I'm putting out some blatant marketing feelers today because one thing I've been thinking about a lot lately is the type of games I want to focus on making the most but more importantly what type of games do I actually play the most? The thing that smacked me in the face a lot was how much I enjoy grand strategy type games.
The problem with that is of course, there aren't that many of them out there that I haven't played to death and the ones that do exist are created by companies that are trying to wring their playerbase dry as much as possible like Paradox Interactive and Creative Assembly.
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. What sort of features would you want to see? As for the setting, I'm kind of thinking of having a fantasy setting but allow you to control Romans as part of the main story.
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. There are also frequently used features in grand strategy that I find very annoying which I would probably remove or fix somehow like diplomacy spam for example. 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.
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
Don't worry, believe it or not I'm actually being quite the professional now, my 'official' work is by the gods but I'm looking for a nice little side project to work on which I should be able to churn out faster. I probably need to do a more detailed checklist/development roadmap for what I have planned so there's plenty of transparency.
I'm a research guy these days and I'm doing a lot of long term planning because I want to make this work. Now that I've been to Dankula's comedy event I'm going to hunker down and get on with debugging again and I also want to practice character sculpting. I think I'll do an ARPG as an extra side thing and that's where the character sculpting will become relevant. The other blender cycles stuff is purely for fun when I find myself a bit fatigued and want to do something different. Shiny graphics are a great way to hook in the normies and Rumble will probably be great for that.
As for details on any kind of grand strategy it's purely something I'm throwing out there, haven't written up any lore or anything. I'd almost be tempted to have Rome become equal through tech maybe or have them be able to enslave/recruit spellcasters. Depending on how involved the project gets you could have a faction split in the empire as a result of disagreement on what to do about the new world which I think would be interesting.
I have so many pathways right now RL I'm looking at, it's all about picking one and sticking with it. I do think for the sake of my sanity I should have a proper small side project I can churn out relatively quickly and be strict about that while I debug by the gods which I'm playtesting now.