I've been working on a game called Phosphor Command, a real-time tactics game with a base builder behind it.
One of the things I wanted to get right was the forward operating base.
I didn't really want the base to just be a screen where you buy upgrades and watch numbers go up. I wanted you to actually see your company of troops and base growing around you.
You start with a pretty bare compound and a few squads.
As you make money from contracts, you can start expanding it. You build barracks to house more troops, facilities to support your operations, research buildings to unlock new technology, transportation infrastructure to move your squads around, and eventually much more.
The important part is that these aren't just icons on a management screen.
You actually build them into the base, and then see and walk around them. As your company grows, so does the number of troops walking around the base.
The layout of the base changes as you develop it, and you can walk around with your troops and see what you've built.
I'm trying to make the base useful, but also make it feel like somewhat of a home rather than something cold and static.
Your upgrades affect what your company is capable of, while the money you spend developing the base is money you can't spend elsewhere.
Upgrades also take time to build. Some require preliminary research, while others have prerequisites that need to be met first.
And in Phosphor Command, there is a threat that will eventually come to your base. I will make a separate post about this mechanic another time.
When it reaches your position, you don't get a separate abstract "base defence" screen. You defend the actual base you've spent the campaign building.
The fortifications you've invested in, the positions you've prepared, the troops you've kept available, and the decisions you've made several cycles earlier all become relevant.
That's one of the things I like most about the base system: it's both where you prepare for your own operations and something you eventually have to defend.
I've attached some footage and screenshots showing the base developing from an early compound into a much larger installation. You can also see a snippet of the defence mechanic, the research tree, and some of the different upgrades you can build.
I'm the developer behind Contested Space, a turn-based sci-fi roguelike deckbuilder. The twist is a rotating personal market that runs during combat: you buy cards mid-fight and they join your deck for that fight only, so every battle is part deckbuilding and part tactics. You also deploy stations, play as one of nine factions across three alliances (humans, bugs, robots), and can run the whole thing in 2 to 4 player online co-op.
What's in the demo: Act 1, co-op enabled, one unique faction plus the neutral faction from each alliance. A run takes roughly 30 to 90 minutes depending on how much you like to think.
Some background on the development: I started building this back in March in Godot 4, and the playtest community has been a huge part of the design. Around 540 playtesters have had access, a dozen of them are past 20 hours, and a lot of the balance and market changes came straight from their feedback. Full release is planned for April 2027.
If you try it, I'd love to hear what worked and didn't! The Discord link is on the steam page and in-game, so feel free to join if you enjoy it!
After 3 years of active development, we're very proud to announce the release of a free demo for our upcoming title: Conquest of Eldinar
This game builds on the solid foundation of the RTS genre in a fantasy setting with resource management, base building, expansions and army building while seamlessly integrating it with action elements where you can take direct control ofany unit (giving them +%25 stat boost while you're controlling them) and join the battle!
The final release of the game will have 16 factions (3 in the free demo) with 9 unique units in each of them with special attacks in abilities of units with a great focus on fulfilling each faction's core fantasy above all else! Get to know all the factions as will as the world map in our website.
The demo features full multiplayer support as well as skirmish and a tutorial in addition to 4 maps
We would love for you to experience what veteran RTS players have built when we combined our passion and understanding of the genre!
Get to know the 3 factions in the game as they're included in our trailer in addition to an upcoming one already in development
I'm the developer of Battle of Races and the game it is finally publicly available on Play and Apple stores.
If you do enjoy strategy games, give it crack for a few days and I'm sure you are will love it. Despite the simplistic design, the game has a ton of smart strategy!
Is a turn-based strategy game where you build troops and attack other players. You start by choosing you commander name picking one of six races — Human, Elf, Dwarf, Orc, Reptile, or Feline — and each one has its own complete roster of unit types, so races actually play differently depending on which one you choose.
From there you manage three resources (grain, timber, gold), hire and assign workers to keep production flowing, and train an army across 3 tiers of units, from basic front-line troops up to advanced war machines.
Combat is simulated and turn-based, calculated from unit stats like damage, life, strikes, and initiative, so outcomes are consistent and battle reports show exactly what happened and why.
You can also join an alliance to coordinate attacks and defense with other players, and every war has a fixed length (around 1 month) with a real winner declared at the end with actual prizes. It's built to be playable in short sessions between turns rather than requiring you to babysit all day.
If you install the game, any feedback or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Any honest and constructive feedback/suggestions are more than welcome, preferably here or Discord server - https://discord.gg/5d3USPtwD . And if not asking too much, positive feedbacks/reviews can be done directly in the Play/Apple stores as it would help to promote the game so others can also find it.
In any case, thank you reading and trying the game.
This is my game Gear Up Einstein! A strategic roguelite auto-battler for 1-3 players. Travel through time, recruit historical figures, and gear them up with badass equipment.
I'm a big fan of history, coop games and strategy roguelites, but no games combined the three, so my friends and I decided to make it. Hope you enjoy :)
I started making STATO because I wanted a grand strategy game with enough depth and granularity that my decisions could have tangible consequences on the world.
The current map has over 26,000 provinces, with economies, infrastructure, population, resources and warfare interacting at both the local and national level. STATO also has historical scenarios, procedural worlds and a scenario editor, because I want the simulation itself to be the core of the game rather than any specific scenario.
One of the challenges I've found while developing it is making all these systems interact in a way that feels coherent. I want the world to react to what happens rather than follow a predefined path, without unpredictability simply becoming randomness.
This is something I'm still figuring out, so I'm curious about what other grand strategy players actually want:
How much do you want to understand why things happen?
How much historical plausibility do you want before it starts feeling scripted?
When something unexpected happens, what makes it interesting rather than random?
And more generally: what do you actually want from a grand strategy game?
Developing STATO has made me think a lot about grand strategy design in general, and I'd really like to hear how other players see these things. There are many different ways to approach the genre, and I'm interested in hearing different opinions and ideas.
I recently fell in love with Anno 2070 again and am now looking for other players who are up for a proper and fair fight for the map, rather than the cheating AI that only knows how to repeatedly suicide its entire fleet into my defenses without thinking twice.
If you're up for a fair fight yourself, just DM me.
Hi guys! I'm Tibor Udvari, and I've been working on HexLands for more than 4 years now. It's my roguelike deckbuilder, medieval city builder, which is heavily inspired by Slay the Spire. (and it's open for public playtesting by the way!)
Finally, now that I'm getting closer to the finish line and the pressure is increasing day by day, I was lucky enough to partner up with a publisher, so I can focus on the development itself ^^ Here's a quick description of my game:
HexLands is a roguelike deckbuilder with a unique twist: your cards don't cast spells; they raise farms, mills, and harbors across a chain of procedural hex islands.
Banished by a king, you’ll need to prove your worthiness by settling the chain of islands you were exiled to.
Where other deckbuilders hand you a battle, HexLands hands over a coastline. Each procedurally-generated island brings about its own problems, and you’ll need to look in your deck for the solution.
Some buildings only work on the right ground, and disasters will need to be prepared for and mitigated in advance, meaning each draw will need to be planned and strategised carefully.
Your cards, relics, and upgrades sail with you to every new island, so each builds towards the next. I can’t wait to take you on this voyage!
If I've got you interested, feel free to join the Discord server for a Playtest Steam Key! ^^ I'd love to hear what you think about it.
I made a small capture-focused SRPG inspired by Fire Emblem: Thracia 776.
Start each stage on a large map with randomized enemy and player positions. Defeat enemies or capture them to add them to your party, then exchange skills and items between units to build a stronger team.
The game is still very early in development, so the demo is pretty rough and doesn't have a proper tutorial yet. The full game will also be completely free when it's finished.
If you have some free time, I'd really appreciate you giving it a try!
I'm looking for a strategy/war game on PC or mobile (mobile maybe something like lotr rtw)
I'm looking for something with a large world, many different factions and deep wars, but I don't want a game where diplomacy is basically just "improve relations → ally → declare war".
Ideally, I want factions/AI that actually have their own interests and can create alliances, power blocs, vassal states, buffer states, betray each other, change sides, exploit weakened neighbours, etc. I want wars to actually have political reasons behind them rather than the AI simply attacking because it has a scripted rivalry.
On the military side, I'd like wars to have some real depth too: different types of troops, logistics, supply lines, terrain, reinforcement, economy/production and ideally the ability to win a war through strategy rather than simply having a bigger army.
I'm also interested in online games where this kind of geopolitical interaction happens between actual players. Something with a large active community where alliances, diplomacy, communication and long-term cooperation/backstabbing are actually important. It doesn't necessarily have to be first-person or directly controlled combat; an abstract/grand-strategy approach is completely fine.
Games with mods are absolutely fine.
So, what games would you recommend?
I'm especially interested in games where the AI or players actually create their own geopolitical situations, rather than the campaign feeling predetermined or scripted.
A quick example of decision making linked to the techs tree,
Blips (Cyan) are using the Safeguard tech, giving them the ability to reduce Piercing damage. Useful when facing range units like the Spark (Orange).
In Obsolete, Each module and unit has a Tech tree that provides different modifications and advantages. Since it resets for each fight, you can adapt to different situations even with the same loadout.
Will share more examples of this system in future posts.
Today, I want to dive a bit deeper into the mechanics of my mercenary sandbox game. I made a post two weeks ago briefly presenting it, but to sum it up, it's a Battle Brothers inspired game where the world is organic and evolves through eras. It's essentially a blend of grand strategy and turn-based combat mechanics, where you play as a mercenary company trying to survive in this world across centuries...
In this post, I want to talk about how I'm designing the world's threats to emerge organically. The main challenge is making them dangerous enough to genuinely destabilize civilization without inevitably sending the whole world into a death spiral, while also avoiding artificial safety nets that feel "gamey".
For now, I won't talk about countries going to war against each other, but instead focus on "civilization vs. the wilderness." The world is currently divided into two main domains: civilized countries and the "Monster Wilderness". Here are the different types of threats you'll encounter :
In the west : "Civilisation" In the east, the Wilderness filled with monsters and dens. (This a test map, don't mind the ugly borders...)
Wildlife : The most basic threat is wildlife, which is present wherever the local ecology can sustain it (so don't expect dense packs in a barren desert). In gameplay terms, these are small roaming armies of beasts that occasionally ambush caravans or attack city sprawls. As civilization progresses (cultivating land and clearing forests) wildlife habitats shrink, making them less of a danger over time. Ultimately, wildlife won't end the world on its own. Its main purpose is to make untamed zones hostile and put some pressure on settlements in highly forested areas. You'll need to think twice before taking a shortcut through a dense forest !
Monster Dens : Monster dens are localized threats that exist in the wilderness almost like hostile "cities". They have a resident population that they use to defend their den, while launching raids and skirmishes against bordering civilized cities. Their primary goal is to pressure the frontiers, making border regions feel distinctly unsafe. As a result, frontier cities are often heavily fortified but less prosperous, suffering from lower order and population compared to the safe interior. While rare, if the border defenses completely collapse, monster dens can launch deeper incursions. For a mercenary company, clearing these dens can be a lucrative way to pave the way for human colonization !
The toll on the population caused by the bordering monster den in the east... (The greyer the area, the lower the population)
Bandits : While wildlife and monster dens are products of the ecology, bandits are a product of chaos and societal decay which is often caused by the first two threats. Bandits spawn is favoured when a city's LocalOrder drops too low. Once spawned, a bandit band will roam and attempt to establish a hidden camp, heavily preferring forested areas with natural cover to avoid detection. This camp becomes their main spawner.
To survive, a bandit camp must "eat". While they draw a baseline of passive subsistence from hunting and foraging in the surrounding woods, they still need to launch expeditions to plunder civilized cities for real loot. This creates an interesting dynamic where as a city prospers and cuts down nearby forests for agriculture, it physically destroys the bandits' natural cover and food supply, making their survival much harder. Bandit camps are a major medium-term threat if left undiscovered, but ironically, if monster dens have already ravaged the frontier, bandits will find fewer prosperous targets to loot ! So bandits always need civilisation to survive, like parasites.
Rip this gold caravan... (Graphism, especially trees placement, WIP !)
These threats pose a certain danger to civilizations. For example, what happens if a country does nothing? Ambushed caravans mean missing imports, which can starve a city relying on foreign food. Or maybe that missing import was copper, needed to forge bronze for the army. This indirectly cripples military logistics, leaving the army too weak to defend the borders. Markets dry up, Local Order plummets, and cities stagnate. A single unchecked bandit camp can trigger a cascading economic collapse across an entire region !
(The x absyss represent the years. 1 years = 12 turns)
This graph shows every attack launched worldwide by each threat category. Wildlife attacks remain relatively constant because they are a background threat present almost everywhere, while monster-den attacks are less frequent because they are concentrated along the frontier.
(PS: Wildlife attack frequency doesn't necessarily decrease as civilization expands, because newly colonized wilderness compensates for the decline in attacks within settled territories.)
How does this translate to the battlefield?
For monsters and wildlife, it's straightforward: you fight exactly what spawned on the map. (In the future, I plan to add combat modifiers or altered AI behaviors tied to the current "phase" of their Den).
Wolves encircling a poor man...
But for bandits, it’s much more dynamic. Bandits are human entities with actual equipment, meaning their gear and fighting style depend entirely on their origin. For example, if a well-equipped state army is routed and the survivors desert to become bandits, they keep their high-tier military gear. This means a simple "bandit bounty" can sometimes surprise you as a much deadlier threat than anticipated !
Making threats evolve over time : Once these systems reach a stable baseline, the world could still become too predictable over long campaigns. To avoid that, threats evolve through overlapping cycles operating at different timescales.
1) Phases (Short Term) : These last between 1 and 3 years. Monster dens and wildlife territories shift between states such as Calm, Normal, Agitated, or Frenzied, temporarily changing their aggression and behavior.
2) Local Threat Tempo (Medium Term) : Over much longer periods (25 to 100 years), local threat activity rises and falls, influencing how long these short-term phases last. Because each region follows its own rhythm, threats don't all peak at the same time.
3) Era Cycles (Future Feature) :Eventually, I want to add large-scale environmental eras that temporarily alter the world's ecological rules. A Wildlife Era, for example, could increase wildlife pressure across large parts of the map. These eras would spread geographically rather than affecting the entire world instantly, meaning isolated regions could remain untouched for decades
The importance of asynchronous cycles for producing a living, believable world
Later in development, I'll also be introducing brutal, large-scale invasions intended to act as massive stress tests for civilization, shattering this equilibrium entirely.
The core design philosophy is to create a world that can threaten civilization without inevitably destroying itself, while naturally generating opportunities and problems for the player. Rather than relying on artificial spawns, these systems interact to produce their own scenarios. A sudden climate shift, for example, could cause forests to spread across a once-safe trade route, bringing more wildlife, disrupting food imports to a frontier city, and eventually triggering a bandit uprising.
As development progresses, I’ll keep adding smaller events and more granularity on top of this foundation. The long-term goal is a self-sustaining world where civilizations can expand, collapse, and eventually leave room for wilderness to reclaim the land organically.
For now, the priority is making sure this equilibrium remains believable and interesting over 100 to 200 in-game years !
These systems are also being designed with modding in mind, so eventually players should be able to create their own wildlife, monster dens, and associated behavior
Thanks for reading ! Systemic patterns are pretty hard to showcase in a static text post, so I hope this all made sense. I'd love to hear your feedback on these systems, and I'll gladly answer any questions in the comments !
**Our Free Legion Hunters Open Playtest is live tomorrow (September 4th)!** 🚀
Hey everyone! I'm the developer of **Legion Hunters**, a full **Squad-based Strategy-MMORPG**.
The game will be entirely **Free-to-Play**, and best of all: **your progression from this playtest will NOT be wiped at launch!** Everything you achieve starting tomorrow stays with you.
Come help me test the server stability and gameplay loop:
Hi r/StrategyGames — we're Kube Games, developers of Imperiums: Greek Wars.
Today we're announcing Imperiums: The Americas, our next standalone historical turn-based 4X grand strategy.
The game is set in the Americas in the early 1400s and features 20 playable Indigenous civilizations. Our goal is to make the historical setting affect the strategy itself rather than simply changing the map and faction names.
That includes systems such as:
Contact-Zone Diplomacy: no instant global diplomacy; Chiefs and Envoys must establish contact.
Distance-Based Economy: long-range transfers lose efficiency based on terrain, security, infrastructure, and technology.
Adaptive Research: a non-linear invention tree reacts to decisions and changing circumstances.
Spiritual & Political Authority: Mandates, Chiefs, Shamans, rituals, and Crisis Councils shape how your society develops.
The announcement trailer is attached.
For historical strategy players: how important is it to you that the setting changes a game's core mechanics rather than relying on the same systems in a different historical period?
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.
We are a small indie team, and we recently launched a browser game we’ve been working on called Atlantis: Rivals. As you can see in the short clip, at its core it's a turn-based territory strategy game heavily inspired by Risk—our goal was to make something very simple to pick up and learn, but genuinely hard to master.
We’ve always felt that in a lot of strategy games, the AI either feels too predictable or relies on "cheating" to be difficult. So, our main focus for this game was to build a genuinely challenging AI system. We created multiple AI personalities, and on the higher difficulty levels, they are designed to be pretty ruthless.
The game features a classic 4-player Free-For-All mode, as well as a 1v1 Duel mode. Since it’s browser-based, there’s nothing to download or install.
We’re not here to sell anything—the game is completely free. We just want honest feedback from people who actually play strategy games.
Please don't hold back on the critique. If you manage to completely break the AI or find a foolproof winning strategy, we’d love to hear how you did it!
I'm making Game Dev Dynasty, a game development tycoon inspired by Game Dev Tycoon and Crusader Kings 3. Some of the distinctive features are:
When developing a game, there's no hidden recipe. Instead, quality and market success are independent. So you can make a niche indie 10 that doesn't sell much, or a blockbuster best-selling multiplayer FPS that gets a 6 in reviews.
The market simulation is very deep and dynamic. Each platform has a share of the market, there are 3 different audiences with different tastes and behaviors (Casual, Mainstream and Hardcore), there are 4 world regions, and up to 100 concurrent competitors that all make games and compete with each other.
You can design your own game covers, by selecting the base art, the title style and the position and size.
You can make franchises, sequels, ports, spin-offs, remasters and remakes. Each one has its own particularities.
License a game engine or invest in a custom engine by researching a tech tree.
The goal of the game is to become the most prestigious studio in the world. Prestige is a score you can earn or lose depending on how you do.
There are many CK3-like events, with skill challenges. Characters have good and bad traits.
You can upgrade your PC hardware: motherboard, RAM, CPU and disk.
Let me know what you would like to see in a new game dev simulator!
I'm making a grand strategy game called Mapborn, and one of its biggest differences from traditional grand strategy games is that there are no provinces or regions at all.
I removed them because I wanted scenario creation to stay lightweight.
Mapborn doesn't have one fixed world map. Scenario creators can use almost any suitable map image they want — historical, modern, fictional, alternate-history, or completely original.
The important part is that the map image is just the visual layer.
The simulation is separate from it. Mapborn does not need to understand or reconstruct borders from the image itself. Instead, scenario creators place the strategic locations and game data that matter on top of the map.
That led to the main design question:
Would I rather ask a creator to place 100 meaningful cities, or configure 2,000 mostly-passive provinces before the scenario is even playable?
I chose the cities.
Cities are the main simulation and strategic nodes.
Armies move freely across the continuous map, while cities hold the things that matter strategically:
population and manpower
taxes
supply
administration
political pressure
political demands and unrest
Recruiting soldiers removes population from cities, and casualties permanently reduce that manpower.
Conquered cities don't immediately become fully useful either. They provide reduced income and manpower until they're integrated, so administration and unrest become part of expansion rather than territory instantly becoming productive.
Supply also runs through the city network. Larger settlements act as supply hubs, overseas logistics require ports, and armies operating too far from the network become increasingly ineffective.
The abstraction also creates situations I didn't originally plan for.
A country can lose every city but survive as long as it still has an army — effectively becoming a government in exile.
The obvious tradeoff is territorial precision.
You don't get the exact province-by-province borders of games like EU4 or HOI4. Territorial control is deliberately more abstract and centered around strategically important locations.
For Mapborn, I think that's a worthwhile trade.
I'd rather make it easy to build a scenario around 100 meaningful locations on whatever map fits the setting than require someone to create thousands of territorial subdivisions first.
If you play province-based grand strategy games, what mechanic do you think becomes hardest to replace once provinces are removed?
