Hi!

Im making a empire builder / wargame. Sort of a mix between “Total war” and “Risk” set in the near future on a world map.

My issue is having challanges in midgame/endgame. Typically in these games you start out weak with a few cities/regions and as you expand around the world you get stronger.

The problem is once you are strong enough, the challange is gone. This is the same in Total war games i find. How to make the game fresh / challanging even when your empire is large and you are rich?

Diminishing returns: Add corruption, higher unhappiness (like in civ 5 to limit city spamming), more upkeep/administration costs as you gain more cities/territories. This hinders your economy from exploding (when you own half the world you otherwise get so rich that you can just steamroll the rest of the world). This is needed, but isnt adding anything fun.

Throw some new enemy at you: In medieval total war the huns was launched at the world in midgame, so that made the end of the game a little bit harder. But they also make the remaining normal enemies weaker since the huns fight everyone… (i could add an alien invasion for example once you own half the world or 50 turns has passed or whatever). Add a plague that decimates some cities? Global rebellion against your rule?

Any ideas?

The game has to end and be won at some point though?

Diminishing returns:

I found a lot of games now seem to intentionally put roadblocks in the way of winning quickly by snowballing an empire, making the expansion “end game” drag out a lot to give opportunities to other victory types. But if you want domination to be the main way to win, is that an issue? I would rather finish off the map quickly than have to spend 100's of turns extra because of arbitrary nonsense penalties that wanted to make a city-state competitive.

Throw some new enemy at you:

I recall Total War: Shogun 2 had the “Realm Divide” mechanic, that once a player controlled a certain part of the map which would see all the AI's ally and war declare the triggering player together to put up a “last stand”. The mechanic is interesting, and unifying a front on a "enemy of my enemy" line. I didn't really like the implementation though as it was literally every AI, including ones that had carefully kept good relations, but the idea could probably be tweaked to feel less “hard coded”.

suliman said:
(i could add an alien invasion for example once you own half the world or 50 turns has passed or whatever). Add a plague that decimates some cities? Global rebellion against your rule?

I think this is the sort of arbitrary “uinfair” thing I would just find annoying. Why am I targeted by these random bad events just for doing well? It's like what I really want to do is carefully sit in 2nd place and let someone else take the fall just before the finish line.

Something like an alien invasion could work while feeling fair, but assuming they are strong enough to be an actual threat and not just “add 50 turns running around the map chasing rebel/alien armies”, probably they should fight all players to some extent, maybe weighted to engage targets of value, so mostly the stronger factions.

It's a big part of war, you win by numbers.

The reason it is quickly done is because you can move a huge force to the next piece to conqueror. If you can limit that in some way, you cannot invade enemy territory easily. For example, if you have to move your troops across the ocean, and you have only a few ships. Moving the entire army takes more time then, and you may not have that to hold your position in the remote country.

suliman said:

How to make the game fresh / challanging even when your empire is large and you are rich?

You don't. If the player's empire is large and rich, the player has already won and the game should be over. A desperate alliance of all enemies of the type SyncViews describes is the last phase that a conquest game can have; after that there's only uninteresting “steamrolling”.

On the other hand, a powerful empire could be challenged by other kinds of objectives that demand careful planning: for example, being the first to colonize another planet thanks to colossal research and industrial efforts (which would have to be balanced against military aspects, possibly rewarding defensive or semi-pacifist strategies more than conquest)

Instead of trying to delay the end of the game by throwing new challenges at the player, you should be doing the opposite: let the player quickly and painlessly clear out the remaining enemies, declare victory, end the game, and start a new game.

I agree one option is to finish the game quickly. Such as declaring world domination when you have 50 % of the map: the others “give up”. However, it can be fun to rule a large empire and not just go from (step 1) initial part of empire building to (step 2) game win. But the challanges might need to change, slowly taking over everything isnt fun obviously.

I do think both Total War (and other games like Risk) fail somewhat at this so I recognize this isnt a super easy issue to solve.

Good input! (keep em coming if you have more ? )

Well actually there's several things you can do end-game.

1. External Threats - Some form of power adversary previously unheard of, alien invasions, new enemy leaderships, some awoken monster/god whatever fits into your lore/aesthetic. Global market crash, depletion of a certain resource.
2. Internal Threats - Sub-leaders vying for power/uprising, religious unrest, economic crash/ruin, pandemics for people or blights for crops.
3. Weaker factions unlocking some form of advanced technology, a hero leading the sub factions to victory against the player etc.

EDIT: Forgot to add simply put a mechanic that your people don't actually want to fight/kill people, or an interdependence on other factions to an extent. Creating a limited form of interdependence forces different play styles etc.

Depending how you structure your game systems leading up to that point there's no real limit to threats/obstacles you can throw at players. Just need to be creative.

Good points.

The game “Battle Brothers” has a neat mechanics called “end game crisis” which can be randomized. So 4 different challenges will make the world harder end-game, but you dont know by the outset which it will be.

And you can pick from the campaign start which one you want, or choose random. I like that! For my game, one could be very combat-focused, another economical challange etc. Or you can choose all of them! (possibly giving a higher score modifier)