u/Character-Wealth-810

We've been building a co-op dark fantasy RTS for two years. The core loop is persistent armies - your units train, level up, and remember. When they die, they stay dead. The scar stays on your save.

Thing is though, we're not trying to be punishing. We're trying to make you care.

So I want to ask the RTS veterans: what makes you actually mourn a unit? Is it the time invested? A name you gave them? The tactical hole they leave? Or the narrative weight of their death?

In The Old War, every unit is a person with a history. The Abbey's knights bear iron wards. The Lodge's rangers carve antlers into their bows. When they fall, the Great Bell rings. We want the loss to feel like an actual story beat, every time.

If you have a story about a unit you actually grieved - in Total War, XCOM, Fire Emblem, whatever - I'd love to hear it.

We're also restructuring our lore server, The Front Lines, into a living world rather than an announcement board. If you want to share your story of your favourite lost soldier, or just debate whether the Abbey or the Antler Lodge is right about forbidden magic, we're building a space for that.

Discord Here: https://discord.gg/YbSQz57j (It's a little empty for the moment but we're working on it!)

Context: We're building a dark fantasy world for a co-op RTS called The Old War. The core premise is that the lore and the strategy are the exact same idea: an ecological war between two civilizations who cannot coexist because they define "order" in opposite ways.

The setting so far: Two years ago in-universe, the fog receded. The Mysts that ended the old world are shrinking, and what they left behind is the Pale. The Kingdom of Andar, the last human kingdom, treats the Pale as a foreign enemy to be pushed back. They send sentries to watch the fog, soldiers to reclaim acre by acre, and the Iron Ward to hold the line. Their whole thing is that their faith is built on the idea that the Pale is a corruption to be defeated.

On the other side of things, the Keepers wait in the groves. They are bound spirits and druids who gave themselves to the Heart Tree, and they're old enough to remember what the world was before the Mysts descended. They understand the Pale as something else, completely separate from how the Kingdom of Andar does.

Our current worldbuilding problem: The Pale does not attack. It's not this hostile entity, it's more like a memory of the old world refusing to be overwritten by "modernism". The more Andar fights to survive and unknowingly suffocate it, the more they're disrupting that memory, and then subsequently the more they wake what sleeps inside.

My question: Have you ever built a world where the "enemy" is not evil, not aggressive, not even conscious? Where the conflict is just two forms of survival that cannot coexist? How do you make that compelling without a traditional villain?

If you'd all like to learn more, we just setup our Lore Discord and will start dropping letters from the front soon. https://discord.gg/vYfeB4Up

Background: Us and our team have spent the last two years building a co-op RTS game that is quite frankly still a bit of a mess. The framework migration is ongoing, the netcode is functional on good days, and the co-op mechanics are not ready to show. The urge to not show anything until it's "perfect" has been at war (get it hahahaha cause the game is called The Old War) with my desire to actually, you know, market the game.

BUT THEN we took a step back and took a look at some of the lore we'd been building and holy shit we had like GoT levels of lore. So far we've got:

1. Six full factions, two of which are completely fleshed out.
2. A magical apocalypse that's reshaped the earth, and research on the actual "science" (i use this term loosely) on how it happened.
3. An ecological war where the lore and our core RTS loop are the same idea.

The lore so far: The fog has receded, and the Pale is shrinking. The Kingdom of Andar, the last human kingdom, is clinging to hard-won ground with timber, thatch, drystone, and the Iron Ward. They have the warm orthodox Abbey and the wild Antler Lodge, and they disagree violently about how to survive. Their ultimate defense is the Great Bell. Their forbidden magic is the Unbound. On the other side, the Keepers wait in the groves. Spiral, branch, antler, woven root. They are bound spirits and druids who gave themselves to the Heart Tree. They remember what the world was before the Mysts descended. Two incompatible definitions of order. Every acre Andar reclaims to survive is the acre that wakes the enemy.

We initially wanted to make a Discord server for the game the way every other game has a server, but in the light of our realization of how comprehensive our lore actually was, we've turned it into a living world server that we'd like to have live and breathe with our lore. We'll be doing lore drops, revealing faction dossiers (as we write them), and community campaigns with the open possibility that some of it might be canon in the game. We also would LOVE to hear feedback on the lore as we work and grow the server, which is why I'm posting here in r/worldbuilding.

For those of you who are are interested, I'll post the server link in the coming days on here (we're still finalizing channel structure and all of that) but we'd love to have people join us soon. Let us know if that's something you'd be interested in!