Making my own Pike & Shot wargame with communication delay
Hi there!
I’ve had a long-time dream of building my own strategy game, like for 20 years now, so come what may, about a month ago I just started taking action.
A friend of mine, whom I was trying to invite as a programmer, showed me how to use Cursor and then disappeared, so I have to do everything by myself :)
I’m a professional game designer, and I've been making games for almost 20 years (best known for farm games 😆). But at the very beginning, I was setting up the balance for the “Fire and Sword” mod for RTW, and later participated in what became Mount & Blade: With Fire & Sword as a Rebalancer.
===
Key pillars:
- Communication delay (orders take time to arrive)
- Incomplete information (hidden unit stats and unreliable reports)
- Operational level
- Full symmetry (same rules for everyone)
- Personality-based AI
- Pike and shot setting
In the pictures, I just want to show my progress. I spent three days learning how to create maps from images (and recognizing them as a graph - the key step), and another 3 days on the pathfinding algorithm (HPA* / Flood fill, as seen in the picture 3).
Today, I'm going to fix signal propagation and synchronization, and then dig into the movement rules.
Happy to answer your questions!
Does anyone still care about this direction nowadays? What features would you want to see here?