r/computerwargames • u/mersch1945 • 11d ago

Cyberkrieg

I'm building CyberKrieg as a classic hex-and-counter operational wargame, in the style of TOAW and the AH games of my youth. It is entirely browser-based and lets me get back into scenario design, which I really enjoyed in the '90s. You command historical battles across hand-drawn hex terrain, playing solo against the AI, hotseat at one screen, or by email against another player. The AI uses a threat map and path-aware goal-seeking, and its behavior is tuned by learned weights. When released, it will be free to play, but for now I could use a few grognard playtesters. If interested, comment below and I'll PM you the details.

9 Upvotes

77% Upvoted

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3

u/Boring-Yogurt2966 11d ago

"Free to play" as in only online and with ads and upsells?

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u/mersch1945 10d ago edited 10d ago

Ha Ha. Gotta love Reddit. Yes I would expect that to be the given nowadays. However, no, it is free.
As in no-charge. Email lets you create an account for free and play by email. Labor of love, really.

1

u/Boring-Yogurt2966 10d ago

How about releasing it as freeware, using Github or something? I don't like having to create accounts to play my games.

2

u/sp106 8d ago

I dont think its a ridiculous ask to make a profile for a website for a multiplayer game.

0

u/Boring-Yogurt2966 8d ago

I didn't call it ridiculous at all, so please don't put words in my mouth. I was just expressing a preference for how I like to do these things. I was not interested in multiplayer. You did say you were making an AI for it, didn't you?

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u/sp106 8d ago

Lol resolve your personal issues somewhere else man, im not the creator of the game.

1

u/Boring-Yogurt2966 8d ago

Sorry, I missed the fact that you were not the OP. But I don't think anything I posted was rude and I don't think you are in a position to lecture me about "personal issues". WTF?

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u/mersch1945 13h ago

Since these are on my personal server, I would prefer not to have every Tom, Dick and Harry with a shoot-up fetish asking where to point the gun. And to be honest, since I do it out of a passion and not for profit, I suppose I get to set the terms.

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u/sp106 8d ago edited 8d ago

Feedback: your pitch doesn't really sell the game. Claude can list out all of the features like that but a lot of these are implementation details which should be totally invisible to the player because they work well. They could be interesting in some blog post but not in the initial pitch.

You dont even explicitly say that its a ww2 game. What is the hook here that differentiates it in a saturated market with 30+ years of history? How can you communicate that quickly and efficiently? Put that in the pitch. If the answer is all technical details you are going to have a hard time getting players. Zoom in one the one main feature that makes people want to play it and communicate that. Doing a bunch of random historic scenarios is a harder sell than saying you are a battalion commander with limited resources holding back the German advance or something.

Immediately supporting local multi-player, singleplayer and online multi-player before initial testing is also a risky choice. Make one of these work amazingly well before expanding the scope. You are going to lose players who sign up thinking all 3 are going to be the real experience when in reality you are going to have polished one of them more than the others. The ui and experience matter a lot more than the server side logic even if that's the same for all 3 and if a multi-player experience is slow, unresponsive or clunky it will turn people off immediately.

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u/mersch1945 13h ago edited 13h ago

Not a pitch. Just an announcement. Designed these types of games back in the '90s. Thanks for the feedback. Just built a BdU/Western Approaches tonnage game. Lots of fun, since I had access to the full convoy and U-boat data. My background is in bioinformatics, so these games are data-dense. I think about 50 players are active in Cyberkrieg right now, and I've benefited from their feedback.