Evocatio

Overview

You are a conqueror marching east. Each city you reach worships a god you don’t understand — one with generations of worship behind it. Your job is to read the city, work out what its god actually wants, and outbid the incumbent before your army loses patience.

You play through an office. The day’s docket holds petitions; each case shows its request, the local custom, and the imperial precedent. You inspect, then rule: grant relief, apply force, or deny. The Town Board renders the city as an isometric map on the same screen, so you can see what your rulings move.

The current prototype combines authored civic-religious cases with a live city simulation underneath: households, cohorts, sanctions, rituals, recovery reads, and district aftermath. The goal is still the same kind of confidence-and-regret play: make a ruling, watch the city answer, then trace the cause back through the systems you moved.

How it started

Evocatio began as just the isometric view. I could render the city, but I couldn’t find a control model that made it playable. The answer came from a different project. While building Permit Office in ArcGIS, which reused Evocatio’s underlying simulation logic, the docket-and- rulings interface clicked. I brought that office model back here, and it became how you play Evocatio.

What’s there

• A simulation engine (Rust workspace) that resolves households, agents, and resource flows into emergent, traceable crises.
• The graphical office route with an authored docket and embedded isometric Town Board; rulings map into live simulation commands and visible district consequences.
• A shell/inspection route and benchmark harness that run against the same simulation truth. The shell work is being folded back into the office route so debugging and play use the same surface.
• A friend-facing ISO playtest build with its own sendable route.

Status

Active prototype. The graphical office loop, shell inspection tools, ISO playtest build, and benchmark harness are all running. Work continues on merging shell inspection back into the office route and making causality and aftermath easier to read.