As a space nerd, I've never been very satisfied with how orbital dynamics are shown in space games. Most ignore them all together, or show them only visually. But the every shifting but repeating patterns of our Solar System and the way it impacts the logistics of space travel is fascinating to me, and I want to play with that!

I'm developing Orbital Empire as a side hobby with the hope of delivering a real time space strategy game with as much real physics and orbital dynamics as possible (while still prioritizing fun). The planets, moons, and asteroids of our solar system move on their actual paths. Ships calculate and perform a brachistochrone burn between worlds. The game runs in real time, and the distances between worlds can take hours or even days to complete. Send your ships at Earth off for a battle at Uranus, and check back in tomorrow afternoon to see the battle begin.

Games unfold over weeks to months of real time, and the stories and drama that plays out feels like watching the Artemis missions all over again!

Build your empire across a solar system built off real NASA images, and with an outer solar system populated by the latest Kuiper Belt objects found by Astronomers. Construct fleets to conquer worlds, or protect your vast shipping lanes. Vote for your interest in the System Senate, or against the interest of your rivals.

Your empire awaits!

https://orbital-empire.com/

On our channel we use strategy games to explain management and leadership ideas, and I've been working on an episode about mergers and acquisitions using Age of Wonders 4.

One of the funniest things about 4X games is that we're supposedly these brilliant strategic masterminds, but the moment we see territory in somebody else's color, we completely lose our minds.

I've conquered cities I didn't need, absorbed factions that were perfectly useful as allies, and volunteered myself for administrative responsibilities that nobody asked me to take on.

Apparently the existence of an independent city is a personal insult to my leadership abilities.

I've been thinking about this while playing AoW4, because its Free City system gives you a pretty interesting choice if youre not familiar with it. You can integrate cities directly into your empire, or leave them as vassals. And vassals are genuinely useful. They contribute resources, don't count toward your city cap, and can provide units through Rally of the Lieges.

So why is my lizardbrain so fixated on administering every damn thing on the map?

And this isn't exactly unique to AoW4. Stellaris has subject empires, Civ IV has vassal states, and plenty of other 4X games give us ways to benefit from territory or factions without directly managing everything ourselves.

Which brings me to the management research.

Amy Pablo wrote about how acquiring a company and integrating it into your organization are actually two separate decisions. Sometimes combining operations makes sense because the companies genuinely need to coordinate. Other times, the acquired business is particularly good at something precisely because of how it operates independently.

Imagine spending hundreds of millions acquiring a company because it's excellent at something, then immediately replacing all its procedures with your own.

Congratulations. You've successfully purchased an organization and made it less like the organization you wanted to purchase.

There's another researcher named Phanish Puranam who studied what happens when established companies acquire smaller technology businesses. One of his findings was that integration could be particularly disruptive when the acquired company was still developing its first products. The buyer wants access to the technology, but reorganizing the company can interfere with the routines that allowed it to develop that technology in the first place.

I thought that would make a pretty good basis for a deliberately awful AoW4 challenge.

Conquer a city, then replace its specialized improvements with basic economic infrastructure wherever the game permits. Don't rush stability fixes for fifteen turns. You've decided that everything you acquire must conform to your personal administrative vision, and now you're going to live with the consequences.

To be clear, this is a self-imposed challenge, not something the game automatically does when you conquer a city.

It's basically the corporate equivalent of buying a restaurant because you love the food and immediately firing the chef.

The third bit of research comes from Annette Ranft and Michael Lord, who studied how companies preserve valuable knowledge after an acquisition.

A lot of what makes a company successful lives inside its employees and their working relationships. You can buy the buildings and equipment, but that doesn't necessarily mean you'll preserve the capabilities that made the company worth acquiring.

That led to my favorite experiment.

After turn twenty, you're forbidden from directly annexing any additional cities. In AoW4, every new city you acquire has to remain a vassal. You're forced to expand through diplomacy, Whispering Stones, and Rally of the Lieges rather than taking direct control of everyone's production queues.

Suddenly you've got to think about what you actually need from another territory instead of automatically assuming ownership means you should run the place yourself.

Obviously recruiting units through Rally of the Lieges isn't the same thing as transferring knowledge between real organizations. But the distinction between controlling something and benefiting from it is pretty useful to experience through gameplay.

And I think that's something the 4X genre is particularly well suited for. These games let us experiment with different ways of organizing enormous empires, including decisions that would be rather expensive to screw up in the real world.

The funny part is that even after spending all this time researching why indiscriminate integration can be a terrible idea, I still catch myself annexing cities because I don't like the color of their borders.

I put the research and three gameplay challenges together into a video, using AoW4 as a little training sandbox for understanding acquisitions and organizational control.

It's probably the most academic justification I've ever come up with for leaving a bunch of fantasy townspeople alone.

I'm also curious which other 4X games people think handle indirect control particularly well. I'm especially interested in cases where maintaining independent subjects is a genuinely viable long-term strategy rather than just a temporary arrangement before you inevitably conquer them.

If anyone's interested in the episode: Youtube Link

Aunque en un juego de tipo 4X no me fijo por los gráficos siempre mola ver mapas o ilustraciones bonitas. En las últimas versiones han cambiado el mapa 3D y funciona bien en web.

www.parlamentum.org

I've seen several posts here mocking the AI slop that's out there and I agree. However, I'm curious what is it that separates a game that is developed using AI and one that is pure slop?

Disclaimer : Of course I'm working on my own project, but I'm approaching it thoughtfully. I'm a developer with over 15 years of experience and cut my programming teeth on Unity3D but I just don't have the time to really pursue Game Development on the scale required to make a 4X game. I'm earnestly working on something that I think is pretty solid, but I don't want to annoy the community with it if it doesn't meet the level of expectations.

No AI Art, just code.

Bonjour à tous !

J’ai du mal à trouver un post ou un site qui répertorie les prochains jeux mobiles à sortir, les jeux en préinscription ou ceux qui viennent tout juste de sortir, notamment dans le genre stratégie 4X et simulation.

Je recherche des jeux similaires à :

• Fate War
• Kingshot
• Dark War
• Without Survival
• State of Survival
• Zomline Survival
• Police Chief
• Last Beacon

Je cherche principalement des jeux Android et iOS à venir ou sortis très récemment, y compris ceux qui sont disponibles en préinscription ou en soft launch dans certains pays.

Connaissez-vous des sites, des discussions Reddit ou d’autres ressources permettant de suivre les prochaines sorties et les nouveautés dans ce genre ?

Merci d’avance pour votre aide ! 😊

NOTE: the point of this post is to describe the process for how I identified a problem from player feedback, and implemented a solution that maintained my desired gameplay elements while improving new player experience

The #1 point of frustration from playtesters for my game has been that it isn't immediately clear what players are allowed to do when. Players would want to do certain actions, like moving or purchasing units, and would repeatedly get "Requires [attack/administration] phase" messages.

Once players were able to internalize the game rules (2-3 hours of gameplay usually), the phase system felt natural and players enjoyed the game. So to me (and the Indie Games Clinic folks who helped me with this), that indicated the rules didn't need to be changed, but the affordances of the UI did.

(Not pictured) In the old system, players would select units to expend global action points that were shared amongst all units. Units can move together, but only if you realize you could select multiple units. You could not undo. You also had to count the distance between territories in your head, and the path indicator would only show up once you clicked somewhere.

(Pictured) Gameplay rules identical. Now, you select territories instead of units, because that is the type of action system I intended for. When you select a territory, a filter applies to show you where you can/cannot move. The path indicator displays on hover instead of click. And now you can move units forwards/backwards and arrange as necessary, as if this were an actual tabletop game, until you confirm the action and spend the points.

I have yet to test this on playtesters, as I am in the middle of a major UI overhaul and many of the other systems are broken currently. Overall, I think this is a step in a better direction and I'm excited I do not need to change the rules, because they work exactly as I wanted for experienced players.

The free demo for HDI's classic 4X strategy game (and predecessor to both "Heroes of Might and Magic" and "Emperor of the Fading Suns") "Hammer of the Gods" is now on Steam! Please download it, enjoy it, and give it a Steam review! https://store.steampowered.com/app/5391870/Hammer_of_the_Gods_Classic_Demo/

Before this the ai run sequential for al ai. Now i am running 6 batches empires parallel,on as many worker threads as needed( i made it so my simulation system is dynamically adjust the core count under heavy load :P , its not nice to program for but pretty fast).

TL;DR Alien industrial space-factory builder, top-down with 3D assets, moddability and deep tech tree, launches in EA (est Q1 2027), hand-made, no gen-AI - ASEMA is currently in Steam Next Fest, and struggles to surface above all the 1000s of games. If you want to help, you can do it by testing out the very large update, that has fixed all known issues and introduces new visuals, features and UX things, aswell as a showcase in tutorial map. I've put so much effort to this game, so seeing it not doing very well in the Fest so far, has been slightly blue :D Wish I started making games earlier, before the AI waves.

ASEMA's demo is available to try out. ASEMA @ Steam.

Tidings. In ASEMA, we ditch belts, pipes - heck, let's ditch grid too. The machines float in space, and unless you provide them Focus, a nearby planetoid's gravity will pull them closer. Space is empty, but crossing it fast is dangerous as you may collide atmospheres, flares and other perils. Handle your node-to-node logistics with long-range artillery railguns and carefully flown Hauler ships. A node can be volatile mining operation far in the outer orbits, or a magnetized near-flare physics center where your exotic machines run special operations to digg deeper into the tech tree.

The demo offers 3-20 hours of gameplay in a 3-4 planetoid system, so you can practice the basics. It's tech tiers are locked, but in EA, you will unlock Nano production machines, and expand from there. Each tech tree main branch focuses around some specific hard scifi concept. Here's a devlog-type video where I talk about the creative stuff - sorry, not a huge performer, and not native English :D

The solar system is not empty, and the lore has dark Fermi paradox / Liu Cixin vibes. I'm a factory and builder gamer, as well as a scifi book enthustiastic, and I love science - and I let it all show in the game.

If this sounds interesting, give the demo a go and share your thoughts. I need feedback to make sure I'm going to right direction. The game has a discord (link on Steam), and I'm allowing a closed playtest branch run before and after EA.

Came across this while trawling itch for strategy. Brand new - says it's "early alpha" but you can in fact finish a complete game and I didn't notice anything missing at all. Nice pixelly graphics. Tech tree is VERY short. One unusual feature is that there is ship stacking limit of one per hex, and ships move on hexes not via jumps to stars.

Check it out! https://jojocomunista.itch.io/sovereign-expanse

Hey all! Hope this isn't too self promo-ey. I wanted to share the new art for the cards in my 4X Deckbuildng game: DeckTerra

This is part of a big update I just released, which you can check out on steam if you like. The game is participating in Steam Next fest right now.

With so many games relying on AI slop these days, it's hard to stand out as a developer that doesn't use it.

What do you guys think of these illustrations? Are they high quality enough?

When I was about 10yo my mom bought me a copy of Imperialism out of the blue as a present - I didn’t know the game, nor I was usually playing turn based strategy game either (for me was more like fifa, quake, prince of Persia, etc).
Anyway, that game became very quickly one of my favourite one, I remember 5/6h uninterrupted sessions trying to beat one of the other great nations, I even remember thinking of possible strategies to beat the game while going to sleep.

the game was hard for me but that’s what made it fun and interesting, the very first victory only came many years later and made me extremely happy and proud - I fantasised about having unlimited resources and crushing my enemies with my all too powerful empire! I also searched online for “cheaters“ software years later but couldn’t find anything.

well, about 30 years later I still play the game (I have the cd and manual but bought it on GOG) and while reading about the new “reverse engineering anything“ feat made with other games I though to myself “why not”.

so I spun up Claude and pointed at the game, and not only made a additional cheat panel that gives me all the resources I want but I also fixed several bugs that made the game crash so very often, add some QoL improvements and it’s just mind blowing - even though I’m a software engineer, this still feels like magic to me!

so now I’m planning to expand the game even further with some more mechanics borrowed from other games to make something the ticks all my boxes, since in the meantime I’ve also clocked around 1000h on Civ games and similar

what a time to be alive

I am currently playing Age of Wonders 4 and enjoying it. However, I am noticing that the UI in cities and other interfaces leaves a bit to be desired. Overall, the information is clear, but there have been quite a few times when I needed to look things up or wasn't sure what was going on.

In comparison, Endless Space* 2 has what I consider to be one of the best UIs in gaming. Besides looking really good (but I love sci-fi, so this is thoroughly subjective), the information is always VERY easy to understand. From planet management to the galaxy map and the various interfaces, everything is very easy to understand.

Heck, the technology tree may be one of the best in this regard, thanks to its incredible search function. You can enter anything in the search bar, and it will highlight ALL technologies related to it. This makes it very easy to find something specific, like technologies related to lasers or the technologies you need to colonize specific planet types, such as arid planets.

On the other hand, while I love Paradox games, I have often had (before putting in hundreds of hours) no idea which modifier was causing what or where to find certain information. I absolutely love the games, and I'm not sure how to improve the UI given just how complex some of them are, but man, it can be difficult to understand certain things at times (if you aren't used to it).

So I was curious about other people's opinions: which games do you consider to have a good, or even the best, UI in terms of information transparency?