134A. Designing Massive Strategy Games of the Future

My favorite genre of game, which I've been playing since 1983. Part one of two. Definitions and major design hurdles are tackled here, with solutions to follow.

Here I will detail the challenges that today’s best Strategy MMOs struggle with, and explain various key systems and definitions. Part two to follow will explain how to create a new era of Big/Heroic massively multiplayer strategy games, by solving the major obstacles that have vexed previous projects.

History

As I discussed in my paper on Turn Based Games, the first strategy MMO that I competed in was Global Supremacy in 1983. The game was played by mail, with turns typically happening once a week (fast games) or every other week (slow games). I was a homeless emancipated minor that year and had orders sent to a friend’s mailbox. The game was played on a real globe of Earth, with players using maps and rulers to measure distances and travel times for all units. Players picked a country, and larger countries tended to have more resources. There was also a complex technology tree and research. The game predated Sid Meier’s iconic Civilization game by at least 7 years and supported simultaneous multiplayer action with ~82 players.

In 2000 I began assisting Nexon full time with Shattered Galaxy, the first MMORTS. The game released in 2001. Games ran for 3 months and then the servers reset. Players would get to keep some of their progress. The last time I check on the game was in 2011 and some players had completed 40 seasons. The wiki does not explain the real reason the game was abandoned by Nexon: Korean players had hacked the American servers to block Americans from accessing their server. My small team of American volunteers had identified and fixed the hack within 24 hours. But the Korean players of Tactical Commander (the Korean version of the game) threatened to boycott Nexon if they implemented the fix. Nexon capitulated to their Korean core audience and essentially pulled the plug on SG. The press noted that American players were not playing the game, but they assumed it was due to lack of interest.

Some time around 2011 Trion Worlds attempted to do a remake of SG titled “End of Nations”. I was well known in the community because I was ranked top-3 in the world in SG. I offered to assist the development of EoN but for some reason they refused to talk to me. I believe this was because a number of the developers were veterans who had just returned from the Iraq war and my name sounded too Middle Eastern. I solved some of their largest design problems but never got the chance to deliver them. The most useful thing to come out of the EoN development was a post I made on their forums asking players how they would like to be charged for the game. It got ~100,000 comments, more than ten times all the other posts on the EoN forums combined. This largest player survey in the history of the industry super accelerated my understanding of monetisation. Trion responded by deleting the thread instead of engaging me or their community. They would ultimately cancel the project.

By 2012 I was assisting Sid Meier and 2K Games with their two attempts to make Civilization MMOs. The first attempt was a smaller scale asynchronous version titled CivWorld. I wasn’t tapped by Firaxis and 2K until the game was in beta, and by then all I could do was explain to them why the design was not working as intended.

Later that year they brought me back for an open world Civ game called Civilization Online. Even today this would be a very ambitious game, and back then there were too many things that could/did go wrong. I ended up advising 2K to kill both of those early attempts, which they did. I was added to the teams too late to recover them.

By 2013/2014 I was working on World of Tanks Blitz, some improvements to World of Tanks, and then the very ambitious World of Warships. I wanted to make WoWs asymmetrical, which sounded impossible to the team initially. But I had already solved that problem for End of Nations in 2011, so I had the design ready to go for WoWs.

I’ve been playing Ways of History since 2012, which is probably the best designed Strategy MMO on the market. Maps are made new each time and games run 6 months. The game has not seen updates since 2018, and players mostly just exploit the same game weaknesses over and over. I will detail what those design weaknesses are in this paper. At its peak several thousand players would cram onto each map. Now some games get under 400.

More recently I spent some time playing Bytro Labs’ Call of War and Iron Order 1919 titles. These are typically played on a map of Earth but with between 18 and 100 players depending on the map scenario. A game typically lasts weeks to months depending on the map size and how competitive it ends up being.

I will compare WoH and Bytro games in depth. Each has some strengths and weaknesses compared to the other, and both share some common issues. One of the things still on my bucket list is to eventually buy and then redesign Ways of History so that it can be the game it always could have been.

I mention also Star Garden later in the paper. This was my most complex design to date. As it included solutions to all the problems I identify in this paper, I will mention how it did so in various places. The game development was shut down in 2024, after 3 years, when it ran out of runway.

What is a Strategy MMO?

All “strategy” or military games have some sort of combat related gameplay. It is what happens between the battles that determines if a game is a strategy MMO or not. If the result of your battles affects the game for every other player on that server, then it is a strategy MMO. If it just affects the player, who may advance between battles or not, then it is not a strategy MMO.

In the latter case, we might describe the game as a Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA). League of Legends, or my World of Tanks and Warships designs are MOBA’s. Shattered Galaxy from 2001 was an MMORTS because every battle affected the game land ownership and economics for all players. While I may reference some MOBAs in the paper, the focus here is not MOBAs. Here we are talking about games with 50 or more players playing on a contested map of some sort for weeks or months.

There are some grey zone examples. Helldivers 2 had a recent (May 2025) event where players had to team up to save Super Earth against alien invasion. Similarly, my Project Drakara (production idled in 2017) would start as a MOBA (like normal Helldivers 2) and then players would have to fight off an alien invasion, in space. I first pitched the game in 2011. If a game starts as a MOBA but then transitions to a persistent coop battle against a 3rd party (often AI commanded), then I consider that a full strategy MMO.

The key distinction is that while individual battles may still occur, those battles become linked with dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of players fighting together against a common foe. Gameplay wise, it may not be a huge difference, but psychologically it’s a very different game.

It is important to note that Helldivers 2 participation skyrocketed during that Illuminate invasion event.

Star Garden played with persistent teams of up to 40 players who would battle several times a day with teams from all across the world. What made the game strategic was that you could view the teams you would be battling against over the next 24 hours and could even review their previous battles to help you decide what tactics/units your team should use when fighting them. Your performance would affect your global ranking. Since this is a non-binary asymmetrical game, the loser could score higher than the winner if the loser was a smaller team but performed above par.

Real Time or Turn Based? The First Major Design Hurdle

The Bytro games and Ways of History are both potentially multi month real time battles, where anyone can attack anyone they aren’t allied to if they can reach them on the map. This feels more “real” to players than taking turns would. The big problem here is that humans need to sleep. Attacking players when they are sleeping, or just not sleeping at all yourself, is a key strategy to winning these games.

The result of playing a game that disrupts or even stops your sleep cycles for weeks or months is harm to the players. I still do it, but I am conscious of the harm I do to myself. Thus I play these sorts of games a lot less than I used to. When I do play, I have a reputation of not sleeping. The reality is that I’ve trained myself to “microsleep” several times a day when needed. But just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. I talked in detail about the dangers of extreme endurance gameplay in my I’m Dying to Play paper. I wrote that paper in 2017 after one of our top influencers died on camera while endurance streaming World of Tanks.

Harming your players can be bad for business, especially in the long run. If you could stop the servers for 8 or 9 hours every day, that might work to allow players to rest. But these games are typically international and even within a particular time zone people don’t always agree on when to sleep.

The solution adopted in Shattered Galaxy, Helldivers 2, and Project Drakara (PD) was to have gameplay sessions replace “turns”. In my Star Garden design massive battles would occur several times a day at specific times, and they were fully automated for all participants. Players just had to load their troops into the scheduled battles before they started. Thus players could check the results at their leisure.

In SG and HD2 there was no minimum or maximum number of games you could play a day so some players could get far ahead of others. In PD the game was meant for server wide competition (similar to Bytro games and WoH) so each player had a limited number of battles they could do per day per account. If they exceeded that number, they would not get meta credit for the fight. This was also tied to the monetisation model, as you could pay to double that number but no more than that. This put all “payers” on equal footing.

While not turns in the traditional sense (which I explain in my paper defining Turn Based Games), it has a similar effect. The purpose is to allow players to play on their terms, when they want and where they want. This quality of life improvement makes any game better for the player. In turn they will be willing to play longer and give you more money.

A true turn-based Strategy MMO would be something like Global Supremacy (the play by mail game). You could do something similar in a modern game, but give the player a finite number of turns or “energy” to spend a day. Project Drakara used this method. Mobile games often have energy, but when the energy caps in less than 8 hours, that’s still health harmful. Games that require you to spend in order to store 8 or more hours of energy are what I call “pay to sleep” games. I still consider those player hostile, especially if children are playing them.

My Civilization Online (2013) design allowed players to run around all day in the open world, but actions that could affect the economy had a limited budget of uses per day. This was similar to “energy”. Technology and specialization could affect your budget and activity costs.

Open Enrolment. The Second Major Design Hurdle

Regardless of whether the game has a map capacity cap (Bytro) or no cap (WoH), strategy games typically do not use matchmakers. Any time matches are under the control of the participants, with essentially no rules, players will engage in what I call “anti competitive practices” to avoid fair pvp.

In Ways of History the maximum team size is ~50. Only one team can win. But Russian players in that game will “zerg” the server with up to 500+ accounts to make sure it is their team that wins. I say “accounts” because it is normal in that game to have players make multiple accounts (“multis”) using VPN to hide their activities. This is not allowed in the game but the developers (Glyph Worlds in Russia) seem unable or unwilling to police the activity. The intent is to “pre-win” the six month game on Day 1, with skill being irrelevant.

Whether it is players or developers removing skill from skill based games, the long term effect on game retention and monetisation will be extremely adverse to the developer.

In Bytro games anyone can jump into a map as long as the map cap has not been reached. Typically the player can see which locations have already been claimed and can choose from the remaining country/region options. Players can typically form into teams of up to 4. Thus 8 accounts could be used to control a map to make sure one team of 4 gets across the finish line using non competitive methods.

How to resolve the problem of match fixing using multis is a very challenging problem. I will save the detailed solutions in the next paper.

Player Trade: The Third Major Design Hurdle

Any time one player can give a resource to another player in a Strategy MMO you invite account boosting using multis. The obvious solution is to just not allow player to player trade in your game. Bytro, Shattered Galaxy, and all of my pre-blockchain designs didn’t allow player to player trade.

My blockchain designs all allowed player trade, as that’s a fundamental advantage of having your game assets on blockchain. This would include Gods Unchained, Guild of Guardians, and Star Garden. GU was not a strategy title. I stopped work on GoG in 2020 and without my tech the game was downgraded to a MOBA when it finally reached market in 2024. Star Garden has a very complex economic, and player trade, and matchmaker models designed to avoid all pay to win possibilities. The game contains no premium currencies, no microtransactions, and all tradeable assets are player crafted. It was designed from the ground up starting in 2020 to 100% pass the Digital Fairness Act conditions.

Ways of History does allow player to player trade. This is both its greatest strength and its greatest weakness. That player trade allows 500 players to direct all their resources to 50 players to make sure those 50 players win. So of course that’s exactly what happens. Typically less than 50 of those 500 are paying players and the rest are multis. This results in poor monetisation, and the unfairness causes a lot of churn.

That said, player to player trading is also WoH’s greatest strength. The game has complex supply chains that require whole teams to complete. This interdependency is key to the game’s enduring player base and a recurring theme in my papers and game designs. Players are likely to churn if they don’t feel needed by anyone. WoH requires intense player teamwork and planning. I’ve been playing the game for 13 years now for that reason. That interdependency is the social glue that not only brings players together, but that also brings people all across the world together in the real world. Exploration and diplomacy have always been driven by the value of trade.

CivWorld and WoH had research auto traded to the team. Then various technologies would be unlocked over time. My 2013 Civilization Online game allowed players to make donations to the country to complete Wonders. I had not solved the multi problem by 2013 to safely enable player to player trade. My first attempt to solve the myriad player to player trade issues was deployed to Guild of Guardians, using both an auto trade and an auto sell system. Your resources transferred to the team automatically, and then goods were produced and automatically sold to other players. No one on the team could grab the resources for themselves. This prevented all the problems that EVE Online suffered from corporation thefts.

My Star Garden design was the first to check all the boxes and allow fair and safe player to player trade in a strategy game, but that was a very complicated design that took me 3 years to complete. I will go over a very surface level discussion of how that was possible in the next paper.

Monetisation: The Forth/Last Major Design Hurdle

My attempts to solve the strategy game monetisation problems in 2011 on the End of Nations project (without consent from the development team) caused a minor firestorm in the gaming community. Players really did want options other than microtransactions. They especially didn’t want pay to win in competitive skill based games. That just made the entire effort pointless.

I described the problems with Pay to Win (what I call “Ante Games”) definitely back in 2011. Bytro’s games depend 100% on pay to win for their monetisation. This really makes me sad because they have the best strategy gameplay in the industry at present tied to the worst monetisation. That company could be making so much money without this self-inflicted cripple. Currently it uses the “Deer Hunter Online” model that I originally described in 2009. This model was very popular in Asia around this time, but has fallen out of favor even in the East because it is so low performing.

Ways of history uses a microsubscription model. I define that is being one or more subscription options that last for a week or less. WoH has 5 categories with 3 tiers each. The first tier is relatively inexpensive, but the 2nd is at least twice as expensive and the 3rd is at least four times as expensive. Still, this is more fair because you can’t boost above the 3rd tier which typically would be a 20% boost in that category (like production or research output).

Bytro allows you to buy entire armies out of thin air instantly, with no limit. You want to win and are willing to spend $500? Sure no problem! But what looks like a great short term boost to monetisation causes such high churn that you pay for that later. Without proper A/B testing you won’t know how much money you lost. I’ve never seen a team using these primitive models engage in A/B testing. Just A/A testing.

How to actually make money from your game is going to be a major theme in the next paper. This is just as important as the gameplay, and should be designed right into the game from the start. The very large strategy games that I’m trying to provide the technological prerequisites for aren’t just going to be attractive to players, but will also monetise at much higher levels. If that wasn’t the case, there would be no point in the larger effort required to make such games.