Introducing: Age of Rites (Work in progress)

BFranse · April 20, 2026, 8:05pm

Hi there ,

I’d like to slowly start introducing a project I’m working on: Age of Rites. It’s a grid-based isometric 3D RTS set in a fantasy world where gods are central to the gameplay. Besides building a base and an army, you devote yourself to one or multiple gods whose demands will shape your play style.

Taking heavy inspiration from Age of Empires 2: Definitive edition (In play style, speed and depth), I am aiming for a game that’s easy to learn, hard to master.

Everything in this post is very early and can still change.

Gameplay loop

What I currently have in mind for the gameplay loop is as follows:

Gather: Collect resources to fuel economy and military
Build: Construct buildings for production, tech, and divine worship
Devote: Invest in your chosen god(s) through prayers, sacrifices, and rituals
Fight: Engage the enemy with units shaped by your race and divine bonuses
Adapt: React to opponents god choices, army composition, and map state

Resources

It’ll have the resources you’d expect: Food, wood stone, gold and faith. The first four are gathered from the map, but faith is gathered differently, depending on the god(s) you’ve chosen. For example, for one of the gods I’ve drafted the idea of needing sacrifices. You’ll get a special unit that needs to collect bodies (Either after a fight, or sacrifice your own) to sacrifice at a temple. (I realise this could very well be a “sounds good on paper, but not in practice” type of idea, but we’ll see).

Priests, rituals and win conditions

Every player has 1 priest. It can defend itself but is weak in combat, but relatively fast. If this unit dies, it’s game over (Also known as “regicide” gamemode in RTS games, or defend the king), but traditional win conditions are also possible. Such as domination, enemy resign, or ascension (After reaching the last tier of a god’s progression and building a wonder in it’s name, that you’d protect for a given duration). I envision priests to be a high risk high reward type of playstyle. To “age up” you’d have to perform rituals physically at the temple. The priest must remain stationary at the temple for the duration of the ritual.
Each ritual consumes real resources from your stockpile as offerings (food for feasts, wood for pyres, gold for adorned altars, stone for shrines)
Different gods demand different resource mixes per unlock, pressuring your economy in specific directions.
I want to create artifacts. One per god. They need to be collected with a priest, and put into a shrine (one shrine can hold one artifact). They give a trickle of faith, but cannot be too close to other artifacts in shrines. Once a shrine holding an artifact is destroyed, so is the artifact, and the player destroying it gets a single chunk of faith. (Again, with artifacts I’m hoping to have priests go out as a high risk high reward type of play).

With this, I hope to create a point of interest. Enemy players might target and attach the temple area to force the priest off the temple, which’ll slowly decay your ritual progress.

Gods

I’ve roughly drafted 4 gods concepts currently. I will share more info about them in a later post. Rather than picking bonuses at fixed age-up moments (AoM style), players have access to all gods during a match and continuously invest in them via in-game progression trees.
Besides, I envision gods to have demands besides bonuses, forcing you into a specific playstyle when you align yourself with a god.
Each god has a rival, progressing in one causes regression in its rival (internal to the player, not cross-player). This might change, but for now I have this idea to prevent maxing out everything in a match, and enforcing specialisation over generalisation.

Races

I currently have 6 races roughly sketched out, but I doubt I’d be able to do them all so I’ll focus on just 2 for an eventual demo down the line. Races share core unit categories (villagers, infantry, ranged, etc.) but with meaningful stat and visual differences. Each race would have a unique passive mechanic that changes how you approach base-building, expansion, and combat.
Every race can align with every god, so you’re not too restricted.

Progress

I learned that building an RTS is a lot of work before you can really see or do anything. Because one of my goals was to build it lockstep deterministic from the start (In case I ever want to dabble in multiplayer, but also for logging, replay, etc.). But it’s slowly shaping up to be something. I’ve got a pretty ok pathfinding system in place for now, and some placeholder models (as I’m learning 3D modelling with this project also with BlockBench). But obviously it’s still very rough.
Currently working on the resource gathering and economy for this epic. And the next one will be focussed on unit production from buildings.

I’ll be sharing more info over the coming time, probably ask for input and help from you, the community, but continue to slowly chip away at this project.

Here’s some impressions of the current state:

dragonforge-dev · April 21, 2026, 9:10pm

I love AoE2. One of my all time favorite RTSs. Very neat idea.

phoenixdk · April 22, 2026, 4:36pm

Sounds cool, I like the god aspect, and that the gods are equally indifferent to everyone, as opposed to one faction having one god. I can already imagine the literal and metaphorical battle for the gods’ attention

An idea - a way to do this might be to have the priest gain godly favor, and become stronger / harder to kill? It fits the god focus, and alleviates the potentially brutal priest game over. Another way to limit the stakes (if you wish) could be having gods resurrect priests, in an amount of time that’s reduced by the amount of faith the player has, or a cost of faith.

Do put up a demo when you feel ready enough

BFranse · April 22, 2026, 6:42pm

I’ll definitely note those down as ideas. I’m curious how playtesting will shape the game over time! Thanks for your input

parallaxis · April 22, 2026, 7:01pm

The god devotion system kind of reminds me of Age of Mythology too, but the idea of continuous investment, combined with rival gods causing regression, sounds really interesting.

dragonforge-dev · April 22, 2026, 7:57pm

Age of Mythology was so disappointing compared to AoE2.

BFranse · April 23, 2026, 5:26am

It’s funny, when I was brainstorming for this idea and I was working on the gods I felt like I really found some untapped concept, and then after a few days I remembered Age of mythology. Luckily I think the way I intend to make them work is very different from Age of Mythology.

It was indeed. I did see some marketing for the remastered edition but it didn’t appeal to me enough to give it a chance.

BFranse · April 28, 2026, 6:48pm

Hi ,

I want to share a direction / concept of one of the gods I have been drafting up. Again, keep in mind this is all subject to change as development progresses.

The blood god: Lord of slaughter

Domain: War, death and carnage
Demands: Bodies. The blood god hungers for the dead. Enemy or your own. Fallen units on the battlefield can be collected and offered, or you can sacrifice your own units directly for faster but costlier progress.
Ritual costs lean towards: Food and gold (Victory feats, gilded trophies, bone)
Playstyle push: Aggression, constant fighting, post battle body harvesting. In quiet moments, sacrificing your own units to keep faith flowing.
Unique unit: Collector: A non-combat unit that hauls bodies from battlefields back to the temple. Creates post battle decisions: Chase the retreating enemy, or secure the corpses? Opponents can contest body sites to deny you faith gains.
Strategic tension: Enemy bodies are “free” faith since you were fighting anyways. But sacrificing your own is faster and on-demand. Early sacrifice of villagers can rush tier 1, sustained combat feeds later tiers.
Rival: Nature god (Death and destruction versus growth and preservation)

I already foresee some challenges balancing the corpse collection and the ritual offering of your own units, but hey, what’s another challenge on the pile ?

Curious to hear your thoughts!

phoenixdk · April 28, 2026, 9:34pm

It sounds perfectly reasonable, and the balancing shouldn’t be too bad… you mainly just need to find a reasonable relationship between bodies and faith.
I like that it adds some gruesome necessity, so you really feel the god worship has an impact on the culture of your people.

dragonforge-dev · April 28, 2026, 10:01pm

Very Zerg-like.

BFranse · July 7, 2026, 7:47am

It’s been a while since I posted. Life has gotten in the way, but I’ve not been idle.
I’ve worked on the other gods. A lot of stuff I’m still not 100% sure about and will probably change over time during development, but for some direction:

The Nature God - The Verdant Mother

Domain: Growth, fertility, the wild
Demands: Protect the natural world. Dont clear-cut forests, maintain groves, tend the land. Faith grows when the world flourishes under your care.
Ritual costs lean toward: Stone and Food (earthen shrines, harvest offerings)
Playstyle push: Sustainable economy, map control through blessed resource nodes, spreading your influence across the land rather than concentrating it.
Unique unit - Druid: A support unit that can bless resource nodes (farms yield more, quarries produce faster) and consecrate groves to generate faith passively. The nature players faith engine is peaceful but requires map presence - you need to spread out and protect your blessed sites, making you vulnerable to raids.
Strategic tension: Your power comes from the land itself, but protecting scattered blessed nodes across the map stretches your defenses thin. Opponents can target your druids and desecrate your groves.
Rival: Blood God (growth and preservation vs. death and destruction)

The Industry God - The Great Architect

Domain: Construction, craft, civilization
Demands: Build. The Industry God measures devotion in stone laid and structures raised. Monuments, forges, walls - every building is a prayer.
Ritual costs lean toward: Wood and Stone (grand constructions, elaborate stonework)
Playstyle push: Turtling, economic boom, dense base-building. Your infrastructure IS your devotion.
Unique unit - Artificer: A specialist unit that enhances your own buildings. The Artificer walks up to a building and performs an upgrade ritual, generating faith and granting the building a small buff (extra HP, faster production, or more garrison space). Each building can only be enhanced once, so the Artificer is constantly moving around your base improving things. When you run out of buildings to enhance, you build more. Faith generation is tied directly to active construction and improvement - the mirror of the Disruptor Gods Saboteur (one strengthens your buildings, the other degrades the enemy’s).
Strategic tension: The Artificer needs buildings to enhance, pushing you to expand and construct. But every resource spent on buildings is a resource not spent on military. Enhanced buildings are visibly marked, so opponents can read how deep your Industry investment is. The Artificer itself is a non-combat unit that needs protection while working.
Rival: Disruptor God (building things up vs. tearing things down)

The Disruptor God - The Unmaker

Domain: Sabotage, entropy, decay
Demands: Undermine. The Unmaker feeds on the suffering of your enemies - damaged buildings, disrupted economies, chaos sown behind enemy lines.
Ritual costs lean toward: Gold and Food (bribes, poisoned offerings, corrupt ceremonies)
Playstyle push: Harassment, targeted sabotage of key enemy structures, information warfare. You dont need to destroy your opponent - just make everything they have work worse.
Unique unit - Saboteur: A stealthed unit (invisible unless near enemy units or towers) that can hex an enemy building, reducing its output or disabling it for a duration. Can only hex one building at a time, long cooldown, dies easily if caught. Low micro requirement: send them in, pick a target, they work automatically.
Strategic tension: Saboteurs are fragile and high-value. Losing one hurts, but a successful hex on a key building (enemy barracks before a push, their temple mid-ritual) can be game-changing. Counterplay is clear: towers, patrols, detection.
Rival: Industry God (tearing things down vs. building things up)