game making

One thing that I want to do is to re-make all the great classic games I played as a kid in a new way. My inspiration for this is the KOEI strategy games I used to play. As such I'm trying to make my own strategy games covering many of the same periods covered by the KOEI games. For example, the Napoleonic wars, or WW2 in the Pacific. Another period is the American Revolution, which is what I've been working on over the past few days. What I have is this and this.

It might not look like much but both of these required research and refinement. For example, I want to ensure all my city/fort/battle locations are realistic and plausible, and are places that truly existed at the time. Some of the places on the KOEI game, for example, simply were not at the top tier of notable (Roanoke, or Fort Saint John for example)

I wanted good balance. As such, each colony has a number of locations roughly equal to their share of the population. Some are over-weighted, New York for example, or the smaller states as I wanted each to have at least two locations. Others are under-weighted, Connecticut for example, but these are cases where the state is physically small and/or did not see much action in the war.

I still need to draw the road network, so you know which centres you can move to from each other centre, and I may still move around the dots and will almost certainly redo the symbols for most of them, maybe even the colours; but I'm very happy with this balance. 72 american cities, and 12 british ones.


I even did a write up for why Philly was the 'duh' choice for capital. It is as follows:

let us make a 294 mile circle around Philadelphia. Why 294? That's roughly how far you can march in 3 weeks, and, a circle of this size best shows the point.

Centre that circle on Boston. You'll notice all of New England is within the circle, as is the populated part of New York state, and New Jersey, and about 2/3rds of the population of Pennsylvania, and a small part of Delaware. It does not include any other state. This is roughly half the population of the colonies.

Centre it on Norfolk in Virginia. Long-story short, you also cover about half the population of the colonies.

Putting it over what becomes Washington DC (currently Georgetown) and you do get over half, but Georgetown at this time is a small unimportant settlement. Putting it over New York and you get 3/5ths of the population covered.

Now put it on Philadelphia, as mentioned. You get parts of New Hampshire and North Carolina in the circle, but even ignoring those, you have the overwhelming majority of the populations of Virginia, New York, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. Adding those up with all the states fully covered and you have 3/4ths of the population covered.

Keep in mind that at this time, Philadelphia was also the largest city in the colonies, though New York was close behind and would soon overtake the city in terms of population.