Geopolaris: Conquer & Dominate

 

Sharing the very first demo of my solo turn-based strategy game – Geopolaris: Conquer & Dominate. The game takes place on a world map in a period between 1949-2200. Historically it has been famous for the Cold war between world superpowers and later saw the world on a path towards globalization and space exploration. I am developing it as an alt history geopolitical simulator sandbox and it is made as 4X and doesn’t start with a historical preset (though I am planning to make a map editor so that some historical setups can be introduced and played).

 

As a tribute to actual history of the time I have used world population of 1949 and have split the world into regions of equal demographic size (with few exceptions), mapped these regions to civilizations (as in the Clash of Civilizations by Samuel P. Huntington, a thesis that people's cultural and religious identities will be the primary source of conflict in the post–Cold War world). Going forward I am also planning to use real technology advancements and geopolitical interactions of the covered era.

 

The current demo has a few basic mechanics in place and is on the lines of Risk in terms of complexity. In this release I was focusing mostly on the look and feel and making a functional foundation that can later be expanded.

 

I am planning to regularly update this game demo, adding more complex mechanics (see list below) which will be changing game dynamics towards greater variability, more detailed gameplay, enabling different playing strategies and longer play time.

 

In this version you win by eliminating all other players or (while you do so) becoming stronger than all remaining rivals combined.

 

Happy playing and your feedback is more than welcome.

 

Stay in touch


Credits


Roadmap

Create fundamentals for these mechanics:

  • Breakdown generic geopolitical influence into more refined influence actions across military, economy and external policy domains
  • Add civilizations to the map (nine of them, having buffs/debuffs) and how they impact strategy/gameplay
  • Add ideologies (8 for now, adding buffs/debuffs) and their own impacts on gameplay
  • Add a technology tree (unlock certain influence actions or increase their strength, power(s) generation, etc)
  • Add (random) events/decisions/challenges that help to shape your nation (buffs/debuffs, permanent/temporary, speeding up/unlocking technologies, etc) as you play enabling diverging gameplay strategies
  • Introduce a concept of a global power / resource and each nation’s share of it (similar to the market share). Higher share, or share reaching certain tier - certain buffs/functionalities get enabled, losing share/tier disables them.
  • Add a Space race quest. It introduces another way to win – extract rare resources in random locations, research and build a space ship and expand outside of this world. Or prevent your competitors from doing so.
  • Make use of population (currently regions have fixed numbers from historical 1949 and each nation holds a sum of pops from all regions they hold)

 Other:

  • Add save/load game
  • Add map editor to allow creating custom scenarios or continue campaigns started in other historical periods in other map games :)

 Recurring:

  • AI improvements (for AI strategies to work with new mechanics, introduce AI levels of difficulty levels, etc)
  • Refine/add more content to already existing mechanics
  • UX & quality of life improvements


Development log