WOM: War By Other Means

Have you noticed how most grand-strategy games have a very odd "economy"? Usually, nothing is actually produced let alone traded, it's just "You now have X more 💰" We plan to change that. The economic system in our game is aimed to simulate a complex, interwoven economy, whose products are produced and traded by thousands of pretty simple economic actor bots. (We did the maths, the runtime will surprisingly actually be reasonably short). We as developers determine how the production steps look like, and how the economic actors decide how much to produce and at what price to trade. The rest dynamically evolves from that rather simple base, in a very non-arbitrary way, that even the developers themselves can't always predict. The game is played on a hexagon map, by about 20 players, with one turn happening every 24h. Players can attack or help each other economically in countless ways: Tariffs and export-tariffs, foreign investments and selling vital military equipment for example; and for trade to happen, the goods need to actually physically travel across the map, which is why it's also possible to physically blockade your enemy's trade with your army or fleet... Because no bots are ruling countries, the diplomacy mechanics can be done much more realistically than the common "Alliance button" etc mechanics. Sovereignty over for example domestic taxes, tariffs, foreign investments, military matters, etc can be ceded to other players and taken back. To win, players need to know the game's mechanics, yes, but they also need to know how to rally allies to a common cause, and to not suddenly find themselves on the wrong side of a huge trade embargo, crippling their economy... When the economic situation in a country becomes too dire, along with other factors, the local population can revolt. This revolt can be beaten militarily, but if you pay your soldiers too little, along with other factors, guess what, they can revolt as well. So make sure to keep your population happy, or you can get overthrown. Rebel governments are the only "bots" running countries in this game. Since we don't want simplistic bot governments to permanenty rule half the map though, this rebellious country will now fall apart into small subunits, and other players can take over the power vacuum over the course of some 5-10 turns. Either militarily, or by convincing individual local governments to subsequently cede certain sovereign powers to them. Players can also do military campaigns. However due to heavy economic destruction of trade interruptions and of the campaigns themselves, these will normally not be preferable to gaining power through leveraging one's economy I hope you can see now why we called this game "War By Other Means"