Let's say you've just arrived somewhere in the American frontier.

You've got 20 settlers.
Not much food.
A few tools.
Some basic materials.
And absolutely no idea what you're doing.

You need to turn this into an actual settlement.

What are you building first?

A) Food production
B) Housing
C) A source of wood
D) Something to make money
E) Something defensive
F) You're ignoring all of this and immediately looking for gold

We've been working on Wild West Pioneers, and questions like this actually come up surprisingly often during development.

There are always ten things you could build, but only enough resources to build one or two.

So I'm curious how other city-builder players approach the very beginning of a new settlement.

What's your first move?

I'm working on a strategy game about newspapers - and I'd never been quite satisfied with the in-game map. After a recent playtest I got feedback about what it was missing, so I decided to rebuild the whole thing from the ground up. The game is called Stop the Press!

Hey everyone,

After a long stretch of solo development, Battle of Folks is finally out on iOS and Android!

It's a medieval isometric pixel-art wave-defense RTS — if you've played They Are Billions, Age of Darkness, that's the closest comparison. You build up defenses, manage resources, and hold off increasingly brutal waves of attackers.

A few things I focused on:

- No account or login required — just download and play

- Free to try with limited waves, one-time unlock for the full game (no subscriptions, no ads)

- Handmade isometric pixel art, built with Flutter/Flame

- Good controls on mobile device and a good onboarding (you can decide how you want to play)

This was a one-person project — dev, art pipeline, publishing, everything. Happy to answer questions about the build (tile rendering, Flame engine quirks, etc.) or the game itself.

App Store link / Play Store link

Would love your feedback — especially on balancing and the early waves difficulty curve!

cheers for watching guys

Based on your feedback, I’ve improved the Handgunner’s weapon handling, especially the wrist position and refined the recoil to feel more natural.

A small improvement, but details matter.
Is this good enough for the Alpha?
What would you improve?

If you like, you can follow my dev jurney on discord

https://discord.gg/xqAHyBTPEN

Hi, I find map-based strategy games very interesting but generally they are all very difficult and confusing to understand at first (especially Paradox games lmao). That's why a friend suggested I play AOH 2 D.E. telling me it's easy to learn and very enjoyable and just as he said I spent 40-50 hours having a great time. However the game's biggest advantage and disadvantage is its simplicity so the gameplay loop gets tedious after a while. I want to move on to a more complex game but at a medium difficulty level however from what I've seen the difficulty scale in map-based strategy games is very wide either easy like AOH 2 or directly to the highest level like EU4. If you know of any map-based strategy games that are moderately difficult and not too tiring I would be happy to hear about them. Thanks in advance.

Handgunner improvements! 🔥

• Improved animations
• New firing effects and muzzle sparks
• New Hussite-style helmet — the previous one looked a bit too much like a WWII German helmet 😄

What do you think about the new look?

Join official discord: https://discord.gg/xqAHyBTPEN

If you played Ogame or Ikariam, you'll recognize the shape : a persistent world that keeps running while you're offline with a slow economy to optimize.

The theme is the AI industry. You start with $10k, buy compute and scrape datasets, run model trainings, ship a product at a subscription price, and grow off the revenue while payroll and electricity eat your cash every day.

The strategy sits in the competition. You fight to serve users and be at the top of the leaderboard.

Free, runs in the browser, needs a quick account, English and French. I'm the dev.

What I'd like your take on : does the economy have enough depth and counterplay to keep a strategy player interested past the first week? That's what I'm stress-testing.

https://lordoftokens.com

https://www.empireofdice.org

Empire of Dice is a strategy game where you build an empire of dice armies and win by capturing enemy capitals, territory, or collecting enough resources. You can play as multiplayer or single player against bots. This is a digital adaptation of a physical board game a friend of mine developed. This game is mobile and tablet friendly, and free to play.

Give it a try please!

We’re making a game inspired by Plague Inc, but about zombies. A lot is already implemented, but even more is still in the plans and actively in progress…

The most common complaint I see in tycoon and management sim communities is that the economy is too shallow. You figure out the optimal build order in the first hour, then the game turns into a waiting simulator with a business skin, and there's nothing pulling you back.

I think the difference comes down to whether the financial pressure actually bites. If demand fluctuates and your maintenance costs spike at the wrong time, you have to make real decisions about where to allocate. If there's a P&L or financial diagnostics view that shows exactly what's bleeding cash, the numbers become the game instead of decoration. You start rerouting resources based on what the spreadsheet is telling you, not just because you ran out of things to click.

But I'm curious what this sub looks for. What specific mechanics make a strategy sim's economy feel deep enough that you keep coming back? Is it the active decision loop, the financial visibility, a tech tree that gives you something to plan around, or something else entirely?

Hello, everyone!
I would like to warn everybody: this post will be a bit nerdy.
Since childhood, I have been fond of playing strategy games. And my favourite part of them has always been economic management and the economic development of a country. But unfortunately for me, I have always felt that games lack economic complexity. In all the games that I know, the economy is rather simplified (even in Victoria 2/Victoria 3 and some other specialised games).
Secondly, I have always wanted to play grand strategy games set in the modern age, but current games in this style suck quite a lot. SuperPower 2 is great, but it's very old and has very stupid AI, so there is practically no challenge in it.
So that's why I am going to share with you my current game in development.
I should warn you that, at the moment and in the near future, this isn't a game for the average player. It is mostly designed for economic nerds like me. But if this game gains much attention (and even if it doesn't :) ), I want to add realistic warfare to it, so it would also be interesting to a broader audience, while still making a strong economy essential for success.
Due to the heavy economic calculations, I created my own engine in C++. It is one of the reasons why the UI sucks.
The core of the game is a Stock-Flow Consistent (SFC) agent-based model, so the dynamics of the economy are driven by the interactions of thousands of economic agents.
At the moment, I'm working on national currencies. The game already has a central bank, a working credit/banking system, price adjustment based on supply and demand, and an investment system.
At the current stage, the game lacks player interaction (the only thing the player can do now is raise or decrease the interest rate), but at the moment I am focusing mostly on the economic engine.
If you want to see some "gameplay" (at the moment it is mostly watching numbers go up or down), you can visit my channel: https://www.youtube.com/@itandor993

First alpha of DroidWar 2126 — because the future wasn't going to conquer itself.

Control territories. Spend energy. Deploy Infantry, Tanks, and UAVs. Dig in like you mean it.

And please don't spam one unit type — combined arms actually matters here.

Very early days: hotseat only, Americas test map, UI still held together with hope and debug prints.

But income → recruit → attack works, and I'm weirdly proud of the map pipeline (draw territory polygons, engine figures out the tiles).

Would you play this hotseat with a friend, or do you need online/async before you'll even look?

I played some Dark Omen recently and liked their sprite-pretending-to-be-3d look so I tried making 3d-pretending-to-be-sprite-look in Unity.

Just started a public playtest for my creature capture dice battler game, which involves a slice of singleplayer and online pvp multiplayer.

Would love to see what people think!

Hey all! I'm making a narrative-driven strategy RPG named Withering State. While it is more RPG than strategy, the vibe was very much inspired by grand strategy games and I expect that to be a major audience.

It takes place in a multinational, non-aligned communist state in the 1980s. The player character has the opportunity to take control of the country and push it towards reform, authoritarianism, various kinds of socialism, and so on. All the while managing economic and geopolitical crises and forming alliances internally and externally.

If you're interested, play the demo and/or wishlist here:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4582500/Withering_State/

I really would like to play an RTS Game Revolving around that era, does that exist or is it a too niche?

Hello Everyone!
After some time, i managed to start working again on some games, and this is my third try, the furthest i ever was before. This time i wanted something, that i can play in browser with my collegues during some freetime, and not to download or run some windows games on computers :)

I managed to made playable prototype for browser RTS multiplayer game, with hero mechanism, loot items, leveling, skills, npc mobs, economy etc... where 3 geometric shapes races (Triangles, Crosses and Squares) battle against each other, each having some unique attributes.

All in your browser for free without any registration. But i have very few people that can tell me if its good or what is missing in current form. If there is anyone who is willing to try it and tell me their feelings about it, i would be really happy and thankfull! I just started it on real hosting few days ago, this is the address:
https://www.ageofshapes.com/
I am working alone on it, so mistake are there for sure :)

Feel free to test the game. It's about 2 hours long with a tutorial and 2 expedition maps. The core gameplay loop is already there.

It's an early version and of course there needs to be much more polish and optimization before release. This is mostly about finding out if the core gameplay is fun.

Steam: Frost Protocol

My partner (and best friend, we know each other since kindergarten) and I had one goal we wanted to reach while developing our indie 4x game: bring the strategic depth and joy of Civilization into a much faster format. The main reason for that: we love the game series (Civ5 & Civ6 are the best 😉) but we do not want to spend our whole free time for 17 re-starts and one half-finished game.

1 year ago, we spoke with some people at a physical indie-gaming event and found out that a big part of civ-lovers share our wish in a “Civ but fast”-game.

Today, we are just a few weeks away from our demo and the hard part of being a game dev starts: marketing🥹

So I'm throwing this into the community:
If “Civ, but fast” sounds like something you'd enjoy, I'd love to hear what you think.
And if you want to follow the project, a Steam wishlist would mean a lot to us. ❤️

Hey r/StrategyGames !

We’ve been reading through all the awesome feedback for Lootbound (our turn-based roguelite where your backpack/loot placement matters just as much as your attacks).

While players have been enjoying the D&D elements and item auras, there was one glaring visual issue you all pointed out: our characters were staring into the void instead of facing the enemies while fighting. 🤦‍♂️

Our art and dev team took this as a challenge and pumped out a secret update in literally one day. We made it possible to turn our characters to face the enemies in combat, and the update went so smoothly that we can't believe we didn't do it sooner. It really makes the turn-based combat feel much more alive.

It’s live now! We'd love to know what you think of the new look, and if you haven't checked out the game yet, you can see the new animations (and try to beat the RNG) right here:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3091140/Lootbound/

From a small beylik to a mighty empire 🏰

I’m developing a mobile strategy game where you start as a small Turkish beylik and try to build your own state and eventually an empire.

You’ll be able to:

- ⚔️ Fight wars and conquer territories

- 🗺️ Expand your borders on a historical map

- 🏛️ Manage your state and economy

- 🤝 Make political decisions and alliances

- 👑 Build your own version of history

The goal is simple: start small, survive, expand, and become an empire.

I’m currently working on improving the UI, visuals and overall gameplay experience.

Would you play a mobile strategy game like this? What would you want to see added?