The Gaming Den

So. Sometimes I'm in the mood to be an incredible dick. I want to crush the will of the populace, extract every useful ounce from my populace and send them to the glue factory, make the dead weep for the living, basically create a hell on earth. What's more, I don't want it to be like Galactic Civilizations or Dungeon Keeper where the consequences of your actions are implied or offscreen. I want to have game events to reflect your depravity, complete with your advisors staring in shock and your victims begging for mercy. Think Jade Empire.

So. What games are out there that will let me fulfill this perverse desire?

There's some game where you design and run a prison. And can change the sanitation and make it a labor camp and so on.

I know Zinegata plays it. PM him.

Black and White lets you be a dick, both to the populace and to your creature.

But it's a Molyneux game. So it's been advertised as awesome but is really quite average at best.

ADD-ON: Rollercoaster Tycoon is an exercise in how shitty you can make a theme park and still meet your goals. And when you're done, create a Death Coaster to maximize the death and destruction.

Papers, Please. You are given power over life and death, and you have to use it to get enough salary to buy a potato for your next dinner.

@Maxus. Prison Architect. It's still in its alpha.

Lago PARANOIA wrote:So. Sometimes I'm in the mood to be an incredible dick. I want to crush the will of the populace, extract every useful ounce from my populace and send them to the glue factory, make the dead weep for the living, basically create a hell on earth.

Populous on the Genesis.

Dominions 3. Play a blood nation with a nature bless.

In Dom3 you have blood magic, which works different from most other forms of magic because it's powered by sacrificed virgins. And to get those virgins you send out goons to scour villages, find those blushing maidens, drug them into submissive state, and then walk them off to be used to fuel demonic summons or what-have-you. This generates unrest within the province so it's recommended that you have footsoldiers patrolling so they can catch and summarily execute the outraged family members who dare to object. There is a spell you can cast where a mage bathes in the blood of 10 virgins and becomes 10 years younger. There's also a pair of human-skin boots you can make that will cease the wearer's aging, and even give them a bit more endurance on the battlefield. And since powerful mages are often old (and damned expensive), and since old commanders will eventually get diseased and die, you will gladly rig up blood showers and human-skin cobblers to keep those old diabolists alive and doing your bidding.

Speaking of disease, there's this item in Dom3 called a Fever Fetish. The commander holding it gets a fatal fever, but while they wait to die they sweat fire gems (stuff used to fuel fire-based spells and forging fire-based items). Normally you hire some cheapo scout and let the disease consume him over the course of a year, before prying the fetish from his lifeless fingers and passing it on to the next victim. But that's not evil enough. Since your god offers a nature bless, your sacred troops and commanders will regenerate. Regeneration, among other things, arrests the progress of disease (you won't get better but you won't die). So what you do is forge a bunch of robes each anointed with the blood of a martyr, and then have your blood-hunting goons wear them while holding a fever fetish. The robe makes the wearer perma-blessed, so your commander will live on and on in wracked, perpetual ailing torment, his body tortured by a disease given to him by the very god that refuses to let him die, and who uses his agony to fuel its sorcery. And during this condemned existence, the commander must lurch from village to village, stealing daughters away from screaming families so that their blood can be used to power demonic summonings, or be spilled across a temple floor to compel worship from the frightened locals. The disease will continue to afflict the commander --he will eventually lose his limbs, he'll go blind, he will limp and labor to breath, go mute or even insane (all actual, in-game afflictions... not me waxing poetic)-- but he will never die unless his liege and tormentor allows it... which it won't because free fire gems and good blood hunters are worth waaaay more than the sweet release of death.


There a nation of cannibal giants (based on jewish mythology) who will steadily consume your population and also love them some blood magic. There is an Aztec-inspired nation whose faith can ONLY be spread by sacrificing virgins atop the ziggurats. There is a nation of corrupted crusaders who will summon angels to fight alongside devils, and whose priests are skilled inquisitors (the symbol for that skill is a red-hot poker and heated tongs). There is a nation of outraged beastmen, who have made a pact with a dark, mad god so now seeking vines grow across the land and will grab, penetrate, infest, and puppet the victim (alive or dead at the time, the vines aren't picky) around as a plant-zombie. It's not all grim-dark and atrocious, but if that's what you're looking for, Dominions has it.

The Dominions community is also full of people who will give you advice and then recoil in horror when they see what you're actually doing.

Lago PARANOIA wrote:So. Sometimes I'm in the mood to be an incredible dick. I want to crush the will of the populace, extract every useful ounce from my populace and send them to the glue factory, make the dead weep for the living, basically create a hell on earth. What's more, I don't want it to be like Galactic Civilizations or Dungeon Keeper where the consequences of your actions are implied or offscreen. I want to have game events to reflect your depravity, complete with your advisors staring in shock and your victims begging for mercy. Think Jade Empire.

So. What games are out there that will let me fulfill this perverse desire?

In Crusader Kings 2 you can..


- cheat your wife.
- f*ck your brother´s wife
- f*ck your son´s wife
- send your brother, you son, your father, your mother and your grannies to jail and hang them
- sacrifice your enemies (or your family) to Odin
- assassinate your friends
- plot for taking the throne of that big friend of yours
- spit in the face of the king
- be envious, wrothful, lustful, gutonous and any other capital sin you wish
etc.

And much more. In my last game I f*cked my sons daughter and made her pregnant. Then my cuckowed son tried to rebel and I killed him, and send the bitch to the jail to die (with the child in his belly).

I remember reading about someone's adventures in an amusement park simulator where they made a roller-coaster that launched the carriages into a competing park, which got all the negative response from 'having people die on their property,' leading to increased attendance at his park, leading to more people riding 'The Ballistic Arc,' and so on...

Maxus wrote:There's some game where you design and run a prison. And can change the sanitation and make it a labor camp and so on.

I know Zinegata plays it. PM him.

I deny all of these allegations against my prison from Prison Architect.

I do not keep all 200 of my prisoners in a single 4x5 room. I did not give them only a single toilet and bench (no beds) for the entire population. I did not intentionally put the prison's lone functioning shower in the middle of the only prison room.

I also did not reduce the entire prison's ration into the unvarying fare known as "cabbage every day, forever"; nor was I sadistic enough to refuse to feed my prisoners and leave them to watch the cafeteria next door ceaselessly cook food to throw away into the garbage can immediately.

Most of all, I did not implement a 24/7 workshift wherein prisoners work without food or sleep until they fall unconscious, at which point their punishment is solitary confinement in a 1x1 cell. Nor did we post 24/7 guard dogs to beat up prisoners who show the slightest signs of rebellions.

We will only admit to an unusually high number of injuries suffered by the prison populace. Though this affects our finances from all the lawsuits, it is more than made up for by our profits from the workshops. We may be billed $1000 per injury (which we get twice daily), and $50K per death (which happens every 3 days), but when we earn $50K daily from our prisoner workshop production our prison is simply a model of financial gain and security.

In fact, you will find all prisoners released from our prison (and there are a few!) so deliriously happy to be freed from my prison that you won't get them to testify at the upcoming war crimes tribunal being called against me at the Hague.

Those are some curiously specific denials, Defendant, and contradicted by your own testimony in these records.

The prosecution rests its case.

Meh. Compared to the other charges against me in the Hague (e.g. Sending 50,000 Soviet soldiers into a death pocket to buy 2 day's delay against the Fascist hordes and calling it "Victory"), the work camp is pretty mild charges.

Zinegata wrote:Meh. Compared to the other charges against me in the Hague (e.g. Sending 50,000 Soviet soldiers into a death pocket to buy 2 day's delay against the Fascist hordes and calling it "Victory"), the work camp is pretty mild charges.

Unity of Command, or some other WWII strategy game?

Shatner wrote:

Zinegata wrote:Meh. Compared to the other charges against me in the Hague (e.g. Sending 50,000 Soviet soldiers into a death pocket to buy 2 day's delay against the Fascist hordes and calling it "Victory"), the work camp is pretty mild charges.

Unity of Command, or some other WWII strategy game?

Proud Monster on the tabletop, War in the East on the PC.

Angling for a job offer with the alphabet soup agencies, Zinegata?

MisterDee wrote:Angling for a job offer with the alphabet soup agencies, Zinegata?

I'm not an American so they won't hire me. Besides which, the CIA is currently in the midst of being especially dumber than it usually is.

Could probably get a consultancy gig though; that's where the real money and brainpower is nowadays.

Almost an entire page of game suggestions and nobody mentioned Dwarf Fortress yet? The Interface is legendarily bad, but it seems a large part of the late game is building elaborate devices to torture or execute your undesirables nobles.

But you Need to get to the endgame there...

Korwin wrote:But you Need to get to the endgame there...

Yes, I'm aware of the difficulty cliff. Also, I should had put quotes around Interface.

Dwarf Fortress doesn't quite count because you don't have a physical presence for the dwarves to react to.

On the other hand, your fortress can easily end in misery quickly even if you aren't trying, so you don't really need the deathtraps.

Alpha Centauri. It has an "atrocity" score, need I say more?

If you want to go old-school, there's always Afterlife.

Lago PARANOIA wrote:I want to crush the will of the populace, extract every useful ounce from my populace and send them to the glue factory, make the dead weep for the living, basically create a hell on earth.

I'm surprised no one has mentioned Heroes of Might and Magic. Just make a custom map with lots of Peasant Hovels and a Necropolis fire up the Skeleton Transformer.

Dungeon Keeper. Send creatures to their deaths! Chuck enemies (or your subjects, whatever) in the prison to starve to death! Or throw them in the torture room and torture them until they die (and become ghosts) or convert to your cause! Minions working too slow? Slap them! How about infecting your own creatures with a plague, then sending them out to be slaughtered by enemies (and sharing the plague with them)? Or you could sacrifice your own creatures to the dark gods - just don't sacrifice an undead, or you will be cursed.

First Dungeon Keeper has a number of bugs, but looks better (decent sprites as opposed to early-days polygons) and has more monsters rather than "evil people". And has personalised torture methods for each monster (and hero) type. On the other hand, DK2 has "My Pet Dungeon", a sort of freeplay mode.

I agree that Dungeon Keeper is an excellent game, and does allow you to be a gleefully evil asshole. However, to quote the OP

Lago PARANOIA wrote:What's more, I don't want it to be like Galactic Civilizations or Dungeon Keeper...