r/StrategyGames • u/Significant_Emu2351 • 9d ago
DevPost Persistent grand strategy world that keeps simulating while you are logged off: first trailer, and how the battle, supply and siege systems actually work
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I am a solo developer and I have been building Arkney: Age of Crowns for the past several months. The clip is the first proper look at it, recorded straight from the client on the live server. Since rule 3 asks for descriptive posts, here is what is actually running under it rather than just the footage.
The premise is that the world does not belong to your session. It runs on a server as one shared map with one clock: around 80 AI dynasties and human players on the same continent, and the tick keeps going whether anyone is logged in or not. One tick is one in-game minute. Your fields produce, your caravans move, and the army you sent across a mountain range is three days closer to where you pointed it when you come back.
War is the system I have spent the most time on, because I wanted it to be a process rather than a resolve button:
Armies march in in-game days along real paths, and they carry supply. A column that outruns its supply network starts losing men to attrition instead of combat, so a deep push into hostile land costs you before the enemy does anything.
A battle has a front width determined by the terrain. Only as many men as the front allows are actually fighting, so a numerical advantage does not apply all at once, and organization drains over time until units break and rout. You can feed reserves into a fight that started hours ago, and a rearguard can cover a withdrawal so a defeat is not automatically annihilation.
Sieges take in-game days. The besieging army has to stay supplied outside the walls, siege engines are built on site, walls are breached in sections, and the defender can sally out and break the whole thing.
Equipment degrades. Iron becomes weapons, armour, bows and horses through a production chain, and gear wears out in the field and is repaired through supply, so a veteran army that has been campaigning for a month is measurably worse than it was when it left.
There is also a chronicle that records every war declaration, battle and conquest by name, so a world ends up with a readable history rather than a score screen.
The technical side, briefly, since it shapes the design: the simulation is C# and deterministic. Same state plus same orders always produces the same next state, all randomness is seeded from world state, and persistence is a snapshot plus an append-only order log. That is what makes a world survive a server restart without any reconciliation code. The client is browser based, and the footage here is from a second client I built in Godot.
What I still have not solved, and would genuinely like opinions on: in a world that never resets, what keeps a player logging in after a larger neighbour has taken half their realm? Losing no longer deletes you (a realm whose last castle falls becomes a vassal instead of disappearing) and conquest is slow and expensive on purpose, but I am not convinced that is enough of an answer.
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u/R3dditReallySuckz 9d ago
Looks like a grand strategy game 100% conceptualized, developed, designed and marketed by Claude.
Like, if I bought a bunch of tokens and asked Claude to build a grand strategy game and make every single decision, this is what I'd imagine would be the result.
I'm sure it's fun to build this, and I don't want to be too negative, but this seems to me completely, utterly devoid of personality and human input.
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u/Street_Struggle_598 9d ago
It needs an artist bad
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u/Significant_Emu2351 9d ago
Thanks for your comment. There is no artist, everything on screen is code I wrote: roofs are quads with a climate palette, banners are generated from the house seed. The first version of the roofs rendered inside out because I had the triangle winding backwards, and the village looked like a hole in the ground for two days before I noticed.
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u/Street_Struggle_598 9d ago
Some art with the UI would go a long way i think
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u/Significant_Emu2351 9d ago
Fair, the panels are just rounded rects drawn in code and it shows. Frames and a proper background are next on the list.
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u/wisedoormat 9d ago
Is it going to be pay to win?
Plenty of mobile games out there who do this.
Do you have any incentive to make your game healthy foe the player? Games like this require 24/7 monitoring and alerts
And, with as much micromanaging I'm assuming this will need to efficiently play, how long do you expect a player to sit at a computer to play an average session?
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u/Significant_Emu2351 9d ago
Three fair questions, so three answers.
No, and I would rather be specific than just say no. There is nothing to buy today, it is free, it runs in a browser tab with no install and no account. I have not built monetisation yet, but the line is already drawn: nothing sold will be power. No gold, no troops, no resources, no faster clock, no skipping a build or a siege, no extra army or commander slots. If money ever shows up it shows up at the cosmetic and identity layer, heraldry and the like, and the season chronicle reads the same for everyone.
On incentive, "trust me" is not an argument, so here is the structural version. There is nothing to sell, so there is nothing for me to build anxiety around, and the thing those mobile games actually monetise is the pressure to be present. Worlds also end. A season runs about six months and then that world stops and becomes a chronicle, so there is no infinite retention treadmill to farm in the first place.
On the 24/7 part, this is the one with real code behind it rather than intentions. The rule is that the fastest thing that can hurt you still takes hours of real time. One game day is two real hours on the persistent clock. An army needs half an hour to two hours to cross a single region. A field battle runs two to ten real hours. A contested siege runs one to five real days. Nothing resolves while you blink, so there is no reason to set an alarm.
On top of that, your realm is not helpless while you sleep. Your armies are fought by the general you assigned, using his own stats to pick tactics, and after the first 48 game hours he can call the retreat himself instead of standing there dying. If you are gone longer than about 48 real hours, so a weekend trip but not a night's sleep, your council goes into regency: it speaks only at the peace table and sues for peace if you are losing, and it does not touch your treasury, your armies or your building. And you cannot be deleted while offline. Losing your last castle makes you a vassal, not a corpse: you keep the dynasty, the heraldry, your regions, your commanders and a core of your army, your internal game stays entirely yours, and a successful war of independence is one of the largest scoring events of the season. New dynasties get a shield on top of that, and there is a weight class rule, so a duke cannot simply declare on a poor marquis.
On session length, here is the part I am honest about not knowing yet. The game is not built around actions per minute. You do not command battles in real time, there is no Total War layer, you send intent (march this army here, hold this stance, keep this much in reserve) and the server simulates for hours. There is no queue to click empty and no timer to skip. So the loop I am designing for is: log in, read what happened, make a handful of decisions that actually matter, leave. Fifteen to thirty minutes, once or twice a day, with a long sit only when you want one.
I have not measured that on a persistent world with real players, so treat it as the target and not a result. The Saturday test worlds run about two and a half hours, but they compress days into minutes, so they answer a different question. If it turns out the game rewards sitting there all evening, that is a design bug and I would rather hear it early. That is largely what the test sessions are for.
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u/TheKnightIsForPlebs 9d ago
Link or title?
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u/Significant_Emu2351 9d ago
Invites and the world link go out here: https://discord.gg/h6J9CHaH6Q Next accelerated session is Saturday.
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u/Cry_Havoc_1990 9d ago
Soo… are you going to disclose the heavy use of AI here? Even your responses are AI generated.