Swords, Sandals, and Superb AI? Strategos shows plenty of promise

Task Force Admiral, Burden of Command, Armored Brigade II, Sea Power, Strategos. I’ve just re-jigged the upper echelons of my ‘Upcoming PC Wargames I’m Most Excited About’ list, and the following interview with the creator of Strategos, a turnless Ancients battle sim with myriad tactical subtleties, is partially responsible.

THC: How did you acquire the skills necessary to make Strategos?

Gabe: Before turning Strategos into a full-time project, I was a AAA AI programmer at a major studio for two years, and before that I completed a master’s degree in video game engineering while working different contract game dev jobs at indie/AA companies. Prior to grad school, I was a web app developer that just did Unity projects on the side for some years. And, just to clarify, I’m the programmer and designer for the project, but the art assets are contracted.

THC: How much have Total War and Field of Glory influenced the design?

Gabe: I’d say that the major design influences come from tabletop wargaming rulesets like DBA/DBM/DBMM, Field of Glory, ADLG, Phil Barker’s WRG Ancients, and Phil Sabin’s Lost Battles, as well as just history broadly. So, Strategos is more like a tabletop ancients wargame come to life in real-time, and with large scale visuals, rather than being inspired by Total War directly. Of course, if it’s thousands of men moving around in real-time in large formations, then the game is going to look like Total War to most people, but I don’t think it plays much like it. The overlap with TW is kind of incidental and aesthetic.

THC: Will Strategos ship with campaigns or historical scenarios?

Gabe: It will not have a turn/grid-based strategy campaign, as the focus is really on tactics. There are historical battles (currently Raphia and Issos, but I intend to add more), and I may at some point later add a way to string a series of battles together with unit carryover if there’s some interest in that, but I don’t intend to add an additional, turn-based strategy map to the game. I think it’s better for the game to focus on recreating tactically interesting, pitched battles, without running into the “covert action rule” type issues with mixing genres, i.e. where a game lacks focus, splits player attention, and its two halves (tactics and strategy) unbalance one another.

THC: I was impressed with the AI in your prototype. Are you happy with its current capabilities and habits?

Gabe: The AI is in a pretty good place at the moment, and much better than it was even in the earlier prototype a few months ago, but I do intend to continue to improve it. It is, of course, a top priority, perhaps the top priority, as Strategos is a singleplayer game, and a huge amount of my playtesting and focus is on always improving the AI. There isn’t really a magic bullet to making good AI, and instead I’ve found that incremental improvements with time add up to excellent AI after a lot of work, so I’m just always plugging away at it. I’d say I’m currently happy with its capabilities generally, but there are always edge cases and tunables to tweak.

THC:  Your TBC faction list…

• Aksumite/Abyssinian
• Early (Persian Wars) and Later (Alexander) Achaemenid Empire
• Aitolian
• Antigonid
• Apulian
• Armenian (Tigranes and non-Tigranes)
• Athenian
• Bithynian
• Blemmye/Nobades
• Bosporan
• Campanian
• Carthaginian (Early/Late)
• Commagene
• Etrusccan
• Galatian
• Gallic
• Germanic
• Graeco-Bactrian
• Early Hoplite Greek (Later Hoplite Greek armies are distinguished by city state)
• Hellenistic Greek
• Illyrian
• Italian Tribes
• Judaean
• Kappadokian
• Kushan
• Latin
• Lysimachid
• Macedonian (Pre-Alexander, Alexander, Imperial, Early Successor. and Late Successor)
• Meroitic Kushite
• Nabataean
• Numidian
• Palmyran
• Parthian
• Pergamenid
• Phokian
• Pontic
• Ptolemaic (Early/Mid/Late)
• Pyrrhic (Early/Late)
• Roman (Tullian, Camillan, Polybian, Marian, Early Imperial, and Mid-Imperial)
• Saka
• Samnite
• Sarmatian
• Sassanid
• Seleucid (Early/Mid/Late)
• Skythian
• Spanish (Iberian, Celtiberian, Lusitanian, and Sertorius)
• Spartan
• Syracusan
• Tarantine
• Theban
• Thessalian
• Thracian (Early, Gallic, Hellenized, and Roman Client)
• Umbrian

…is pretty remarkable. Does its size and variety mean you’re not planning DLC?

Gabe: This is a natural question, as most games of this type tend to monetize content like additional factions and units. However, because I need to get my foot in the door as a new developer, and as the game is all tactics focused, I do think that a core appeal of the initial release is, and should be, a wide variety of base factions to select from. My current plan is to focus on the major and minor powers of classical antiquity, in the greater mediterranean littoral, from almost 600 BC to almost 300 AD, for the initial release; so, that would include a few lists each for Rome, Carthage, the Hellenistic empires, the Thracians, the Achaemenid Persians, as well as the major Greek city states, and native tribes factions in Italy, Iberia, North Africa, the Balkans, and Central Europe, and also some of the more peripheral armies from the steppe, and even into Central Asia a bit, like Sarmatian, Kushan, Graeco-Indian or Graeco-Bactrian armies.

I may, in time, consider DLC to cover the later Imperial Roman era with Late Roman lists (east and west), various dark ages British armies (Brythonic, Pictish, Scots-Irish, etc..), more Sassanid armies, and Goth/Vandal/Frankish etc..invasion armies. I’m undecided on whether to bring in medieval armies as a DLC or a sequel, but that would be some time further in the future (it would be nice to have them as a DLC though, so as to make anachronistic matchups easy).

THC: Name a game either released or upcoming that you feel deserves more attention.

Gabe: This is perhaps an odd answer, as the game was never completed, is long since abandoned, and has mostly negative reviews on Steam, but I really thought Jon Shafer’s At the Gates was something special that hooked me for a solid 20 hours or so of gameplay, and that it deserved more attention from both audiences and its developer.

THC: Thank you for your time.