All About Anachro-Lords

History and Future

Anachro-Lords was inspired by Advance Wars (and AWBW) and others in its genre. It's a cursed genre. I know. That's why I wanted to take the opportunity to do things a little differently.

My plan is to design for asynchronous PvP first, and once I nail down a fun PvP experience, I will put together a campaign, which will be sold on Steam and itch.io. I've built this game as a lightweight browser-based game in order to lower the barrier to entry as much as possible. Also kind of to flex my skills. I am a Backend Software Engineer by day, so it's refreshing to do something just a little different on the side. From scratch.

My business plan for the PvP site is still brewing. The site will be free and unlimited for the time being, however I am expecting to eventually paywall higher concurrent game limits, potentially tournament entry fees (with real cash prizes!), and a potential for paid cosmetics. If you want to support this project before a concrete business plan is in place, you can buy me a coffee, and I will be sure to put your name somewhere as a token of my appreciation.

I will promise right now to not have any paid advantages, paid unlocks, or ad-driven monetization. EVER. I firmly believe that these monetization strategies compromise game design and waste players' time and money. I get it. You have lives. You have to pay rent. Some of you have families to support. I'm not trying to get rich from this (as much as my wife would love that). This is a hobby project, and I really only expect this to make enough money to offset server costs and pay freelancers for graphics and music.

At first I left the theme open-ended. I thought about many different settings and themes but they all felt restricting in different ways. I used TF2 characters as placeholder sprites. One day I had an old friend over, showed off my progress at that point, and joked that maybe I'd do dinosaurs or something. Or maybe sci-fi. Maybe fantasy. Or modern military (like Advance Wars). Then I just kinda derped around with ChatGPT one day and used it to brainstorm a theme and try out different ideas. Then it hit me. Why not mash them all together? From there, the theme of smashed-together timelines emerged. It just sorta worked. It gives me a lot of flexibility to take the design where it needs to, opens up a lot of creative avenues of diverse ideas, and also offers a lot of fun flavor to make things interesting and inspire units, commanders, and terrains.

Design Philosophy

So other than the theme and PvP-first approach, what am I doing differently from Advance Wars? In short:

  1. Make the win condition clear and decisive rather than most matches ending with resignation
  2. Cut out the capture phase and get straight into the action
  3. Add real meaning to "teching up" by adding a tech tree
  4. No straight upgrades of units
  5. Active, passive, and ultimate commander skills
And, of course the hex-grid, but there's not really much to say about that.

Decisive Win Condition

My biggest issue with Advance Wars and some other strategy games is that the real win condition is so far from the tipping point of the match that nobody wants to actually play out the whole match. An etiquitte forms around this to resign, and most matches therefore end in resignation rather than being played out to their conclusion.

I'm going to try to rectify this situation with a two-prong solution. In order to have an objective that each match is steadily marching toward, I decided to borrow and adapt control point mechanics from team shooters like Team Fortress and Overwatch. This also works hand-in-hand nicely with a variant of capture mechanics from Advance Wars.

In order to keep a runaway game from being obviously lost by the losing player, I also want to develop a Hail Mary comeback mechanic. The goal is for it to be hard enough to win this way that you don't really want to throw the match to trigger it and cheese out a win, but also provide just enough of a chance at victory that it is fun for both players to play out to its ultimate conclusion.

Minimize Tedious Openings

From Chess to Advance Wars to Starcraft, a lot of strategy games lend themselves to rote memorization of a shockingly impactful, but not very fun opening. It's where you build your economy, set up your defenses, and start on critical research. There is some variety here, but not much. It's all execution, and there isn't much room for agency or creativity. I want to shake this tendency in the openings of Anachro-Lords.

Obviously some degree of an opening is inevitable, but I really want to increase the number of meaningful decisions early in the game. There won't be a first-order optimal opening of research and captures. Everything should have a counter.

Perhaps the biggest gamechanger for the opening is the fact that there are three starting units, each at fairly low cost. No massive jumps from infantry to your first tank or even a 3x difference from infantry to mechs.

The Tech Tree

I don't see any reason why a turn-based tactics game can't have a tech tree. Civilization has one. Starcraft has informal tech trees, with certain buildings required to make higher-tech units.

This also introduces an interesting opportunity for offsetting first-turn advantage by giving player 2 some additional starting research currency.

Distinct Units

I don't like dynamics where one unit is basically just a clone of another unit... but better. In Advance Wars, Neotanks are just better Medium Tanks. It creates a tech race dynamic where there aren't really any good options to counter them. But on the other hand, they don't really serve a different role from regular tanks, so the only dynamic keeping them from covering the whole map is their cost.

I'd much rather borrow inspiration from Starcraft's unit design and ensure that every unit type that you can deploy serves a distinct role. A smaller set of more versatile units with more depth is better than a larger set of samey units.

Commander Skills

I love day-to-day powers in Advance Wars, but some things are too strong to be on every unit every turn. Adder's power is a great example. Movement bonuses are way too strong to be on a lot of units every turn, so it was relegated to his COP and SCOP. But what if you could only apply a bonus like that to a few units per turn? Then it could have an ever-looming presence on the battlefield without making him broken...

And that's where I got the idea to borrow from MOBAs and Hero Shooters. Borrow the four abilities model: a passive (or possibly active), 2 cooldown abilities, and an ultimate. Passives define the pace of gameplay, actives spice things up a little, and ultimates can turn the tide of a game.