Hi,


As a follow-up to today's stream with the Devs (and a direct response to their question), here's an idea for a potential  new collaborative challenge towards unlocking a Culture, just like the Mississipians in their time. The concept here would be a multi-step process to ensure community engagement and maximize the impact of dev time investment, loosely inspired by the way the Umbral Choir was implemented into ES2. 


It could work as follows ; 

- Step 1 : Affinity / a time-limited, community-wide challenge based on era stars or FIMS gathering, the result of which would determine the future Culture's affinity. 


- Step 2 : Era / a second time-limited challenge based on era stars accrued across all played games that would determine the culture's era (accounting for the Contemporary era's specificities)


- Step 3 : Shortlist and final vote / based on the results of steps 1 and 2, a few proposals would be put forward by the dev team in line with their orientation and inspiration, and the winner designated by a vote on Amplifiers. An additional step could entail the determination of the continent / cultural area, but let's keep it simple !


Example : Step 1 points towards Expansionist. Step 2 towards Early modern. Devs then submit two concepts, one for the Portuguese and one for Songhai. The winner gets implemented into the game !


An actual way to make games together !