Speaking of Romans in a fantasy word did you read Jim Butcher's Codex Alera books? If you did ignore the rest, but if you didn't I'll summarize. The fabled lost Ninth Roman legion gets teleported to a fantasy word where there are elemental creatures that they can bond with and gain powers.
Butcher wrote it because someone dared him to write a story that combined the 9th legion with Pokémon.
I love it.
The first bit of the second book is a bit slow, but I blame it on him writing them years apart.
But his aerial battles are really great and I actually like his teenage characters. It also has talking cats, steampunk shit, all kinds of good stuff. It's good fun.
Personally, I'd say it's the least good of his works, but still enjoyable. His other two big series are better, and Cinder Spires is a bit too trope-y, without the humor to make up for it, but still a fun read. It's no Dresden Files, and it's no Codex Alera, but if you've already read those, give it a shot.
One thing I've really begun to appreciate recently is that the best games are created by people who are very well studied in history/philosophy/mythology/mysticism and such. I feel as though one big problem with the modern games industry is there are way too many people getting into it while knowing little to nothing about anything other than computers. Whatever you decide to base your game upon, I would recommend devoting some time to researching relevant subjects to draw upon for inspiration.
Unironically, this is what made me actually gain a small amount of respect for Ken Levine years later with Bioshock Infinite.
Game is still trash, as is its writing. But the level of knowledge of history and American culture from history is astounding for a guy who is trying to shit on and mock it.
He, or someone, at least did their homework in actually learning about the time period and the obscure little forgotten details of it to make their stupid point about racism bad.
Grand strats are alright but I feel like we need more 4X, endless space 2 was the last great 4x and before that it was master of Orion 2 and before that it was space empires 4 gold. There really isn't a lot here in that untapped market. I'll always praise 4x over grand strategy.
I really enjoyed Stars in Shadow. It hews close to moo2 but has a more interesting way of handing population on planets.
One of the features I really like is that picking Humans for your race is basically an extra bump in difficulty. The game's lore has Humans as one of the 'elder' races. Human population has no resource boosts of any kind and start with no homeworld. You have a few population in transport ships and a decrepit fleet escorting them. Find a world and settle it pronto, and it will almost certainly be terrible compared to Earth.
Definitely agree. There's plenty of grand strategy to the point where it's a meme genre and has been for years. 4X can fill a very similar niche while also being unique enough that people won't just dismiss it as "more EU4". Just don't make the opposite mistake and make something that's just poor man's Civ.
If I had a dream game in this genre, it'd be a combination of Civilization and Command and Conquer. Superweapons, over the top absurd units, intentionally cheesy writing, but matches last hours instead of minutes and span entire globes. Give your Romans laser swords and a Greek Fire superweapon that lets them incinerate entire cities. That would be awesome.
Honestly, now that I'm thinking about it, maybe I'll make this game if you don't. It sounds fun.
If there is one thing Vanillaware never skimps on its the art. They'll often leave a lot to be desired with gameplay, but the prettiness of what you are seeing will mask it.
Unicorn Overlord takes it a step further and has so many characters available that almost any "type" you may have is an option to waifu (or husbando for the gays), while also having "okay" gameplay.
Not sure what the divide between grand strategy and 4X games are by this point, but if someone came up with a game that let me do all the things in Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri in a modern game engine, I'd probably write off the next year of my life playing the damn thing.
Jokes aside, that is genuinely a solid green flag in an obviously Western developed game for me. It's wild how hard we've flipped from games trying to use sex appeal to make up for not caring about gameplay, to sex appeal being a solid indicator that the dev has a vision for their game and will not compromise on the quality for trend chasing.
All bets are off if it's Asian though, they're still happily using big tits to sell hot garbage all the time over there, especially China.
Obviously adding sex appeal if it isn't actually part of your own personal vision isn't going to work as well. Other green flags are games that make fun of total pacifists, have savages that are simply savage and not noble, or have antagonists that are obvious wolf in sheep's clothing manipulative faux virtue signallers.
Isn't the game Kingmakers partly that whole 'GATE' idea as it does have top down strategy elements?
As someone who's a veteran of the Tiberian/Red alert wars and who's first strategy game was Dune 2000 (who's soundtrack is criminally overlooked), I'd say one of the first things you need to properly invest in is setting and dialogue. You can have something with fantasy, sci fi, historical or a mix of all three, if you're not invested in the setting, you won't care about the game as in a grand strategy you're seeing things from a bigger perspective.
For settings, I like grim. If you ever played Myth: The Fallen Lords that is what I like. The narration in that game is stuck in my memory since I was a child, there is something so well made that no one in modern times will ever be able to achieve. Compare that to the 2 jokes in each seen of modern games. Who said that children can't be exposed to grim and dark themes.
A campaign from that but about Romans starting their own empire inside a dark fantasy world where humans can barely survive among all the monster factions that are also fighting each other would be interesting. They need to study the new magic and combine that with their weapons of war, magic catapults and magic actual shields.
I also like story in my strategy games, nothing very complex but a purpose and to create the feeling the world is living, changing around you. While you are off fighting a battle somewhere another city fell or the emperor died and is now replaced by his soy drinking son that will divide the empire if you don't act soon.
Alternative, crusaders reach monster infested fantasy world and go on a holy crusade to purge the planet.
Mechanics.
Would be nice to have a talent tree between missions. For Romans it would be improving New Rome that would give you better weapons and more starting resources or other stuff like that. For monster factions would be appeasing their dark gods.
I would love an XCom style grand strategy where you need to gather and improve tech as you control and grow armies. That was Chingis Kaaahn's strategy when he took over the trade group in Eurasia.
That's certainly going to be a tough one to narrow down, given the variety of preferences people can have on such a genre.
I can give a rundown of a few areas I'd personally like to see in a solidly done (modern) strategy game, based largely on past favorites:
Something space-science fiction related in the same vein as Master of Orion, Star Trek: Birth of the Federation, Star Wars: Rebellion, and Sword of the Stars.
Most newer games I've tried of this variety tend to take annoying and experience killing design choices. Oversimplified and "streamlined" gameplay, 2D/pixely/cartoony art design, and often little depth or personality to anything story, lore, or character related. (IE, Stellaris having a rather bland "spreadsheet" faction setup). I can expound further if you're curious.
I've never been quite able to get into too many fantasy strategy games, save for a few niche instances though, and I think I've burned myself out on historical strategy games thanks to Paradox and Total War.
Maybe something like Heroes of Might and Magic might work, if it had the same personality and charm, but a less cumbersome design to the overarching strategic gameplay.
That's very much the same kind of motivation that finally pushed me into starting on my own game a few years ago. I've tried to keep any details on it pretty close to the vest though, as I'm sure you and others here would certainly understand.
Something worth remembering by the way. It isn't the complexity that makes the game so much as the fun and satisfaction that the core gameplay gives to the player.
IE, playing cat and mouse with an enemy vessel in space, glancing skirmishes that eventually lead to a major moment where you maneuver your ship at the perfect speed and angle, and executing a deadly barrage onto an enemy at just the perfect moment.
So many developers let themselves get so deeply embedded into systems and meta mechanics that they forget and fail to deliver on the simple things. Plus, sometimes it's the simplest things that can provide the most satisfying and complex results (Emergent Gameplay).
For me, grand strategy requires a few things to be successful.
Every aspect of the "strategy" in the game needs to be able to be automated but "how" it is automated should be left to me. I should be able to optimally playthrough a game without having to manually control every aspect such that the game becomes tedious.
No cheese. Optimal strategies should not exist where you do things that are just so obviously cheesy and not intended. Like say in your world you start off with a city that has a governor and a warrior unit. On turn one you shouldn't degrade your warrior unit to gain 50 Iron then fire your governor so you can encourage crime only to immediately review you governor and get an additional growth bonus for lowering crime. Cheesy shit like this always pisses me off in strategy games.
Highly customizable races, cultures, etc... that have significant impacts on how the game's strategy is played. Maybe I want my Romans to be a highly religious society along with a warrior society well, if I go down that root, I should have access to buildings, units, types of attacks, types of special abilities, etc... that are going to be significantly different than if I went an atheist warrior root such that the way I play the game becomes highly different given the way in which I choose to develop my people.
Lots of different avenues for success. The more variability in how to play the game, the more fun it is. Like tech rushing shouldn't always be the be-all-end-all strategy. A common problem in Grand strategy games with "advancement", imo. Like having low tech but maybe a highly religiously zealous group of low tech but high numbers should perhaps be viable. To make this more "realistic", I'd recommend not doing civilization style where you progress through the ages cause it gets tough to imagine the realism between horses beating tanks or whatever.
Don't make negotiating with NPCs the way to win the game. Make it a potential side thing to gain a slight advantage but too many grand strategy games pretty much make the whole game depending upon negotiating with dumb AI, which is trash.
The main appeal but also the largest issue with the 4X genre is that it is based on a progressive utopian ideal, where every aspect of the society you control is always moving forward and improving. Every cultural change provides new bonuses over the last, each new technology researched only has upsides, every new population increases your production, etc. In the early game when you are building up all of the essentials this system works out very well, and it makes sense that these would have only upsides that allow for rapid expansion. After the early game this system usually falls apart, mainly because the exponential expansion has to significantly slow down when meeting other player's borders. Instead of expanding directly the player has to expand through other systems, which ends up with the player managing more and more systems for continuously shrinking payoffs. It doesn't help that all the other players also slow down at the same time, so there are no new diplomatic developments. Players usually get bored at this stage, and either spam end turn to try to quickly finish the game or start a new one.
I think that the 4X genre could greatly improve if there was some way to prevent this issue. If all of the players were not limited to only moving forward, then the game could keep the quickly changing nature present in the early game without resorting to complexity bloat. Diplomacy could drastically change as different player's empires would rise and fall. Decision making could become more interesting if cultural and technological changes had a mix of positive and negative impacts. Building up a great empire would be a more satisfying accomplishment if it wasn't just an inevitability, Figuring out how to manage a dying empire would bring new challenges to the player. The main issues are figuring out how to get the player to want to manage a declining empire, and in determining if or how the game would continue after a decline. Maybe an empire could be reformed after a decline, which the player would take control of, and a new period of growth could start with some influences from the previous empire's iteration. A player might have his empire rise and fall multiple times, but would need a reason to try to have each iteration succeed.
You might want to check out some of Griffin's content from The Armchair Historian on YT. Specifically some of his livestreams where he's demonstrating some of his war strategy games that he's developed from scratch.
I personally find his personality grating. He's mostly focused on Napoleon-era digital war board game strategy setups.
But he's the only one I've ever known to try to develop and demo similar content themselves from the ground up.
Have an minimum viable product of whatever game(s) you've been working on. Not shippable, but just enough to have all-around experience of the dev and design process
As for strategy, RPG, and other sandboxes, I think what's needed is aesthetically sophisticated procedural generation. Flavor text, faction banners, entity behavior and motivations, so on. Take Rome 2: TW and think what it would take for a computer to generate meaningful start positions and cultures for fresh experiences (Civ games, but not necessarily dynamic landmasses). Furthermore, how are CA/Paradox Games arbitrarily free-form and inconsequential where the map ends up either one color or jigsaw vomit unrecognizable to how nations form in the real world. Imperator Augustus should be something that can happen over the course of a 272 BC campaign.
You can look up King Arthur: The Role-Playing Wargame. Yeah, it was published by Paradox, but whatev.
Think CA games, but with more RPG elements like heroes that can go on quests on the campaign map etc. I don't really recall the story, but initially it starts relatively "medieval", but then the fey beings start invading. 2nd game also has an expansion about Romans in Britannia.
The concept of the game was nice, but it definitely had issues.
I want more of whatever Lords of Magic was. A lovely little game with a lovingly crafted world that probably didn't fully realize its potential, but it always left me with a warm fuzzy feeling. In an ideal world I'd like to return to the realm of Urak again some day, but there isn't anyone I'd trust to do it justice now.
Just a question how many balls are you trying to juggle at the same time?
Now onto your query, I think to some extent the market for such games are saturated (but ofc hungry for a good new title, any market in this climate of globohomo is :D)
Also you are mixing a lot of genres that goes more or less hardcore when it comes to grand strategy (the mention games are Paradox interactive, presume Stellaris,hoi4, etc and CA (total war series) and then Age of Wonders 4?) where some are true to the genre and others are more classic 4x.
So with that in mind I've been wondering about the type of grand strategy game people would want that doesn't have the DLC garbage spammed everywhere.
I would personally want something that takes over the Total war series and does the overview and battlemap well, and I would like a medieval period perhaps the up till the late medieval since that gives your overview map a lot of fun with different ruling systems which could give flair to different factions and it also can ensure different specialties of units while keeping it somewhat grounded. The major point except fixin AI in battlemaps is the need for opponents to follow personality trait more than just being random retards that they usually are. I'm not against giving the ai cheats on higher difficulties levels but the core need to be somewhat thinking to provide more of personality that makes sense in the context. Also, I want naval battles back.
Sort of like the anime GATE but in the reverse and I'd have it where Rome ends up invading a fantasy world which would be hilarious I think but also somewhat interesting.
What level of tech would this magic society be? I presume the romans would be the underdog requiring to reverse engineer the magic from this new world? Or would it awaken Romulus?
I'm not really seeing the appeal of this theme tbh.
I do know that Age of Wonders exists, don't get me wrong but boy did that game need to be optimised, don't know if they've fixed the issues yet.
Depends on what optimization you are talking about, to some extent it is better now. Altough that could be that they nerfed the reserch rate since to some extent the slowdown was tied to the amount of research (how?! I do not know, but like all things the engine programmer is most likely alone trying to keep something working) which has been nerfed.
Still got the horror of huge log files being created in which I do not know how to turn of logging weird telemetry and dumping it as logs. which can be quite large after a game. And don't get me started on how AoW4 increase the amount of globo homo by taking a series name and just trying to turn it into a blob.
Speaking of Romans in a fantasy word did you read Jim Butcher's Codex Alera books? If you did ignore the rest, but if you didn't I'll summarize. The fabled lost Ninth Roman legion gets teleported to a fantasy word where there are elemental creatures that they can bond with and gain powers.
Butcher wrote it because someone dared him to write a story that combined the 9th legion with Pokémon.
That sounds like the Visionaries cartoon from the 80s.
I don't remember that one, I have something to google now
Out of curiosity, since I've been reading his work for a while, is the Cinder Spires series any good?
I love it.
The first bit of the second book is a bit slow, but I blame it on him writing them years apart.
But his aerial battles are really great and I actually like his teenage characters. It also has talking cats, steampunk shit, all kinds of good stuff. It's good fun.
I've only read the first book and it was good
Personally, I'd say it's the least good of his works, but still enjoyable. His other two big series are better, and Cinder Spires is a bit too trope-y, without the humor to make up for it, but still a fun read. It's no Dresden Files, and it's no Codex Alera, but if you've already read those, give it a shot.
One thing I've really begun to appreciate recently is that the best games are created by people who are very well studied in history/philosophy/mythology/mysticism and such. I feel as though one big problem with the modern games industry is there are way too many people getting into it while knowing little to nothing about anything other than computers. Whatever you decide to base your game upon, I would recommend devoting some time to researching relevant subjects to draw upon for inspiration.
But they can lecture us about the pay tree are key, systemical raycissisms, and a wide array of gender fluids.
Unironically, this is what made me actually gain a small amount of respect for Ken Levine years later with Bioshock Infinite.
Game is still trash, as is its writing. But the level of knowledge of history and American culture from history is astounding for a guy who is trying to shit on and mock it.
He, or someone, at least did their homework in actually learning about the time period and the obscure little forgotten details of it to make their stupid point about racism bad.
It's funny that the almost-angelic painting of John Wilkes Booth in Infinite is closer to the truth than Levine will ever admit.
Grand strats are alright but I feel like we need more 4X, endless space 2 was the last great 4x and before that it was master of Orion 2 and before that it was space empires 4 gold. There really isn't a lot here in that untapped market. I'll always praise 4x over grand strategy.
I really enjoyed Stars in Shadow. It hews close to moo2 but has a more interesting way of handing population on planets.
One of the features I really like is that picking Humans for your race is basically an extra bump in difficulty. The game's lore has Humans as one of the 'elder' races. Human population has no resource boosts of any kind and start with no homeworld. You have a few population in transport ships and a decrepit fleet escorting them. Find a world and settle it pronto, and it will almost certainly be terrible compared to Earth.
Definitely agree. There's plenty of grand strategy to the point where it's a meme genre and has been for years. 4X can fill a very similar niche while also being unique enough that people won't just dismiss it as "more EU4". Just don't make the opposite mistake and make something that's just poor man's Civ.
If I had a dream game in this genre, it'd be a combination of Civilization and Command and Conquer. Superweapons, over the top absurd units, intentionally cheesy writing, but matches last hours instead of minutes and span entire globes. Give your Romans laser swords and a Greek Fire superweapon that lets them incinerate entire cities. That would be awesome.
Honestly, now that I'm thinking about it, maybe I'll make this game if you don't. It sounds fun.
As far as character design, I've recently picked up Unicorn Overlord and the designs are old school in all the best ways.
If there is one thing Vanillaware never skimps on its the art. They'll often leave a lot to be desired with gameplay, but the prettiness of what you are seeing will mask it.
Unicorn Overlord takes it a step further and has so many characters available that almost any "type" you may have is an option to waifu (or husbando for the gays), while also having "okay" gameplay.
Not sure what the divide between grand strategy and 4X games are by this point, but if someone came up with a game that let me do all the things in Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri in a modern game engine, I'd probably write off the next year of my life playing the damn thing.
You’d need a faction of sexy scantly clad women and also a faction of hyper masculine monster men.
Woodelves and Beastmen?
Jokes aside, that is genuinely a solid green flag in an obviously Western developed game for me. It's wild how hard we've flipped from games trying to use sex appeal to make up for not caring about gameplay, to sex appeal being a solid indicator that the dev has a vision for their game and will not compromise on the quality for trend chasing.
All bets are off if it's Asian though, they're still happily using big tits to sell hot garbage all the time over there, especially China.
Obviously adding sex appeal if it isn't actually part of your own personal vision isn't going to work as well. Other green flags are games that make fun of total pacifists, have savages that are simply savage and not noble, or have antagonists that are obvious wolf in sheep's clothing manipulative faux virtue signallers.
Isn't the game Kingmakers partly that whole 'GATE' idea as it does have top down strategy elements?
As someone who's a veteran of the Tiberian/Red alert wars and who's first strategy game was Dune 2000 (who's soundtrack is criminally overlooked), I'd say one of the first things you need to properly invest in is setting and dialogue. You can have something with fantasy, sci fi, historical or a mix of all three, if you're not invested in the setting, you won't care about the game as in a grand strategy you're seeing things from a bigger perspective.
Hard question.
For settings, I like grim. If you ever played Myth: The Fallen Lords that is what I like. The narration in that game is stuck in my memory since I was a child, there is something so well made that no one in modern times will ever be able to achieve. Compare that to the 2 jokes in each seen of modern games. Who said that children can't be exposed to grim and dark themes.
A campaign from that but about Romans starting their own empire inside a dark fantasy world where humans can barely survive among all the monster factions that are also fighting each other would be interesting. They need to study the new magic and combine that with their weapons of war, magic catapults and magic actual shields.
I also like story in my strategy games, nothing very complex but a purpose and to create the feeling the world is living, changing around you. While you are off fighting a battle somewhere another city fell or the emperor died and is now replaced by his soy drinking son that will divide the empire if you don't act soon.
Alternative, crusaders reach monster infested fantasy world and go on a holy crusade to purge the planet.
Mechanics. Would be nice to have a talent tree between missions. For Romans it would be improving New Rome that would give you better weapons and more starting resources or other stuff like that. For monster factions would be appeasing their dark gods.
I would love an XCom style grand strategy where you need to gather and improve tech as you control and grow armies. That was Chingis Kaaahn's strategy when he took over the trade group in Eurasia.
That's certainly going to be a tough one to narrow down, given the variety of preferences people can have on such a genre.
I can give a rundown of a few areas I'd personally like to see in a solidly done (modern) strategy game, based largely on past favorites:
Something space-science fiction related in the same vein as Master of Orion, Star Trek: Birth of the Federation, Star Wars: Rebellion, and Sword of the Stars.
Most newer games I've tried of this variety tend to take annoying and experience killing design choices. Oversimplified and "streamlined" gameplay, 2D/pixely/cartoony art design, and often little depth or personality to anything story, lore, or character related. (IE, Stellaris having a rather bland "spreadsheet" faction setup). I can expound further if you're curious.
I've never been quite able to get into too many fantasy strategy games, save for a few niche instances though, and I think I've burned myself out on historical strategy games thanks to Paradox and Total War.
Maybe something like Heroes of Might and Magic might work, if it had the same personality and charm, but a less cumbersome design to the overarching strategic gameplay.
That's very much the same kind of motivation that finally pushed me into starting on my own game a few years ago. I've tried to keep any details on it pretty close to the vest though, as I'm sure you and others here would certainly understand.
Something worth remembering by the way. It isn't the complexity that makes the game so much as the fun and satisfaction that the core gameplay gives to the player.
IE, playing cat and mouse with an enemy vessel in space, glancing skirmishes that eventually lead to a major moment where you maneuver your ship at the perfect speed and angle, and executing a deadly barrage onto an enemy at just the perfect moment.
So many developers let themselves get so deeply embedded into systems and meta mechanics that they forget and fail to deliver on the simple things. Plus, sometimes it's the simplest things that can provide the most satisfying and complex results (Emergent Gameplay).
For me, grand strategy requires a few things to be successful.
Every aspect of the "strategy" in the game needs to be able to be automated but "how" it is automated should be left to me. I should be able to optimally playthrough a game without having to manually control every aspect such that the game becomes tedious.
No cheese. Optimal strategies should not exist where you do things that are just so obviously cheesy and not intended. Like say in your world you start off with a city that has a governor and a warrior unit. On turn one you shouldn't degrade your warrior unit to gain 50 Iron then fire your governor so you can encourage crime only to immediately review you governor and get an additional growth bonus for lowering crime. Cheesy shit like this always pisses me off in strategy games.
Highly customizable races, cultures, etc... that have significant impacts on how the game's strategy is played. Maybe I want my Romans to be a highly religious society along with a warrior society well, if I go down that root, I should have access to buildings, units, types of attacks, types of special abilities, etc... that are going to be significantly different than if I went an atheist warrior root such that the way I play the game becomes highly different given the way in which I choose to develop my people.
Lots of different avenues for success. The more variability in how to play the game, the more fun it is. Like tech rushing shouldn't always be the be-all-end-all strategy. A common problem in Grand strategy games with "advancement", imo. Like having low tech but maybe a highly religiously zealous group of low tech but high numbers should perhaps be viable. To make this more "realistic", I'd recommend not doing civilization style where you progress through the ages cause it gets tough to imagine the realism between horses beating tanks or whatever.
Don't make negotiating with NPCs the way to win the game. Make it a potential side thing to gain a slight advantage but too many grand strategy games pretty much make the whole game depending upon negotiating with dumb AI, which is trash.
The main appeal but also the largest issue with the 4X genre is that it is based on a progressive utopian ideal, where every aspect of the society you control is always moving forward and improving. Every cultural change provides new bonuses over the last, each new technology researched only has upsides, every new population increases your production, etc. In the early game when you are building up all of the essentials this system works out very well, and it makes sense that these would have only upsides that allow for rapid expansion. After the early game this system usually falls apart, mainly because the exponential expansion has to significantly slow down when meeting other player's borders. Instead of expanding directly the player has to expand through other systems, which ends up with the player managing more and more systems for continuously shrinking payoffs. It doesn't help that all the other players also slow down at the same time, so there are no new diplomatic developments. Players usually get bored at this stage, and either spam end turn to try to quickly finish the game or start a new one.
I think that the 4X genre could greatly improve if there was some way to prevent this issue. If all of the players were not limited to only moving forward, then the game could keep the quickly changing nature present in the early game without resorting to complexity bloat. Diplomacy could drastically change as different player's empires would rise and fall. Decision making could become more interesting if cultural and technological changes had a mix of positive and negative impacts. Building up a great empire would be a more satisfying accomplishment if it wasn't just an inevitability, Figuring out how to manage a dying empire would bring new challenges to the player. The main issues are figuring out how to get the player to want to manage a declining empire, and in determining if or how the game would continue after a decline. Maybe an empire could be reformed after a decline, which the player would take control of, and a new period of growth could start with some influences from the previous empire's iteration. A player might have his empire rise and fall multiple times, but would need a reason to try to have each iteration succeed.
You might want to check out some of Griffin's content from The Armchair Historian on YT. Specifically some of his livestreams where he's demonstrating some of his war strategy games that he's developed from scratch.
I personally find his personality grating. He's mostly focused on Napoleon-era digital war board game strategy setups.
But he's the only one I've ever known to try to develop and demo similar content themselves from the ground up.
https://www.youtube.com/live/dbzX2xgXOXU?si=QQh8dx7vkV_ZlDnc
Have an minimum viable product of whatever game(s) you've been working on. Not shippable, but just enough to have all-around experience of the dev and design process
As for strategy, RPG, and other sandboxes, I think what's needed is aesthetically sophisticated procedural generation. Flavor text, faction banners, entity behavior and motivations, so on. Take Rome 2: TW and think what it would take for a computer to generate meaningful start positions and cultures for fresh experiences (Civ games, but not necessarily dynamic landmasses). Furthermore, how are CA/Paradox Games arbitrarily free-form and inconsequential where the map ends up either one color or jigsaw vomit unrecognizable to how nations form in the real world. Imperator Augustus should be something that can happen over the course of a 272 BC campaign.
For me, I love lore. The more in depth a game can get to show me how and why characters make the choices they do, the more drawn in I get
You can look up King Arthur: The Role-Playing Wargame. Yeah, it was published by Paradox, but whatev.
Think CA games, but with more RPG elements like heroes that can go on quests on the campaign map etc. I don't really recall the story, but initially it starts relatively "medieval", but then the fey beings start invading. 2nd game also has an expansion about Romans in Britannia.
The concept of the game was nice, but it definitely had issues.
I want more of whatever Lords of Magic was. A lovely little game with a lovingly crafted world that probably didn't fully realize its potential, but it always left me with a warm fuzzy feeling. In an ideal world I'd like to return to the realm of Urak again some day, but there isn't anyone I'd trust to do it justice now.
Just a question how many balls are you trying to juggle at the same time?
Now onto your query, I think to some extent the market for such games are saturated (but ofc hungry for a good new title, any market in this climate of globohomo is :D)
Also you are mixing a lot of genres that goes more or less hardcore when it comes to grand strategy (the mention games are Paradox interactive, presume Stellaris,hoi4, etc and CA (total war series) and then Age of Wonders 4?) where some are true to the genre and others are more classic 4x.
What level of tech would this magic society be? I presume the romans would be the underdog requiring to reverse engineer the magic from this new world? Or would it awaken Romulus? I'm not really seeing the appeal of this theme tbh.
Depends on what optimization you are talking about, to some extent it is better now. Altough that could be that they nerfed the reserch rate since to some extent the slowdown was tied to the amount of research (how?! I do not know, but like all things the engine programmer is most likely alone trying to keep something working) which has been nerfed. Still got the horror of huge log files being created in which I do not know how to turn of logging weird telemetry and dumping it as logs. which can be quite large after a game. And don't get me started on how AoW4 increase the amount of globo homo by taking a series name and just trying to turn it into a blob.
On entirely unrelated thing, have you seen this old comments of Total war series being mods on top of mods xD