Lucasart's Afterlife

Tags Afterlife I can hardly believe I’m writing a blog post about a game that came out 27 years ago, but here we are. Lucasfilm, at one time had a gaming subsidiary called Lucasarts, and they produced something that has never been sequeled or surpassed : Afterlife. Here is your elevator pitch for this game – “What if you combined Simcity with Heaven and Hell ?” I clearly remember loving this game, playing up until 2 billion souls, and being so frustrated with certain aspects that I hex edited game files in an attempt to unlock the Omnibolges. But I don’t have all the details. After a fair amount of searching through the interwebs I have found only a few sources of information about the game. This is also the only game with no subreddit dedicated to it. Forum Posts from 2013 laying out bits of strategy. The Afterlife FAQ – this is vintage ’90s, when we put these massive text documents together. And the really surprising thing, an Article from November 2023 from a guy who clearly loves the game and “has beaten it”. After starting and stopping a few different games, I have thoughts about tactics and game mechanics. And I need notes to get to the point where I win as well. BAD THINGS – Turn them off. You get half the soul rate, but leaving them on guarantees both boredom watching the nose/picnic basket, and they ruin your super fiddly carefully constructed astral plane. MONEY CHEAT – I highly doubt you can get through the game without at least one money cheat. It’s $@! which I remember as SHIFT-421. This is due to the strange negative cashflow you start out with and need to manage down by growing the size of your heaven/hell. ROADS – Roads are odd in this game. You want them to be inefficient in Hell which suggests one super long snaky road. Yet I also remember reaching a point where the roads have a bug – no one is on them. After they get a certain population there’s probably some overflow error. In 2023 I have not reached that point. Roads in Heaven should be efficient, so think nice squares with zones / infrastructure in the middle. For neither do I think I have the best building strategy yet. ZONES WITH VIBES Each type of zone – or color – puts out a certain type of vibe. To make matters worse, as you go through the development cycle, each zone goes from positive vibes to negative, or from negative to positive, or bounces from positive to negative ending in no vibes. So far I’ve ignored this dynamic since you have incredibly limited ways to influence the vibes in the game. And this may be a big problem. INFRASTRUCTURE WITH VIBES Some buildings put out positive vibes, like the Topias, Training Centers, and Reward buildings. Others put out negative like Gates, Karma Trains, Siphons, and Karma Portals. ADJACENCY BONUSES Heaven likes to be diverse. You’d like each zone to have as many different other types next to it as possible. Of course Hell is the opposite – a sea of Green gives the best adjacency bonus. SIZE SURPRISES Several buildings go through an upgrade cycle. At least one will screw you up. Your first gate will probably be 3×3, and so will the second. The third gate is a 4×4 building. It will spill over when upgraded if room is available, and if not you can’t build it. There may be others. POPULATION SURPRISE When you first sit down and look at the game you’d think “I get it. Those 1×1 buildings have certain population sizes, and better ones have more size”. This is true – but the size amount changes as the game progresses. In other words, the population in any specific 1×1 building gets larger as time goes on. This deserves some documentation. Later. ZONING STRATEGY – HEAVEN The obvious strategy would be to go for 3×3 buildings in some kind of road box. Pearson recommends 2×2, which I haven’t tried out yet. I’ve had good success getting 3×3 buildings so I think the next game includes 3×3 as a goal. It is possible that if you modified the above to fit 4×4 buildings, that would be a good strategy. You could introduce more diversity for the corners that way. The center zones get 4 diversity which is probably the maximum. All this said, I feel pretty good about the first idea for Heaven. ZONING STRATEGY – HELL Assuming a goal of 3×3 buildings, you want as little diversity as possible. Only roads and the same type of zone next to each other. The trick is, the 3×3 buildings never seem to develop if you make a gigantic zone, just look at that first screenshot. 25 million souls in Hell, and four 3×3 buildings. I think some of the explanation is that to develop a 3×3 zone, the game will not break down any 2×2 zones into “nothing” or 1×1 tiles, it will only make them even. If this is correct it suggests that you isolate areas until 3×3 buildings develop. So maybe the key is to let each of these 3×3 blocks develop into one, then zone in the middle area with additional green. Or, maybe Pearson has the right Hell strategy with only 2×2 buildings. Problem is, if that is correct, you still should do a modified version of the above. LOCKING STRATEGY There is a 2×2 building for each type of zone that is the best in terms of highest population. These are worth locking – they can devolve to less valuable 2×2 buildings. What’s not so obvious is that buildings do not seem to devolve from 2×2, to four 1×1 buildings. Put it this way – I’ve never seen it happen. And so, there’s no need to lock your 3×3 buildings. It’s a small thing but each lock costs you around 10 pennies a year. Time to start a new game with these lessons learned from four recent attempts. To some degree your score is the number of SOULS you collect, and my games have gone from 1 million (test game), to 14 million, and 83 million. Can I do better next time ? 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