Have you ever wanted to create (and grow) a tribe of "human beings"?
Have you ever wanted to crudely manage the collective lives of a small group of "arguably real" "people" with "state of the art" tables, buttons, and input fields?
Have you ever wanted to attack, talk to, and trade with other tribes, managed by people you don't know, over a basic and uninspired (yet web-TASTIC) user interface?
Well, NOW YOU CAN!
Visit SinaTribes (currently hosted here) to follow along. Or, click here to try to host it yourself.
When you first navigate to the website, you are given two options: sign up, or log in. Sign up if you don't have an account, or log in if you already do (don't worry, passwords are hashed!). You don't have to give it your real email address, if you aren't comfortable with that. Just go ahead and make a dummy one and no one will ever know.
The assumption here, given that you're reading this README, is that you've never played the game before. So, in that case, you will be presented with your home screen—this is where you can manage all the tribes you have created. Currently, you have none. So, click the "New tribe" button to get started (alternatively, click on "World" in the top right to view the other tribes active in the world of SinaTribes, then click "Create a tribe" right next to that link to continue here).
Now, you're presented with a tribe creation page. You can choose a name for your tribe (woefully uncensored) and a religion (learn how to make suggestions for new features like "I want Wicca in the game. WHY ISN'T WICCA IN THE GAME?" by clicking here). Then, press "Create tribe" to found your new community.
If you have made your tribe's name too long, you will see that I... poorly designed the CSS and damn it I should fix that overlap now. My suggestion: Make your tribe's name shorter! At least until the dumb maintainer (curse you, maintainer!) fixes the issue. If you don't see the issue, then I lied and there are no bugs in this game at all. Ahem.
After creating your tribe, you are brought to the Tribe Management page. Before we explore this, go back to your user home page (click the big "Sinatribes" home link/logo in the top left). Create a new tribe so I can show you about "active tribes". Go ahead, I'll wait.
Done yet? Great! You're so good at this. Now, go back to your user home page again, and see that there's a button on your old tribe that says "Make active tribe". You can only have one active tribe at a time, but you can switch them easily (and as often as you'd like) with this button. Try it now!
Your "active tribe" is the one you will send messengers from (if you would like to interact with other tribes) or attack from (if you would like to make other tribes angry at you). Switch them around from the user home page (the big "SinaTribes" link up in the top bar). It also governs which tribe has a quick link to the tribe management page in the top right navigation menu, and which tribe's messenger activity the "Messengers" link (in the same nav) brings you to.
You can get back to your tribe management page from a few places, which are self-explanatory once you see them. The easiest way to do so, however, is to click your tribe's name in the top right navigation menu. This brings you to your active tribe's management page.
Right now, you'll see a few different tables. Depending on the size of the screen you're using, they may be arranged a few different ways. I'll assume you're on a pretty sizable screen since that's the norm these days. If you're on mobile, it shouldn't be too hard to pick up on what I'm referring to.
At the top left, we have the General Information table. This shows... general... information... about your tribe. You can buy land here. You'll want land because 1) you have a chance of randomly discovering resources as your expand, and 2) keeping your population density under 50 people per square mile keeps them happy.
Your technology score currently doesn't do anything. I kept it there as a reminder that all you suckers are still tribes, so don't start getting cocky once you have a spread of land and buildings rivaling that of NYC.
Below the general info table is your Census info. Here, beyond the helpful data provided to you, you can enlist warriors, invite farmers, and ordain priests. Right now, you'll only see the option to invite farmers. You can have up to ten farmers per hut you build.
You get the options to enlist warriors and ordain priests once you have built barracks and a temple. We'll get into building buildings in a bit.
Farmers, beyond padding your population, give you increased output from farms, yielding more food per farm when harvesting if you have excess farmers per farm. I'm leaving it up to you to figure out exactly how much more. Also, again, you can only have up to ten farmers per hut so they don't get all claustrophobic and mad at you. They're a little prissy.
Warriors can only be enlisted if you have built at least one barracks. They add to your offensive and defensive strength scores, which add considerable weight to the random outcomes of raids. We'll get more into those later. They also make your tribe feel more protected, which adds to your population's happiness. Each costs $50 to enlist.
Priests can only be ordained if you have built at least one temple. They add to your tribe's happiness. They also contribute significantly to your defensive score if you have a heckuva lot of them, but you didn't hear that from me. If you have, again, a heckuva lot of them (metric units), you get a little defensive help from THE GODS™. Each costs one cloth to ordain.
Over to the right we have three more tables. One is finances. Shows your GDP and your collectible taxes. You can collect more taxes the more farmers you have, the happier your people are, and how many of certain buildings you own. I'll let you figure that out. You can collect taxes from your population once every five minutes.
Below that table, we have two more. These tables will grow and shrink as you play. The one on the left is your resources. It displays how many of each resource type you currently have. It doesn't display resources you do not yet have.
You get resources from buying up land (you have a chance to discover certain types of resources), using buildings (see the next section), from gifts brought by messengers (we'll get to that later), and by winning raids (offensively or defensively).
To the right, there is an infrastructure table. This shows the buildings you own. You can build buildings with the drop-down menu at the bottom of the table. Buildings cost a monetary amount and a resource amount. Go ahead and buy a few. Most have behind-the-scenes uses (e.g. walls and hospitals increase your defense, barracks increase strength and allow you to enlist warriors, etc.) but some have interactive uses. For example, mines will allow you to collect "mine-able" resources such as stone, iron, and coal, whereas farms will give you food, and factories will give you cloth. Experiment and see where this takes you.
Smack dab in the middle is a table for your military information. This table displays your offensive score (this is matched up to another tribe's defensive score if you raid them) and your defensive score (do I have to say this again?). These scores do not deterministically decide the outcomes of your battles (as in, it's not purely checking your attack score against their defense score), but they heavily weigh them one way or the other. We'll get more into that when we talk about raids.
The "War messages" area displays the outcomes of recent battles you may have waged or been subject to. Check here for changes after you've raided a tribe, or periodically to see if you have been raided.
You can view your messenger activity (the messengers you've sent or received) if you click the link in the middle of the tribe management page. Alternatively, click the "Messengers" link at the top right to go to your active tribe's messenger activity.
Messengers can be sent from tribe to tribe to relay messages or send gifts. You can send one from the World page, a user's page, or a tribe's public page (which can be accessed through the World page, most simply).
You can send a message with your messenger, and you can also attach a gift to the little guy. Your gift can be comprised of money, warriors, and/or one resource. You can't send anything you don't have, so DON'T BOTHER.
Once you've sent a gift, you can see the status of your recently sent messenger through the messenger activity page. This page lists your sent messengers and your received ones.
Here, you can view messages and gifts from other tribes, accept gifts from received messengers, reject messengers to be passive aggressive to their home tribe, reclaim gifts from messengers of yours which have been rejected by their destination, and see when someone has rudely taken your gift yet rejected your messenger.
Hope that last one doesn't start a war!
Speaking of war, let's talk about raids.
You can attempt a raid on another tribe (with your active tribe) by going to that tribe's page and clicking "Attempt to raid tribe". Careful! This can be dangerous. Try to estimate their strength. If you think you can handle it, go for it.
The chances of beating another tribe are random. However, those chances are weighted proportionally toward the attacker if their offensive score is greater than the defender's defensive score, and vice versa. Your offensive score is determined by a bunch of different factors, including number of warriors, happiness (for morale), and having certain types of buildings (like barracks). Your defensive score is the same way, but determined by different types of buildings (walls, for example) and there's a special case if you have a buttload of priests. But that's hard to do (and sustain).
If you win a raid, you receive 25% of their resources, randomly selected, as well as 50% of their money. On the other hand, if you lose a raid, you lose 90% of your warriors, and 90% of your iron, stone, and wood, and the defender picks it up from the battlefield. So, be careful about who you attack. There's some real risk there.
You can see the results of your raids (and raids you have defended against) in the "War messages" part of your military table, on your tribe's management page. You can clear those messages, too, if you just want to forget.
You can see how other users see your tribe by going to your tribe's public-facing page. Click the name of the tribe on your management page to get there.
You can see other tribes by clicking their name wherever there is a link on it (the World page, their user page, your messenger activity page, etc.).
If you want to install the game and try to host it on your own, clone this repository:
git clone https://github.com/kjleitz/sinatribes
You're going to need to install and set up postgres if you haven't already:
Alternatively, to use sqlite3, put this in config/environment.rb:
ActiveRecord::Base.establish_connection(
:adapter => "sqlite3",
:database => "db/#{ENV['SINATRA_ENV']}.sqlite"
)right below the line that says:
Bundler.require(:default, ENV['SINATRA_ENV'])Then, delete config/database.yml and config/puma.rb, and you should be able to run it locally with rackup.
Either method you choose (postgres or sqlite3), you'll need to rvm install 2.2.5, rvm use 2.2.5, then run bundle install. You can create and seed the database with rake db:create, rake db:migrate, and then rake db:seed. Then, finally, serve the site locally with rackup.
If you care about session security (like if you're not running it locally), you should set an environment variable for the session secret (e.g. export SECRET="some secret string") before you serve the site.
Bug reports and pull requests for this project are welcome at its GitHub page. If you choose to contribute, please adhere to the Ruby Community Conduct Guideline so I don't have to go around breaking necks, running out of bubblegum, etc. If you'd like to make a suggestion for new features, make them in the "Issues" section and I'll try to get around to implementing them.
This project is open source, under the terms of the MIT license.