The Waking Deep - No Gods Above Nor Below

A real-time strategy game of faith, steel and madness

Throughout the twentieth century, mankind was haunted by madness and terror again and again. In the 1930s the militaristic Church of Hope was founded to contain those who had fallen to the madness and to
keep the rest steady. In the late 1950s it largely managed to halt the horror. There was even talk of angels being sighted, but those sightings never repeated and faded into legend.

Ninety years later the madness is rising again. From every corner of the planet come reports of scenes straight out of a horror film. Still isolated, but their number is growing…

The Waking Deep is a classic base-building real-time strategy game. Build a base, claim resources, research technologies and lead your armies to victory, in matches that typically last 15 to 30
minutes.

Command land and sea, and reshape the battlefield

Victory rarely goes to the biggest army. It goes to the commander who uses the terrain best. Every map is shaped by large bodies of water, and how you combine land and naval forces decides the war.

• Rule the waters: warships can attack enemy supply routes from the coast, claim water rifts for extra income and hold large stretches of the map that land armies cannot reach.
  
• Build bridges: lay new crossings over rivers and straits to open a surprise route into the enemy's flank, or link up your own expansions.
  
• Destroy bridges: blow up a crossing to cut off an attacking army, protect your base, or strand enemy troops on the far shore. Anyone standing on a bridge when it collapses goes down with it.
  
• Fight for chokepoints: bridges, land bridges and hill ramps channel every attack. Hold them, fortify them, or go around them by sea.
  

Every bridge you build or tear down changes the map for both sides, including the routes your own army relies on.

Two factions that play nothing alike

• The Humans: tanks, infantry, war machines and a navy, backed by the Church of Hope. Build power plants on geothermal rifts, keep your troops supplied, expand with mobile outposts, and send
  engineers to bridge any stretch of water. Field soldiers, snipers, rocket launchers, chainsaw-armed walkers, the colossal War's End, gunboats, and the Church's own zealots, artillery and shield-bearers.
  
• The Deep: ancient horrors risen from the sea. No power plants, no supply lines. Its buildings spread corruption across the land, and corruption is its economy: every rift it swallows
  pays, and every enemy who stands on corrupted ground burns. Its amphibious creatures cross the shoreline at will, its sunken cities rise from open water, and its stone causeways grow wherever its corruption
  reaches. Overwhelm your foes with masses of believers and Deep One hybrids, priests of Dagon and Mother Hydra, the teleporting Mi-Go, shoggoths, and the towering Star-Spawn summoned through a star gate.
  

AI opponents that learned to play

The AI does not follow scripted build orders. Its decisions about what to build, research and attack were shaped by training: thousands of matches it played against itself, in which the winning strategies
survived. The result is an opponent with its own habits rather than a fixed routine you can learn by heart. It decides where to expand, when to raid your economy instead of attacking head-on, and which units
it needs to counter what its scouts have seen of your army. Trained opponents are available for both factions.

Features

• Deep tech trees: dozens of research options per faction, from weapon and armor upgrades to abilities that define the faction.
  
• Three resources: Energy, scarce Dark Mass from contested pools at the center of the map, and (for the Humans) Supply that has to be kept up or your army starves.
  
• Living maps: neutral guardian camps protect valuable resources, villages can be captured for vision, forests block line of sight, and hills give the high ground.
  
• Fair, endless maps: a procedural map generator with five map types (central waterway, lakes and rivers, lane network, open plains, islands), all rotationally symmetric, plus five hand-crafted maps.
  
• Skirmish against trained AI: play either faction against AI opponents of either faction.
  
• Online multiplayer: 1v1 matches against another player over Steam.
  
• Replays and save games: every match can be recorded and watched again at up to 8× speed, from either player's perspective.
  
• Original soundtrack with music for each faction.
  
• Fully localized in English and German.