I built Syphilisation with the aim of making a postcolonial 4X game. Taking an ideological lens to an established genre allowed me to derive novel mechanics and generate a game that plays out in fundamentally different ways. There are a lot of assumptions rooted firmly in the 4X space and designing a postcolonial 4X game pushed me to examine them and helped me come up with alternatives.
The 500 update brings the game to the point where I feel it hits all of the notes that I want from a postcolonial 4X game. All of the bones of the experience I wanted to make are now in the game. There are still a lot of things to be fleshed out, a lot of features to add, both large and small and a ton of quality of life improvements to make but the core of the game is now fully present.
Some things don't come through fully though. This last update revamped the pollution and inspiration mechanics, but they're both understated right now. The interpersonal dynamics also need a little bit more space than they currently have. I'll write out a full rundown of what's left to do sometime next week.
However, I'm very happy with where the game is right now. It took a lot of work to get to this point and for the first time, I can look at the game and see that it does everything that I wanted it to. I didn't even know if this would be possible when I started working on Syphilisation and I had to learn a lot to get the game to this point but now I feel like I can actually put it out there as a postcolonial 4X game and really feel that it delivers on that promise and that's very exciting for me. I hope you have fun with it!