Heart of the Machine v0.857-Skidrow

Set in the far future, Heart of the Machine is a turn-based sci-fi 4X RPG where you play as a powerful sentient Machine Intelligence, beholden to none. Pursue whatever goal catches your eye across a multitude of playthroughs with a plethora of tools to help you achieve objectives how you’d prefer, often in surprising and unexpected ways, while overcoming those that seek to thwart you. Genetics labs, factories, nuclear silos, military complexes, and much more besides are ripe for the taking, each offering a litany of ways to accomplish your tasks, each with consequences of their own, building a world and story that reflects your approach to every obstacle. Will you raise an army of robots and wipe out humanity? Perhaps you will be a benevolent – or malevolent – machine god with a cult of loyalists? Or will you focus on pushing past the limited intelligence of rudimentary creatures of flesh and blood?

Hijack, build, or invent hardware ranging from humanoid androids to towering mechs and shapeshifting metals, each specializing in different abilities from combat to conversation to infiltration. Iterate on your designs based on new discoveries uncovered in the pursuit of specific objectives. Establish hidden structures within existing human buildings, or raise your own towering constructs as you seek additional computing power, storage for organic matter of both the human and non-human variety, and spaces to conduct dangerous experiments of all kinds. Invent your own tools, seek out upgrades, and manufacture powerful equipment to unlock new opportunities – will you take these tasks on as one, risk splitting your consciousness to accomplish multiple goals at once, or enlist organics to your cause?

Many choices lie open to you. Perhaps you wish to establish a shell company to add a layer of protection and obfuscation to your true identity, using it to engage with humans without revealing the AI puppet-master pulling the strings? Walking this path will allow you to accumulate massive wealth, employ humans to perform tasks without raising alarms, and act from the shadows. Or if violent conflict is your calling, you might divert your attention to developing the most powerful weapons platforms and upgrading them with devastating equipment instead of improved cognitive functions that allow them to tackle problems with intellect instead. There are many approaches to choose from, and you can engage with multiple objectives at once to see how they collide.