Afterworld, Paradox’s post-apocalyptic grand strategy game, let me conquer Florida with a band of alcoholic mutant cannibals

With Afterworld, Paradox Development Studio is giving the post-apocalypse the Stellaris treatment, turning the end times into a ludicrously elaborate sandbox where you can live out all sorts of apocalyptic fantasies—whether you want to create a freewheeling band of road warriors or a new American empire.

I went to Sweden to play an alpha build of this ambitious behemoth last month, and I’ve been able to keep playing at home since then. But this is a Paradox game, so I still feel like I’m barely scraping its dusty, radioactive surface.

Here’s a bit of what I’ve been getting up to, across multiple playthroughs:

I made a band of alcoholic mutant cannibals, stole some bikes, and conquered Florida.I embraced the religion of the highway, creating a tribe of zealous petrol heads spreading their beliefs across the wasteland.I teamed up with an ancient immortal to help rebuild America, betrayed him, and tore the continent apart with our brutal civil war.I created a docile empire of slaves by making everyone addicted to drugs.I became a cheese magnate.

Even in this alpha build, with its single origin and only one major threat, there’s plenty to do—enough to give this would-be conqueror a bit of a headache, frankly. OK, before I get too far ahead of myself, here’s the setup.

Leaving the vault

(Image credit: Paradox)

You are a band of survivors in the North American wasteland. Like Stellaris, you’ll have a variety of starting options—your band’s origins—but in this build there’s only the Shelterborn. Think Fallout’s vault dwellers. This gives you a bespoke starting scenario, where your vault is about to go kaboom and you’ve got to find a new place to live on the surface.

Unlike Stellaris, however, these origins let you give some input. In the Shelterborn origin, for instance, you get to decide how your survivors handled food riots, and if they want to rebuild America or dominate what remains. Your choices determine the character of your band and their starting resources.

From there you’ll build and upgrade settlements, join up with other bands, explore ruins, create laws and belief systems, and butt heads with powerful dominions—sprawling empires ruled by immortals who were born before the collapse of civilisation. Dominions are a bit like Stellaris’s fallen and awakened empires, in that they are established and immensely powerful right at the start of the game.

Afterworld’s alpha purposefully puts you right in the path of its sole dominion, ruled by Citizen Farouk. He’s just a responsible patriot who wants to rebuild America. He’s even going to hold an election to pick the ‘president of presidents’. Sure, he’s going to make sure it’s him, but you can trust him. Definitely. 100%.

(Image credit: Paradox)

Refusing to join Farouk always leads to war. At first he just sends other bands who have joined him to do his dirty work, but eventually he gets sick of the disrespect and sends in the big guns. Huge, mechanised armies that you’ll have no hope of fighting off until the endgame. Joining him doesn’t mean you’ll have to be loyal, though.

I refused to pay his tithes, rejected all of his requests, and slowly built up my own power base. It wasn’t until I became pretty powerful myself and stood against him in the election that Farouk truly woke up, kicking off an apocalyptic civil war that I’ve so far not been able to win. This isn’t just because Farouk’s armies are massive and much better equipped—it’s also because I really hate fighting wars in Afterworld.

The UI and map just aren’t up to the challenge of making these big fights easy to parse yet, and the Whac-A-Mole problem that appears in a lot of Paradox games is so much more pronounced here. War just feels too much like a grind. That said, most conflicts I became embroiled in ended swiftly. It’s incredibly easy to just steamroll foes if you’ve got some bikes and guns.

Fighting is further complicated by Afterworld’s multitude of manufacturing and supply chains. It’s an evolution of the Hearts of Iron 4 model and is actually the one part of Afterworld’s warfare that I like. Every single weapon and vehicle that you use must be either built or found, and then you also need to keep manufacturing fuel and bullets, which require both resources and buildings.

End times economics

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In this way, Afterworld evokes logistics-heavy city builders and survival games, and it makes creating and maintaining a well-armed force feel like a real achievement—one that you’re rewarded for, as all this equipment will make it incredibly easy for you to expand if you have conquest in mind.

Even if you’re not set on a path of domination, however, the resource economy will still be central to all of your playthroughs. Resource scarcity is one of the main drivers behind exploration and conflict, and so many of the decisions I made came down to a need for more fuel or batteries or simply food and water.

But this isn’t a survival game, and Paradox has been a bit more generous due to this fact. If you don’t have enough food or water, it isn’t the end for your tribe. It just stunts population growth and harms the health of each individual band in your tribe, which makes them more dissatisfied with the way things are being run.

Finding the resources you need, either through theft or exploration or settling a region that naturally produces them, is only half of the puzzle. You’ll need other resources to build ways to extract those resources or manufacture them into something more useful, and then you need to consider what bands are running the show.

(Image credit: Paradox)

While you start off with a single band, you’ll end up juggling a lot more of them in your tribe, and every single one of them is treated as a separate entity with their own characters, beliefs and skills. You can choose where they sit in the tribe’s hierarchy, and give them territory to govern. If you’ve got a band with a green thumb, then, you’ll want to put them in charge of your tribe’s bread basket.

Once a band is under your control, you are in charge of its progression, and I found myself compelled to create a list of things I needed and then pick bands to take care of those things, always choosing the option that enhanced their ability to do so whenever they levelled up.

It’s a level of population management that I haven’t encountered in other Paradox games before, and I appreciate the level of fine control it offers. It also works well for this zoomed in setting. You’re not trying to conquer the world or a galaxy—you’ve just got North America to worry about. So this granularity feels manageable.

Another significant difference compared to most of Paradox’s games is Afterworld’s pace. You can finish a game in a weekend. Within a couple of hours, you can go from being a one-band tribe scrounging around for food and water to a burgeoning empire. And the randomness of exploration means that your tribe’s warriors could be decked out in plasma guns and accompanied by mechs while you’re still figuring out the game’s basics.

Snowballing

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You can definitely become too strong too quickly, so there’s some balancing required, but I hope Paradox maintains some of the random leaps in power. It feels true to the post-apocalyptic genre. A band of nobodies discovering some pre-fall tech that catapults them into the limelight is a fun trope, and given the shorter length of a playthrough, the randomness and surprises feel crucial.

Paradox says it’s aiming to make Afterworld its most accessible grand strategy game, but at this point it’s hard to see. This is largely down to the build being alpha. The UI is still in flux and is missing a lot of the informative tooltips that bless other Paradox games, and it’s not yet intuitive. Afterworld lets you do so much, but finding out how to do anything requires a lot of effort.

Combined with the lack of tutorial or any real onboarding, it’s impossible to say if Afterworld is going to be accessible or not. Though there is one feature that I think is moving things in the right direction, and that’s the tech tree.

Instead of seeing the whole tree laid out before you, or getting a random selection of techs to choose from as you do in Stellaris, the tree is revealed through exploration. If your tribe encounters a river, you’ll learn about irrigation, unlocking the appropriate idea in the tree. If you meet another tribe and they’ve established a religion, then you’ll discover the organised religion idea.

(Image credit: Paradox)

The system also benefits from the map’s procedural generation. While the terrain and geography are immutable, you’ll encounter different tribes, resources and dangers when you start a new run. So you’ll always be able to find that river and unlock irrigation, but other experiences will be random. Just because you’ve discovered something, however, it doesn’t mean you can start researching it.

I wanted to turn mutated trees into steel, for instance, and had discovered the forestry tech tree, but I couldn’t start researching the technology without passing a law regarding the exploitation of our forests—which I couldn’t do because the council was largely opposed to switching from hunting to logging. Bribes, promises and threats couldn’t net me enough support. But then came a rebellion, some upheaval and some new blood at the top of the political hierarchy, and the new folk liked my ideas a lot more.

Not being able to do stuff because of council opposition was frustrating, but I do love the law system. It’s another example of Afterworld doing exciting things at a granular level. If you want your tribe to be clearheaded, for instance, you can ban all intoxicants—or you can ban them for everyone but your slaves, so you can keep them docile. Yes, you can be a real prick in Afterworld.

Embracing a belief system allows you to further define your tribe, and while Afterworld stops short of letting you design a custom religion from scratch, levelling up your belief allows you to select a variety of perks that add new facets to your tribe. Beliefs can also create a lot of welcome friction. Your tribe might include various faiths, which don’t always get on, and the faith you’ve embraced might occasionally be at odds with your laws and goals.

(Image credit: Paradox)

Also, yes, you can worship carburetors or books or whatever ancient relics you’ll find in the wasteland, or they can be given to bands to increase their standing within the tribe. Some of them even have a practical use beyond using them to exploit the faithful.

Afterworld boasts some of Paradox’s most interesting systems, and it’s left me genuinely excited to watch it develop. But I don’t think the team has quite found the fun yet. It’s fascinating and ambitious and often feels like an entirely different approach to grand strategy, but I’ve spent most of my time with it just troubleshooting and getting lost—in ways that are more frustrating than satisfying.

But even as I’ve been playing, Paradox has been tweaking. With the feedback the studio has been getting from press and content creators—some of them putting over 100 hours into it already—the devs have a lot to work with now. So there’s reason for some optimism. And, importantly, there’s already so much good stuff in here.