leaderboards. Plus the newly added stats page tracks your progress and reveals the state of the ongoing rivalry between the Red and Purple factions (sorry Orange). http://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/11728301/e5653ee9a06fabbbf533dbe6dde0962405f3a806.png It took a little longer than originally planned but multiplayer wouldn't have been possible without all the extra features, performance improvements, and bug fixes released in updates 1-3 over the last few months. I challenged myself to achieve a lot of new things with this game: gamified cellular automata, AI that can play an RTS competitively, online multiplayer and leaderboards. I'm proud of what we've been able to accomplish with Automata Empire. If you agree, please leave us a positive Steam review. Thank you! And I hope that 3 of you will help me defeat all the undead so I can unlock that brand new achievement. As an added incentive, the game is going to be 25% off all week to celebrate the multiplayer launch. Tell your friends! Here's the full patch notes for this update: added online multiplayer with multiple region servers added Stats page to display past gameplay performance added online leaderboards for multiplayer high scores added 2 new Steam achievements for cooperatively eliminating the undead on Migration and for beating the game's developer in multiplayer more performance improvements monsters now wear monocles properly in the postgame awards fixed construction timer bugs normalized the length of turns in singleplayer and multiplayer fixed bug that caused undead to arm themselves faster than they should fixed issues with long names in postgame awards fixed bug that ca...
Posts come from Steam's official announcements feed.
