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.
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.