Where do I go from here?

I’ll start by saying I’m very excited that Victoria 3 was announced. It also makes me undecided on how my own gamedev should proceed. I’ve been working on a game engine the past three years in the hopes that it would fulfill my desires of what a grand strategy game should be. Much of the work has been in emulating massive real-time battles with large numbers of units. The only way to achieve that sort of scale was to write the engine myself. With optimizations and gameplay techniques this first core part of the game is mostly settled.

Grid-based battles with animated units, large maps efficiently rendered, fields of vision for units.

However I’ve also been working on generated procedural campaign maps. One of my biggest desires for Paradox world maps gameplay is for procedural worlds so that no play-through is the same. This is especially true for colonial exploration, since the player can choose to have no idea what the world looks like outside their initial continent. I have plate tectonics, ocean currents, and varied biomes. I can also generate fragmented political and cultural regions that conform to the landscape. With that core foundation I was hoping to expand on the features of one of my favorite games Victoria 2 while fixing my gripes with it. This meant regional markets, physical trade routes, and semi-elastic goods.

Procedural world maps generated with plate tectonics, ocean currents, and auto-generated province tiles

However with the announcement of Victoria 3 I’m not sure if I should try to “fix” Victoria 2 when its better sequel is now a certainty. So what timeline/features should I focus the game?

With the large-scale set-piece battles, the technology period of 1450 to 1850 seems to be most valid. Because campaign maps are procedural this reduces the historical accuracy need which would require much too work for a lone developer. The scale of WW1 era could also not fit well with real-time battles. However the game should be capturing the scale of massive battles of Borodino or Königgrätz since the game uses an efficient grid system. But does zooming from world map to real-time map make the most sense if the goal is to emulate the strategic decisions of those time periods? Does there need to be an intermediate map system where corp/brigade units are maneuvered on a tactical map prior to the set battle?

Does an advanced pop economic system make sense for that early time period if the game is ending technologically at the time when our own world was experiencing the major social and economic upheavals. Would instead focusing on vassal/prince dynamics, religion, military reforms make more sense? It would seem so but I very much enjoy programming the economics due to its dynamic nature, whereas much of the other features would involve reforms that grant eu4-like buffs.

While Victoria 3 is self-described as focusing on the internals of a nation, I can’t hope to achieve the same entertainment value while also supporting real time pitched battles. Fighting internal revolts with pitched real-time battles would be tedious even if auto-resolved. It seems like I may have restricted myself to a map-painting game like the Total War series if I want to keep both my procedural world work and real-time battles in the same gameplay loop. There just doesn’t seem much point in having a deep pop system if Victoria 3 will have a far superior system already.

Ultimately here are the things I hope to achieve:

• exploration gameplay where the wider reaches of the world are truly unknown due to the unpredictability of the proceduralism
• a believable political system while still unpredictable for endless replayability
• A grand stategy game that allows for a simulated world and having political interactions that diverge from any actual history while still being faithful to historical accuracy
• Detailed 4x strategy mechanics but doesn’t devolve into tedious over-management towards the end-game (focus on key core cities, self-sufficient unit AI)
• A simulated world that allows the player to zoom into set-piece real-time battles while not overloaded with tedious battles. The gameplay should trend the world map towards singular decisive battles in some manner without compromising the simulation mechanics.

I’m still years away from a near-completed game to show off… but I think i’m in a place where I’m confident in my core technologies but uncertain how to tie it all together into a sensible gameplay loop.