Thank you! I just re-read the copy and realised that I'd taken the real-time part for granted and focused on the turn-based element of the battles.

It's real-time, but it's pauseable and the player can change the speed of the game from 1x to 4x. Then when a battle occurs, it has a turn-based system where the two armies attack each other in succession (each turn is 4 days in-game).

I came to write that a preview video could have shown this instead of only pics. Always happy to see another (semi) RTS game though.

I heard that StarCraft Remastered & II is coming to Xbox Game Pass. Wonder if that will stick (or a new generation will hate the brutality of 1v1 ladder).

For sure-- they want different things. But this looks great.

Thank you! Yes, unless you're counting the artists who I've hired to do freelance stuff.

I think that it would definitely benefit from a gameplay trailer, so that's something that I'll try to get up in the next few weeks.

I would really like to make a Total War style game after this if it's a success. It's probably something you'd need a few other people on the team to do though - it's at least twice the work. It's also a lot more difficult to write code to handle simulations of 20-40k units and still have the game run at a decent speed.

So far Fall of an Empire has been surprisingly easy to write: everything maps to classic OOP. You have a Unit object and an Army object that extends the Unreal Engine Actor class, the Army has an array of Units, it's got a mesh with animations that it plays based on what it's doing, etc.

But when you're doing large-scale battles like Total War it's totally different. You're trying to do as much as possible on the GPU. You can't have a regular Actor with a regular Skeleton, instead all the soldiers are going to technically be instanced static meshes, with animations that are stored as textures that offset vertices - and that's just the start. It would be very cool to pull it off though.

Feedback mostly - what's wrong with it, what's right, what needs doing differently or should be rebalanced before the main game is out.

Thanks, I did the landscape materials and some of the UI myself, but the other half of the UI, the models for the trees, the cities (which I'm in the process of revamping) and the armies were all outsourced.

I would assume it's pronounced like ref-sys, which seems not too bad to me.

It’s got a bunch of components and paid libraries that probably wouldn’t let me do that.

I also think that very few people would get any benefit from being open-sourced since it depends on modified Unreal Engine - the project itself and the engine mean that the git repo is over 100GB even when shallow cloned. I could open source the core game systems but they’re almost entirely useless without the rest of everything.

Edit: just thinking of it, I wouldn't be able to distribute the modified UE source either - it's source-available but you need to agree to Epic's licence to get access. Might be possible to only distribute a diff and instructions on which version of the engine to apply it to? In any case it would be a lot of work.

> users will pay for the convenience of not having to compile/build themselves

But another developer could republish the game for half the price, no?

Most people, I assume like yourself, would just download and build the game for free and not contribute anything back to the project

Why should I do that apart from some commenter demanding that I do so? If I put in thousands of hours of work and a few thousand dollars into a project, why should I get zero compensation for that and not even be allowed to indirectly benefit?

This comes across as very rude. I'm not sure if you intended that so I thought you should know.

When someone spends years of their life working on something they get to decide how they release it to the world. They even get to not release it if they want.