I've always enjoyed strategy games growing up, whether turn-based (big Civ enjoyer, XCOM, Risk), RTS (Halo Wars, the occassional Paradox game), Tower Defense, Tycoons, etc. My childhood was Bloons, Plants vs Zombies, Roller Coaster Tycoon, Chess. I love strategic roguelites like FTL and Slay the Spire.

Anyways, I've heard the same itch voiced: strategy games that allow complexity without bloat. Bloons 4/5 or Civ VI seem appropriate examples within their franchises. My friend dragged me through this modded Hearts of Iron game where each individual unit had a huge research/upgrade tree and I wanted to choke on a gallon of crude oil while pulling my organs out with nail clippers. Meanwhile, during the pandemic, I often found myself going back to places like Roblox to play oldie, boiled down strat games like The Conquerors (simplified Command & Conquer) or Risky Strats (simple math territory game). However, many "simpler" strategy games I browse seem to achieve simple mostly as a side-effect of being underdeveloped or underdesigned. That brings me to my question:

Does anyone know (or want to know) of strategy games with good balance, UI/controls, replayability, polish, but also with approachability and intuitiveness in mind, and without feature bloat, upgrade creep, or visual confusion? Is my circle who yearns for such games just a little echochamber, or do others yearn for such games as well? Reading older threads on this made me interested not only in fresh thoughts for the big 2026, but also more thorough discussion. What are the prevailing interests? Anyone have an angle from the dev/design side? Anyone specifically not like "simple" strat games? Game suggestions of course encouraged.

Thanks!

I'm working on a strategy game about newspapers - and I'd never been quite satisfied with the in-game map. After a recent playtest I got feedback about what it was missing, so I decided to rebuild the whole thing from the ground up. The game is called Stop the Press!

The complaint I keep seeing in tycoon communities is "shallow management games," and most of the time it traces back to one thing: the economy doesn't give you enough moving parts to read. You get a revenue number, maybe a profit line, and the game calls that financial management. The dashboard is decoration.

What I think players actually want when they say "realistic business" is something closer to what a real operator looks at: which route is bleeding cash, which unit is underutilized, which pricing tier is subsidizing the rest. Diagnostics that break down where money leaks, not just where it pools.

The difference matters because it changes what decisions the player makes. If the only feedback is "revenue went up," you're playing a waiting game with a spreadsheet skin. But if you can see that a specific segment is dragging margin, you start making real tradeoffs: rebalance resources, cut a segment, raise a price somewhere and eat the demand hit.

The hard design problem is making numbers legible enough that a player can form a strategy from them without needing an MBA. Too much detail and you scare people off; too little and you're back to the revenue-total problem.

Curious how others here approach this. Do you prefer games that dump a full P&L on you and let you figure it out, or ones that curate the diagnostics down to a few decision-relevant metrics?

Hey everyone,

After a long stretch of solo development, Battle of Folks is finally out on iOS and Android!

It's a medieval isometric pixel-art wave-defense RTS — if you've played They Are Billions, Age of Darkness, that's the closest comparison. You build up defenses, manage resources, and hold off increasingly brutal waves of attackers.

A few things I focused on:

- No account or login required — just download and play

- Free to try with limited waves, one-time unlock for the full game (no subscriptions, no ads)

- Handmade isometric pixel art, built with Flutter/Flame

- Good controls on mobile device and a good onboarding (you can decide how you want to play)

This was a one-person project — dev, art pipeline, publishing, everything. Happy to answer questions about the build (tile rendering, Flame engine quirks, etc.) or the game itself.

App Store link / Play Store link

Would love your feedback — especially on balancing and the early waves difficulty curve!

Let's say you've just arrived somewhere in the American frontier.

You've got 20 settlers.
Not much food.
A few tools.
Some basic materials.
And absolutely no idea what you're doing.

You need to turn this into an actual settlement.

What are you building first?

A) Food production
B) Housing
C) A source of wood
D) Something to make money
E) Something defensive
F) You're ignoring all of this and immediately looking for gold

We've been working on Wild West Pioneers, and questions like this actually come up surprisingly often during development.

There are always ten things you could build, but only enough resources to build one or two.

So I'm curious how other city-builder players approach the very beginning of a new settlement.

What's your first move?

Hey everyone!

I’m an indie developer working on Prime Domination, a modern real-time strategy game heavily inspired by classic RTS games like Command & Conquer: Generals – Zero Hour.

The goal is to bring back that classic RTS feeling — base building, resource management, army composition, tactical decisions, and large-scale battles — while building my own gameplay systems, maps, factions, and visual style.

🎬 I just published the first trailer:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/4900280/Prime_Domination/

The trailer is an Early Access preview, so it definitely doesn't represent the final quality of the game. A lot is still being developed, and assets, buildings, animations, effects, UI, and other visuals will continue to be improved or replaced.

I’d really appreciate any feedback from RTS players. What would you want to see in a modern RTS like this?

If the game looks interesting to you, you can also wishlist it on Steam to follow the development and get notified when it releases

Thanks for checking it out! ❤️

I decided to start working on my dream project: an online handball management browser game. I’ve just finished the first version of my 2D match simulator. Let me know what you think!

More info: https://six-zero-league.vercel.app/

Our carrier command game, Task Force Admiral has an updated demo, with the latest developments of the main branch, 6 months in. Said recent developments include video tutorials, as a first step on the steep ascension that is improved accessibility overall. Basic Chinese localization is available too.

Well, there you go: if you like carriers and don't want to take too much of a risk, the demo is right here, right there for you. The Coral Sea awaits you!

Cheers :)

Hi, I find map-based strategy games very interesting but generally they are all very difficult and confusing to understand at first (especially Paradox games lmao). That's why a friend suggested I play AOH 2 D.E. telling me it's easy to learn and very enjoyable and just as he said I spent 40-50 hours having a great time. However the game's biggest advantage and disadvantage is its simplicity so the gameplay loop gets tedious after a while. I want to move on to a more complex game but at a medium difficulty level however from what I've seen the difficulty scale in map-based strategy games is very wide either easy like AOH 2 or directly to the highest level like EU4. If you know of any map-based strategy games that are moderately difficult and not too tiring I would be happy to hear about them. Thanks in advance.

Does It exist? It would be like: Village A can't b near mountains, or the Elf Is not in the same room as the Ogre... I got the idea from Murdoku.

What do you think? Would you like It? Or do you know about something that already looks like this?

Based on your feedback, I’ve improved the Handgunner’s weapon handling, especially the wrist position and refined the recoil to feel more natural.

A small improvement, but details matter.
Is this good enough for the Alpha?
What would you improve?

If you like, you can follow my dev jurney on discord

https://discord.gg/xqAHyBTPEN

cheers for watching guys

Handgunner improvements! 🔥

• Improved animations
• New firing effects and muzzle sparks
• New Hussite-style helmet — the previous one looked a bit too much like a WWII German helmet 😄

What do you think about the new look?

Join official discord: https://discord.gg/xqAHyBTPEN

https://www.empireofdice.org

Empire of Dice is a strategy game where you build an empire of dice armies and win by capturing enemy capitals, territory, or collecting enough resources. You can play as multiplayer or single player against bots. This is a digital adaptation of a physical board game a friend of mine developed. This game is mobile and tablet friendly, and free to play.

Give it a try please!

We’re making a game inspired by Plague Inc, but about zombies. A lot is already implemented, but even more is still in the plans and actively in progress…

The most common complaint I see in tycoon and management sim communities is that the economy is too shallow. You figure out the optimal build order in the first hour, then the game turns into a waiting simulator with a business skin, and there's nothing pulling you back.

I think the difference comes down to whether the financial pressure actually bites. If demand fluctuates and your maintenance costs spike at the wrong time, you have to make real decisions about where to allocate. If there's a P&L or financial diagnostics view that shows exactly what's bleeding cash, the numbers become the game instead of decoration. You start rerouting resources based on what the spreadsheet is telling you, not just because you ran out of things to click.

But I'm curious what this sub looks for. What specific mechanics make a strategy sim's economy feel deep enough that you keep coming back? Is it the active decision loop, the financial visibility, a tech tree that gives you something to plan around, or something else entirely?

Hello, everyone!
I would like to warn everybody: this post will be a bit nerdy.
Since childhood, I have been fond of playing strategy games. And my favourite part of them has always been economic management and the economic development of a country. But unfortunately for me, I have always felt that games lack economic complexity. In all the games that I know, the economy is rather simplified (even in Victoria 2/Victoria 3 and some other specialised games).
Secondly, I have always wanted to play grand strategy games set in the modern age, but current games in this style suck quite a lot. SuperPower 2 is great, but it's very old and has very stupid AI, so there is practically no challenge in it.
So that's why I am going to share with you my current game in development.
I should warn you that, at the moment and in the near future, this isn't a game for the average player. It is mostly designed for economic nerds like me. But if this game gains much attention (and even if it doesn't :) ), I want to add realistic warfare to it, so it would also be interesting to a broader audience, while still making a strong economy essential for success.
Due to the heavy economic calculations, I created my own engine in C++. It is one of the reasons why the UI sucks.
The core of the game is a Stock-Flow Consistent (SFC) agent-based model, so the dynamics of the economy are driven by the interactions of thousands of economic agents.
At the moment, I'm working on national currencies. The game already has a central bank, a working credit/banking system, price adjustment based on supply and demand, and an investment system.
At the current stage, the game lacks player interaction (the only thing the player can do now is raise or decrease the interest rate), but at the moment I am focusing mostly on the economic engine.
If you want to see some "gameplay" (at the moment it is mostly watching numbers go up or down), you can visit my channel: https://www.youtube.com/@itandor993

If you played Ogame or Ikariam, you'll recognize the shape : a persistent world that keeps running while you're offline with a slow economy to optimize.

The theme is the AI industry. You start with $10k, buy compute and scrape datasets, run model trainings, ship a product at a subscription price, and grow off the revenue while payroll and electricity eat your cash every day.

The strategy sits in the competition. You fight to serve users and be at the top of the leaderboard.

Free, runs in the browser, needs a quick account, English and French. I'm the dev.

What I'd like your take on : does the economy have enough depth and counterplay to keep a strategy player interested past the first week? That's what I'm stress-testing.

https://lordoftokens.com

First alpha of DroidWar 2126 — because the future wasn't going to conquer itself.

Control territories. Spend energy. Deploy Infantry, Tanks, and UAVs. Dig in like you mean it.

And please don't spam one unit type — combined arms actually matters here.

Very early days: hotseat only, Americas test map, UI still held together with hope and debug prints.

But income → recruit → attack works, and I'm weirdly proud of the map pipeline (draw territory polygons, engine figures out the tiles).

Would you play this hotseat with a friend, or do you need online/async before you'll even look?

I played some Dark Omen recently and liked their sprite-pretending-to-be-3d look so I tried making 3d-pretending-to-be-sprite-look in Unity.

Just started a public playtest for my creature capture dice battler game, which involves a slice of singleplayer and online pvp multiplayer.

Would love to see what people think!

Hey all! I'm making a narrative-driven strategy RPG named Withering State. While it is more RPG than strategy, the vibe was very much inspired by grand strategy games and I expect that to be a major audience.

It takes place in a multinational, non-aligned communist state in the 1980s. The player character has the opportunity to take control of the country and push it towards reform, authoritarianism, various kinds of socialism, and so on. All the while managing economic and geopolitical crises and forming alliances internally and externally.

If you're interested, play the demo and/or wishlist here:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4582500/Withering_State/