Pico Nations

Pico Nations is a small and simple "strategy" game. You control a nation of pops and have to build buildings and attack enemies to have the highest score after 5 minutes.

The map is randomly generated on each new playthrough.

Pico Nations is a small project that I made to learn PICO-8. It's currently missing sound and music, which I plan to add. I had a lot of fun working on this project and learning how PICO-8 works. I really wanted to stick to the default limitations of the console, so I restricted myself to the limited control scheme, arrow keys and Z/X.

Controls

Use arrow keys to move the selected tile.
Press Z to build a building on the selected tile. What you build depends on the tile.
Press X to rally your pops to the selected tile. This can be used to attack enemy cities.

Buildings

Buildings is how you gain new resources and score. What building you build depends on the tile you're building on:
-Forest: Builds a lumbermill, costs 5 wood. Gives you a steady income of wood.
- Plains: Builds a farm, costs 8 wood. Every two farms increase the maximum population of surrounding cities (max popoulation is 9).
- Mountains: Builds a mine, costs 15 wood and 5 gold. Gives you a steady income of gold.
- Ocean: Builds a ship, costs 25 wood. Increases you expansion area, allowing you to settle across water. Can be built in expansion area.

Sand is utterly useless.

Settling

Settling a new city can be done by building on plains outside of your borders but inside the expansion area. Settling requires the nearest city to have a population of at least 3. The first city costs 15 wood to settle. Cost increases with each city.

Scoring

Each nation gets a score calculated when the game ends, and the nation with the largest score wins. The factors that contribute to score are:

- Number of cities, each city is worth 3 score.
- Population, each pop is worth 1 score.
- Gold, each 10 gold is worth 1 score.

Lexaloffle BBS Link.