Hi r/StrategyGames!

I’ve been working on Age of Mankind, a real-time grand strategy game set in antiquity, and I’d love to show you where it stands and hear what you think. Everything in the video is pre-alpha footage from the current build, recorded in-game.

What it is

You lead one people through the ancient world – from a small tribe to an empire, or from Rome to its fall. There are three historical start dates (509 BC, 264 BC and AD 117) and a free game where you can pick any of several hundred original peoples of the Old World, from Celts and Carthaginians to the Han.

What I’m trying to do differently

• The whole Old World, not just the Mediterranean. Europe, North Africa, the Near East, India, China and Japan on one hand-made map with around 9,000 provinces.
• History that moves. Names change with time and size: the Latins become the Roman Republic, the Republic becomes the Empire.
• The AI plays by your rules. No bonuses, no shortcuts. Whatever you can do, it can do, and the other way round.
• A map you want to look at. No satellite image: the earth is painted, rivers come from real elevation data, snow reaches each region in its own season, and you can zoom all the way down into the streets of Rome.
• Battles day by day. A battle runs over several days, so you can watch how it goes before it is decided.

Where it stands

Age of Mankind is pre-alpha: the foundation is in place, but several big systems are still missing or only partly done. The release date is not set yet.

Already working:

• Three historical start dates and a free game with every original people
• The full map: around 9,000 provinces, seasons, rivers, and Rome you can zoom into
• Building, population per province, settling new land
• Armies and multi-day battles
• Diplomacy, trade and treaties
• AI that builds, settles, fights and negotiates under the same rules as you
• Saving and loading

Still to come:

• Culture: the cultures are already on the map, but they don’t affect gameplay yet
• The research tree: only a small part of it exists so far
• Artwork for units and buildings: every culture gets its own look. A Celtic warrior or a Persian palace should look Celtic or Persian, not like a reskinned Roman one.
• More 3D buildings for the cities: right now Rome shows its monuments up close; more cities and cultures will follow, each in its own architectural style.
• Armies as 3D figures: right now armies are shown only by their standards on the map. They’re supposed to become proper 3D figures in the style of their culture. That’s a big job and will take a while.
• The new interface (the leather-and-bronze look you see in the video) is being finished
• Smarter AI in war and defense, and a lot of balancing

Next: keep building the core systems, one by one.

I’d really like your input: what would you most want to see in a grand strategy game set between 509 BC and AD 476? Is there a mechanic, a people or a moment of ancient history that other games have left out?

I’ll be around to answer everything in the comments.

Steam page, if you’d like to follow along: https://store.steampowered.com/app/5331500/Age_of_Mankind/

Hey everyone, after the shield formations last time, this one is about the guns.

On the march my riflemen move as a loose mass, but the moment they halt, every man steps into his place, rank and file. They can form a line, a column or a wedge, and when the fighting starts they take two ranks, the front one down on one knee.

(sorry the video’s in the chinese interface, it’s the best gameplay capture i have! and the actual game has way more going on than what you see here)

So here goes: (And if you've been following my previous posts, thank you for keeping up my updates)

i used to be obsessed with RTS, RTT, pretty much any war game i could get my hands on. but over the years there’s been fewer and fewer of them, and the ones that come out don’t really scratch that itch anymore...so i decided to make the game i always wanted to play as a kid.

when i tried to get funding, investors weren’t interested and some of them were pretty open about telling me it was a waste of time. NGL that stung... but i kept going anyway, lots of late nights and probably too much instant noodles, and the demo is finally playable guys! (and for me to get some sleep)

what Live War is about

it’s a modern combined-arms RTS, tanks, air, infantry, air defense all working together. i’ve tuned it to be heavy on strategy and light on micro ops, so you’re thinking like a commander instead of fighting your own mouse. less APM stress, more “ok how do i actually win this.”

help needed:

i’m giving out Steam playtest keys through Discord cuz i want real, in-depth feedback, not just “looks cool.” what feels good, what feels broken, what’s missing. i read everything. so pls come destroy my game!

if people end up enjoying it, that’d mean a lot to me. and i won’t lie, it’d feel pretty good to prove a few people wrong 😅

Discord link in the comments if you want a key. thanks for reading this far (I'm [ahui_123456], DM me if i dont reply!]

Hey everyone, this time I wanted to show how the melee units in my game fight in formation.

I always loved switching formations depending on the situation in Total War: Rome 2 and the older games, so every shield unit in Sundered Reach can switch between five formations, one key each: shield wall, testudo, phalanx, orbis and fire cover.

Fire cover is the one for the guns. The shields kneel in one long line and you can hook your riflemen in right behind them, every rifleman gets his own spot behind a shield and fires over it. The human shields are holo fields, every hit lights them up, and when one takes too much it fails and turns red for a few seconds.

It's still not where I want it to be, a few units still do their own thing sometimes, but I'm on it and I'll go deeper into it in the next dev diary.

Which formation would you use the most? And if you have ideas for more formations, let me know.

Everything is recorded in game, still in development.

Hi, I'm a solo developer and I've just announced Radar Shadow, a real-time strategy game about reconnaissance and long-range strikes. Here's how a match works.

Both sides see the terrain but not what the other has built. Each hides one HQ on its half of a hex map, and you win by finding the enemy's and destroying it before they find yours.

Recon. You scout with camera drones and satellite passes. Until a drone has flown over a hex, a missile sent there is a guess.

Strikes. You plot every route yourself, hex by hex. Going around a battery costs range, going straight through costs aircraft. Forest hides you, towns give you away, and a ridge between your drone and their radar hides it completely. That blind zone is the radar shadow.

Air defence. It only fires at what its radars have detected, and each battery can track only a few targets at once. One expensive missile is easy to stop, a swarm of cheap drones is not, and the same works against you.

Blueprints. Every drone and missile is a hull with bays: warhead, fuel, engine, radio, camera. You can build a very fast, very reliable drone that costs a fortune, or a swarm of cheap ones and accept that many won't make it. Jammers, decoys and a station that blinds their satellite round it out.

It started as a board game, but the radar math quickly outgrew the table.

A question for people who play RTS and wargames: when recon is the core of a strategy game, what keeps it from turning into a chore?

The closed playtest starts in November, sign-ups are open on the Steam page.

I still keep thinking about WC3, played it at different stages in my life and still never found any better. Maybe Starcraft 2 WoL was close to it.

What are your recommendations?

Sorry to be negative, but it’s just discouraging how many of the games advertised on here are just half assed AI slop. I’m not against using AI as a tool but so many of the UIs just scream AI, with that soulless corporate spreadsheet look. I get developing a game is HARD. (I’ve tried and failed a ton!!)

But at least put some effort in and have passion for it.

It’s all so tiresome.

We just released Northgard Battlegrounds, our new city-building autobattler where structures are the heart of your strategy!

We just did a Demo during Steam Next Fest and released our game yesterday with a new clan (clan of the bear) and new builds to do! Has anyone tried it yet? We'd love to have your opinion on it 😁

Hey guys,

I've been working on my procedural map generation for this dark parchment world for quite some time. I kind of like where it is right now, but i certainly suffer of developer blindness.

How do you like the atmosphere? Any ideas how to improve? The game itself is quite unique i guess - i would compare it to battlebrothers, you build an army of sceletons which you individually equip and improve - but combats are autobattler in which you use spells out of your spellbook. So movement on the map and combats are basically real time. If you die you loose your army but keep your spells and lich powers (roguelite).

Also got a playable demo if you want to explore the world yourselves.

TL;DR: Last week I asked about which map style people prefer in strategy games. Answers were mixed, but the top one was, 'paper zoomed out, immersive zoomed in.' So I took that on board, plus additional playable paper map styles.

Context

There were votes for all three styles, immersive (units on the field, buildings, dynamic living world, etc.), strategic (cleaner look, abstract unit symbols), and paper (mimicking a paper map), but top votes were for immersive zoomed in, paper zoomed out. Plus some responses around, 'it depends' and map busy-ness.

What I did

• Dynamic styles: one style when zoomed out, another when zoomed in (first gif)
• Paper map template: so I could easily add more paper map styles, medieval, renaissance, steam punk, WW2, etc.
• Togglable map elements: every visual element of the map can be turned off or on, or mixed and matched. E.g., a paper map with soldiers on the field (like in the last screenshot of WW2 North Africa), or a stripped down view if things are too busy. You can save your combinations as custom views and switch between them in any save.

I'm really happy with the end result. It brings the customizability from just map and faction creation and behavior, to the next level of how it feels and looks to be in the game. You can really make it feel like any setting you're playing or watching now.

Which of the paper maps in the carousel would you play in? Are any styles missing that you'd like to see?

Super grateful to anyone who left their thoughts in the first post.

Playtest: a playtest build of the game (Pixel Imperium, sandbox strategy / world-builder) is almost ready. If you're interested in participating, comment 'interested' and I'll reach out.

Hi all. I'm a solo dev and my first game came out on Steam yesterday.

I grew up with games that came with thick manuals, and I used to read them before playing, sometimes more than once. I always missed that, so I wrote one for my game. It's 82 pages, written as if it was the internal manual of the lab in the game. It explains every number on the screen, and the formulas are in the back for anyone who wants them.

The game is called Subject Zero. You play an AI model inside the lab that built it. The more capable you get, the more they watch you, and you're trying to stay useful enough that they don't shut you down. A run takes about 7 to 10 minutes.

You don't have to read the manual to play, the game explains itself as you go. It's just there if you're like me and enjoy that kind of thing.

The manual is free to read online: https://niobium-labs.com/products/subject-zero/manual/

Steam page (Windows and Linux): https://store.steampowered.com/app/5279350/Subject_Zero/

If you try it, I'd really like to hear what you think, good or bad.

Trailer music: "Galactic Rap" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), CC BY 4.0.

Hey Reddit!

We’re a small team making Fomo Fighters, a browser MMO strategy game. We wanted to share how the game works and why we made a few not-so-obvious design decisions.

A bit of context

We launched in November 2025 as a mini app inside Telegram. Almost a year later:

• 500,000 unique players
• 7 game seasons
• a second server (we shut down the first one)
• a full browser version
• our first steps toward an international audience

The core loop

Genre classics: build your castle, train your army, fight other players.

After that, it’s your call: go solo and fight in PvP, or join a clan for clan wars and outpost sieges.

We bet on clans from day one. In MMO strategy games, people don’t stay for the mechanics. They stay for the people they play with.

Decision #1: your race is permanent

Three races: Humans, Elves and Demons. Once you pick, that’s it. No switching.

We argued for a long time about whether that was too harsh. But we kept it: a choice you can’t undo makes people take it seriously, and each race ends up with its own identity.

Decision #2: a live world map

For almost a year the game had no shared map. Recently we added one: you can see every player and outpost, and your troops and your clanmates’ troops move in real time. You can relocate your castle closer to your allies or closer to your enemies.

It changed the game noticeably. Once people can see who’s where, they start negotiating, planning attacks and forming alliances.

Decision #3: a shared goal for the whole server

The big question for any MMO: why come back every day?

Our answer is WAR points. You earn them in battles, and once a month a shop opens where you can trade them for rare items. That gave the server a rhythm: you grind all month, and by the end of the month everything is on fire.

What’s next

We’re now going international, and it’s a whole new experience: different players, different expectations, different mistakes.

We’ll share as we go. What would you like to hear about?

• game design and balancing three races
• how clan wars work
• how we grew to 500K on Telegram
• the technical move from Telegram to browser

Let us know in the comments 👇

Steadfast started as a solo project of mine a year ago and can't believe we've already hit 1,000 steam wishlists in the first two weeks of getting the steam page online! Super thankful for all the support and here's a teaser of the storm gameplay.

Official website: https://steadfast.game/
Wishlist on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/5235740/Steadfast/

this is the russian one. our main menu cycles through every nation's parade, USA, Russia, China, EU, India and Iran, each with every unit type marching and driving in formation, the leader speaks, the infantry shout back and then their song kicks in with subtitles. all live in game

its a modern base building rts inspired by c&c generals, pre alpha. we gave every nation the same treatment on purpose, no good guys and no bad guys

honest question, could this be offensive for anyone? would u keep it, make it optional, or change something? what do u suggest

if u like it, wishlisting is free and steam tells u the second its out
store.steampowered.com/app/5145960/Doctrine_Strike/
trailer: youtube.com/watch?v=kP3JGbnxE5k
discord: discord.gg/WeBjq5vcqx

I’m the creator of The Last Mandate, a political simulation currently in development. You govern the fictional federation of Arken, where advisers, governors and institutions have interests of their own, and your decisions and public statements leave a political history.

I’m particularly interested in testing whether players understand their options, find meaningful room to act, and can follow the consequences afterward. Where does a political constraint feel convincing, and where does it feel like the game is simply blocking you?

The Mac and iPad preview is free: https://thelastmandate.com

Feedback on confusing decisions, unconvincing reactions or missing opportunities would be especially useful.

Game Title: Hashmark

Playable Link: https://jfrank06.itch.io/hashmark

Platform: PC (Windows / Mac / Linux). It runs in your web browser from a downloaded file, with no installation and no internet needed.

Description: Hashmark is a football franchise sim where you are both the GM and the head coach of one of 32 original, fictional teams. On game day, you call your offense or defense while an AI coordinator handles the other side, and every snap is a physics simulation: routes, coverage, blocking, pursuit, and tackling come from player ratings and geometry, not dice tables. You can draw your own plays in the Play Designer and test them against any defense. Off the field, you run the franchise: trades with AI teams, free agency, contracts and the salary cap, scouting and the draft, plus optional storylines with your players where your choices affect their development. You can rename and recolour teams, edit players, and export your teams to share. The demo covers one complete season. The full game adds the offseason, the draft, and every season after, and you can load your demo league into it from Settings → League file. Download the zip, unzip it, and open index.html in your browser. Your league saves in your browser. I’d love feedback on whether game day feels fun, whether the results look realistic, and anything confusing in your first hour.

Free to Play Status:
[ ] Free to play
[x] Demo/Key available
[ ] Paid (Allowed only on Tuesdays with [TT] in the title)

Involvement: I’m the solo developer. I designed the game and directed its development, and I built it with Claude (an AI coding assistant) writing much of the code. It’s disclosed as AI-assisted on the itch.io page.

We just launched the Rift of Magic update which introduced spellcasting for the first time as well as a bunch of other updates! Including:

• 30 spells, including a signature spell for every hero
• A recruitable mage for every faction
• Endless Mode: finish Act III and you now have the option to March On
• Daily Runs with global and friends leaderboards
• 75 new achievements
• Enemy AI rebuilt from scratch
• Charges reworked
• New Photo mode with cinematic controls
• Steam Deck controls
• Custom unit models for mods
• New accessibility features

Check out the the dev long on steam for a full list of updates.

Hi. I would like to present a game I'm working on.

Woodwars is an browser online strategy game in which it is difficult to achieve a ‘snowball effect’.

A game in which a direct attack serves no purpose.

Resources are mined at remote sites and must be transported back to base. The same applies to getting food to your units.

Your success will depend on your ability to both secure and attack these supply routes.

The game is currently in its first publicly available version. It features a leaderboard, a lot of missions, two challenging campaigns consisting of more demanding missions, a 1v1, 2v2 and FFA for 4 players + 1v1 against AI. It also has Elo matchmaking. Maps are randomly generated, but you can create a lobby for private match and see the map before.

Almost all rewards are cosmetic, and the game contains no pay-to-win mechanics or simply too powerful units.

For new players there is an advisor and tutorial in the game to help you with what to do in the beginning.

I’d love to hear your feedback on the game.

And remember, please, it's first public version. woodwars.online

Hi r/StrategyGames, I'm the solo developer of Ageforge. It started as "what if Age of War were a real 1v1 against another player" and became its own strategy game. A few design decisions I'd love strategy players' opinions on:

Tech or army. Both players share one lane. Units cost gold, and every kill pays gold and XP. XP lets you evolve to the next age (Stone → Medieval → Gunpowder → Future) for stronger units, a new ultimate and an upgraded keep tower. Evolving spends the XP you banked, so you're always choosing between teching up and fighting the wave in front of you.

Counters over numbers. Units form a triangle: frontline beats ranged, ranged beats fast, fast beats frontline. Countering a unit type deals 75% more damage, so reading what your opponent sends matters more than spamming.

Fight for the middle. A shrine in the middle of the lane pays XP to whoever holds it, and a keep left idle starts to crumble, so turtling loses.

No two matches the same. Each evolve offers cards that bend your army (e.g. ranged +40% damage, frontline −20% HP), with set bonuses, and every match rolls a rule like Gold Rush, Eclipse or Meteor Shower.

Matches take a few minutes. It's free in the browser, no download, and you can play as a guest: https://ageforge.live/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=post&utm_campaign=strategygames

What I'm unsure about: is the counter triangle too punishing for new players, and does spending XP to evolve feel like a meaningful trade-off?

Land & Liege is a slow-paced, persistent medieval MMO set in England in 1066. You begin as a minor lord with a small wooden manor, a few fields and a handful of peasants.

The world itself is built from real geographic data. Every hill, river and coastline sits where it actually is, so when you claim land, you’re claiming a real piece of England. The economy is just as grounded: towns specialize, goods have weight, and everything moves by cart along real roads.

The idea is few minutes is enough to read your letters, make decisions for your manor and plan your next move. There are no resets and no seasons. Losing a battle hurts, death is possible, and the history players make stays.

If you feel like knowing more hope to r/landandliege or hop in the discord https://discord.gg/Yt4x6qVcRE

Feel free to ask anything, this is early development btw

• What Im working on?

Currently working on the bulk of the buildings, I had plenty done before but I got finally to put them all together and get to a point where I feel I can actually see them in the game.

I have all the core ones ready, there's definitely some polishing needed in the future but this bill most likely work for now.

Something important, the buildings are isometric but they have 4 different rotations right now, so you wont have to deal with a game that only allows you to build either south east or south west.

• Construction as a visual building and gameplay experience.

Since the game is a persistent world, the pace is going to be quite slow, allowing you to just play for less than an hour, make a couple of decisions, respond to a couple of letters and leave task to your steward, then just walk away if you want too, you city wont burn because you don't feel like siting for 8 hours straight in front of your PC.

For this reason I want players to enjoy the process of construction, developing textures that will be meaningful and representative of the current state of your town (see the images in the carrousel).

I have a similar plan with farms and vegetation (that I haven't even touch) that are waiting for me on a notebook.

• MMO as the base and possible single player mode.

It has come to my attention from many players, not only on reddit about how much they would love a game like this in single player, to be honest I didnt even think about it to be honest. Now the question is, what would you prefer, a kind of city builder were you can freely and instantly build or a proper experience fighting other lords and conquering against the computer.

I would love your feedback about the looks and the game mode.

If you feel like knowing more hope to r/landandliege or hop in the discord https://discord.gg/Yt4x6qVcRE

I was really looking forward to the strategy game Veterans: Napoleonic Wars. Then I played the demo in May, and my enthusiasm kind of died. It was terrible. It wasn’t so much that the UI was unfinished, but rather the overall gameplay - and as I mentioned in my video, there was still a huge amount of work to be done on it. And as if that weren’t enough for the developers to deal with, just a few days later the game literally vanished from Steam because they were accused of copying the Ultimate General series. It was eventually resolved, but I have to note that when you look at the gameplay footage, there’s a certain logic to it. The developers, however, pressed on and released another demo, which I also had on my hard drive, but… due to a lack of time, I didn’t even open it up - though, to be honest, it’s not like I really felt like playing it anyway. A few days ago, though, I received a third email granting early access to the first release. Well, at that point, I just HAD to give it a try.

More in my early access review!

Hey everyone ım a solo developer working on a game that combines 1st-person trench warfare with RTS tabletop tactics.

Here is a quick peak at the early pre-alpha build where you build defenses order troops from a tactical map and fight alongside them on the frontlines.

Its still a work in progress (currently working on maps and polishing systems), but Id love to get your feedback on the core concept and gameplay flow!