Hello everyone!

As a solo developer and a lifelong strategy gamer, I’ve spent years looking for a very specific holy grail: a massive, persistent-world strategy game where I can build a medieval realm, but where success is dictated by logistics, diplomacy, and brainpower and not by how fast I can click my mouse.

I got tired of waiting, so I’ve started designing The Marches.

The core concept is to blend the mechanical depth of four of my absolute favorite games into a stylized, low-APM, top-down persistent world where geography actually matters:

• Age of Empires, Crusader Kings 3, Foxhole & Mount & Blade

"I don't want a second job."

Traditional strategy games are exhausting. To fix this, in The Marches I seek to introduce a few key systems to respect your time:

1. RimWorld-style Task Automation: Lores don't micro-manage every peasant. Instead, you manage your fiefdom via a global Work Priority Matrix. Need to fortify before winter? Bump "Construction" and "Hauling" to Priority 1, and your entire population drops their secondary tasks to build the walls autonomously. Or something like this, give me ideas. I am still collecting them.
2. Safe Offline Transition ("Home Anchoring"): Your empire shouldn't collapse while you sleep. When you log off, your character safely returns to your designated "Hogars/Homes" (like a tavern room or city castle) and becomes completely invulnerable.
3. Active Offline NPCs: Instead of disappearing, your offline character transitions into an interactive NPC. If you are an artisan, you keep selling wares behind your counter at your set prices.If you are a mercenary, other active players can hire your character as an AI companion for their patrol, earning you passive income.
4. No Lordship? No Problem: You don't have to manage lands. You can play as a traveling Blacksmith, an independent Mercenary accepting player-posted contracts, or a direct Frontline Soldier earning a steady salary from a Duke's treasury.

The Scale

Using a seamless strategic zoom (similar to Supreme Commander), you should be able to zoom out to the world map where armies are represented as single "Legion" tokens. When a battle occurs, zoom in to see the token dynamically deconstruct into hundreds of individual 2D-stylized soldiers utilizing smart local behaviors (like shieldwalls and kiting and whatever).

To keep things running smoothly for thousands of players on a single global map, the server backend is being built from the ground up using a highly-optimized Entity-Component-System (ECS) in Rust.This ensures we can simulate millions of autonomous entities without the server dying.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this:

• Does a "low-APM, high-strategy" persistent MMO sound like something you've been missing?
• How do you feel about the player-as-NPC offline automation?
• What is your biggest concern with a persistent political sandbox like this?
• Would you rather a realistic down-to-earth medieval simulation game or rather a low-fantasy style game?

If this is a world you’d like to see come to life, let me know! I'm starting to gather a small community of strategy enthusiasts to discuss mechanics and early development tests!