You can find out more over at the projects website.

I’m going to keep this brief as I’ll doubtless be expanding on this at length in the future but I wanted to take a moment to introduce a project I have that is a good way through development and that I hope people can play soon.

Generally I prefer to wait until I’ve finished things before I talk about them but I’m going to need help balancing this one and hopefully I can start to find some suckers, I mean, ahem, volunteers over the next few weeks.

In short: I used to love 4X games (Master of Orion, Civilization, and I have a real soft spor for Birth of the Federation) but the direction they’ve gone in I just don’t get on with. Ever more complex. Rules that require a month of study. Games that last for hours and hours and hours. It feels like this has all become an excuse to create a platform on top of which endless DLC can be sold and for me each additional system, each additional layer of complexity, just sucks more fun out of the games. Not only that… but they feel less “real” as a result and less like games, more like spreadsheets. Its all too much effort and I refuse to pay money for half finished games.

All that being the case I figured it would be fun to create my own take on the genre. Strip things right back. Create something that is both complete and playable in a couple of hours. Easy to pick up and play anywhere. And allow multiplayer in both real time and asynchronously. Essentially the game I want to play. I hope you do too!

The result in Annhexation: a 4X game designed to be simple enough to hold in your head, complex enough for interesting decisions, and completable in an evening.

So where are things at? The core gameplay is all up and running with research, fog of war, combat, and city management. There’s also an embryonic AI in place. So quite a way along. Far enough that I felt it was worth standing up a website and start talking about a little as, as I say, I think I’ll need some help balancing it.

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