How do you learn to play grand strategy games? If we take Paradox titles as an example, players often joke that you do not really know what you are doing before the first hundred hours. Those games are so rich in interacting systems that even starting to understand them, let alone master them, takes a long time. That is part of their appeal: the mastery and sense of accomplishment that comes with it.It also does not help that, if you want to learn, you either digest pages upon pages of text, try on your own and fail until you grok the essentials, or watch YouTube videos. And there is no escaping it: even the best tutorial cannot cover enough to ensure success on a first run. But that does not mean we should not try to make these games more approachable.So how do you do that? Let’s try to answer that with Uncharted Sectors. The game has a lot of complex, interacting systems, which means there are too many valid playstyles for a one-size-fits-all tutorial. Beyond the very basics, the "right" information to surface will always depend heavily on what the player is doing. As such, the game should not try to lecture the player on how to play, and should instead try to answer "what matters right now?" and "what can I do about it?"The Echoes systemOne of the tools we use is the "Echoes" system: a feed of short, tweet-like messages from your advisors or your people that highlight big problems and big wins. In addition to the feed, specific Echoes also show up inside UI panels, surfacing insights that are directly relevant to what you are looking at.Each Echo carries a tiny "would you like to know more?" element (the question mark under the text) that you can hover over to display what the problem is, or what good thing the Echo is referring to. As much as possible, each entry will link to the relevant mechanics and list a few leads on "how to fix the problem" or "how to reproduce the good thing".Not only does this avoid pulling you out of your flow like a tutorial would, it ...
I love Traveller's Pocket Empires and Warhammer 40K Rogue Trader. They're among my all-time favourite pen-and-paper RPGs, and among the main inspirations for Uncharted Sectors.I love their empire/colony management mechanics, but even more, I love the freedom they offer! You want to build a city made of wooden pyramids on top of a mountain and inhabited by religious fanatics? Go ahead. You want to terraform a sterile rock just to prove you can? That becomes a whole campaign, but you can try. Hand in hand with the Game Master (GM), you'll write that story, and it'll be fun.Very few computer games capture that feeling. The only ones I know (and love with all my heart) are Dwarf Fortress and RimWorld. They let you set almost any goals and make them fun to pursue until the end (usually losing your colony to some catastrophic failure or crazy chain of events).But I also love the power fantasy of ruling an empire. I want stories about the destiny of millions. I want to explore the unknown, discover wonderful planets in dangerous places and go all-in on them. That's why I love Rogue Trader and Pocket Empires. That's why I love Europa Universalis, Victoria, Stellaris, Civilization. And that's what Uncharted Sectors is about: the crazy sandbox where you write your own story and losing is fun, but at empire scale.So how to achieve that? The core of Uncharted Sectors is layered, interacting systems. Planets are divided into territories, regions, and provinces. Buildings depend on the culture that builds them and on the materials your construction workers use. You choose the inputs, the workers, and the outputs. Those wooden pyramids in mountainous terrain? You get them by combining culture, materials, and geography in a specific way.Want a spa-resort province where people eat dolphin cakes? The systems will let you try. You build fisheries that catch the local weird dolphins. You build restaurants that turn them into delicious prepared meals. You ensure these meals sell at a lo...
I’ve always had a soft spot for Paradox’s Victoria series. Over the last decade I’ve sunk an embarrassing number of hours into turning minor powers into industrial giants, lifting those tiny (and now nicely animated) people into better lives, rushing for Johore because of course you rush for Johore, and generally seeing how far I could bend the XIXth century. As you probably guessed, those games are a major inspiration for Uncharted Sectors.What Victoria does exceptionally well is make the economy feel alive. You build things that actually feed other things, pops respond to what you produce, standards of living climb, and you get that very satisfying “the graph is going up because I made good choices” moment. It’s a great loop because the parts of society depend on one another, and the game actually shows you that.But there’s a built-in limitation to that formula. In most runs you gravitate toward the same path: secure iron, coal, wood, gold, rubber, oil; pump out steel and tools; grab the good states; get more people; research the obvious techs; and eventually let the AI do the heavy industrial lifting because pops can do it faster than you. Whether you start as a European power or something smaller, you end up playing variations of the same industrialization story.That big limitation is, in my opinion, unavoidable. It’s baked into the pitch itself. You’re playing an industrializing nation during the industrialization era in a historical game. The whole game engine revolves around that, as it should. There is no way to make “the march of progress” not railroaded (pun very much intended). You can get to automobiles first, you can be richer than the others, you can optimize better, but you’re still playing off the same screenplay.A science-fiction setting breaks those constraints. We can keep the part that’s fun (inputs becoming outputs, populations reacting, standards of living changing) but we’re not required to have only one “correct” way to power cities, feed peo...
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