Populous

Populous casts the player as a deity competing against rival gods for control of a world. The core objective is to ensure your worshipping population expands and ultimately eliminates the followers of opposing deities.

Gameplay begins with a single follower placed in a wilderness. Success depends on terraforming the environment to create habitable land for settlements, as population size directly influences divine power. This expansion is a race against a competing god developing their own territory simultaneously, making the pace challenging.

Beyond managing followers, a god can directly intervene with supernatural forces. These include altering terrain to drown enemies, creating swamps or volcanoes to devastate enemy lands, and unleashing floods. When a population grows sufficiently, its leader can be transformed into a powerful hero unit that gathers strength from followers to assault and destroy enemy settlements.

Victory on one world is not the end, as the structure involves conquering a sequence of hundreds of worlds.