Not Ready for Service

Not Ready for Service is a turn-based tactics game on a hex grid with no initiative order. Set in 2239, you are a specialized doctor, an immunician; you control a set of micro-bots to fight pathogens inside a human body. Form your squad from dozens of different units, fight pathogens, save lives, advance in your career, and learn the fundamentals of the immune system: the difference between self and other.

Fight to preserve life

Every fight takes place in a piece of living tissue. Each combat is procedurally generated for the organ it belongs to. Deploy your squad, act with your units in any order you like, and hold the Cells against the pathogens. You are not protecting a health bar. You are protecting the Cells, keeping a person alive. Lose the fight and the tissue is lost with it.

Analyze the Pathogens' Intent...

The Advanced External Guidance for Immune System, AEGIS, predicts every pathogen's intent with 100% accuracy, showing you the enemy's whole plan before it happens. Perfect information is your starting point. Can you synthesize the perfect plan?

...and exploit their paths.

Drop a hazard, a mine, or a trap on an enemy's path, lure them in with various actions, and let them crumble under your tactical decisions!

Use Cytokines to tilt the odds of each battle

Each patient comes with a set of Cytokines: power-ups that affect both the Player and Enemy units when picked up. Use them to improve your units, or to degrade the enemies. 

Evolve your units during each combat

Pathogens drop genetic fragments once they are eliminated. Any player unit that collects them can upgrade an action of their choosing. With carefully selected upgrades across different units, discover synergies and dominate the battlefield!

Across the patient: the clock only moves when you move

Zoom out and the patient is a map of nodes. Every node is a tissue. The infected ones carry a timer, and when it runs out, the infection spreads to neighbours. The only way to clear a node is to go in and fight for it. Win or lose, coming back out costs a tick of every timer on the map. Winning clears the tissue. Losing hands it to the infection. So which fight you take, and which one you leave alone, is a decision with a price.

Invoke the body's various defenses

Between fights, use different inflammations to reshape the node map. The battle against the infection can be won or lost with a simple decision. Are you ready to take the responsibility?

Unravel the story behind your character

You are an immunician trainee, recently moved to another country, curious to discover life expressed through different cultures. When you were young, you lost your mother to an infection because there were not enough immunicians to save your mother. This affected your career choice. You also like being exposed to life and living things, and admire the fundamental idea underneath the immune system. The fact that those mindless cells, that used to work before the compound, could separate self from other.

In the demo build

• 3 patients: a scripted tutorial case and two week-one assignments, one skin and one muscle, each with its own tissue map, infection, and permitted squad

• 7 pilotable immune cells: a Macrophage and a Neutrophil always deploy; the third slot is one pick from two drawn out of five specialists (Sentinel, Bulwark, Courier, Trapper, Lurer)

• 5 pathogens across 2 families: every one of them with different intents

• 7 inflammations on the patient map: Scout, Immunize, Quarantine, Cauterize, and three Boosts

• 10 maneuver verbs: Won fight by fight, and a 22-axis mid-fight upgrade catalog paid in Genetic Fragments

• Tissue boards generated fresh for every dive; a lost Cell stays lost

• 13 languages, interface and subtitles (translated from English with AI), and an optional Hard Mode

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