For the past 16 years I've been playing the same browser game. Long enough that I built the tools, calculators, and rank history its community runs on. Not because the game kept getting better, it didn't. What kept me playing was the community and the friends I made over those years.
The mechanics of that game were ok, building a base and watching your numbers go up was a nice dopamine hit. Combat in the game was well balanced and felt satisfying. But when you play a game for this long you start to notice issues and gaps. Servers that stagnate as players quit. Combat losses that turn into weeks-long income drains. Coalitions that grow until nobody wants to fight anymore. I dive into each of these in later posts, but seeing them is what pushed me to build.
Through these tools, especially the rank history and server stats, I could see trends in the game. As servers got older, players would quit. Most servers lost 40%-45% of their players in the first six months. Then coalitions would grow until the server stagnated. Players would happily grow their empires until the next server started or if they had already quit, wait until the next server to start again. The game itself received very minimal updates, sometimes years apart. None of them did anything to address the decreasing population or issues with the game.
Over this time I had been slowly collecting notes and ideas on ways to improve this game. Most ideas got tossed once I really thought them through, but the ones I kept felt good. The player population kept declining. The game developer's updates were not bringing enough players back. So it was time to take a chance and make my version of this game.
I took these loose ideas and started building. The goal: create the game I want to play and avoid the issues I had noted over the years.
Sixteen years of notes finally became a design doc. The rest of these posts are what's in it.