Unite The World - Training Strategic Thinking Through Simulation

Most grand strategy games emphasize conquest. Unite The World has players balance the political, economic, and social domains to achieve a grand objective, all without too much micromanagement.

In a departure from my normal blogging focus, this post won’t directly cover the conflict in Ukraine. The design concept I lay out has future applications, but readers who are primarily interested the conflict analysis and forecasting side of Rogue Systems Recon can skip this one and wait until Monday for the next Ukraine specific piece.

The following is a high level outline of a digital strategy simulation that can fill a unique niche. It’s a concept that I’ve been developing for a good few years now - in a way, learning how to make something like it was one of my motivations for going to grad school in the first place.

Collecting degrees is fun and stimulating and all, but it’s developing skills and insights that really matter in education. Credentials are a convenient way to signal the potential for competence and expertise, but the proof is in the pudding, as they (though I have no idea who) say.

Like many people my age (early forties), I grew up with video games. Unlike a lot of gamers, I’ve always had a fondness for simulations. In the 1990s, before the American video game industry mostly degenerated into a shareholder casino focused on leveraging cheap dopamine rushes for quick cash, clever developers were publishing some incredibly innovative stuff with immense potential in the realm of strategic simulation.

Harpoon is a classic naval warfare simulator that Tom Clancy and Larry Bond used to test out scenarios for their collaboration, the best-selling novel Red Storm Rising. Flight simulators like the Janes and Falcon series were popular for a while and there were even a few submarine and surface warship sims, too. Grand strategy titles that let a player live out the entire Second World War and other decisive historical eras were getting started too.

Quality varied widely, obviously, but there’s a good reason that defense organizations have long been interested in simulations and even games. A game is just an abstraction of real life, a simplification that lets people experience success and failure without serious consequences. Sports are competitive games with a narrowly defined structure that limits the possible outcomes to something easily judged and scored. Simulations are best seen as games that mimic complex situations for the purpose of understanding the scope of real world possibilities.

Education in general ought to leverage the power of simulation because the most powerful mode of learning for most people is based in immersive experience. Having the freedom to try something and fail in an environment that balances repetition and variety lets players develop cognitive flexibility while preserving the ability of experienced coaches to guide progress. A martial arts class often simulates combat movements at slower speeds and with extra rules rather than have students memorize forms and take multiple choice tests to prove that they know the difference in an abstract sense.

Simulations have not disappeared, of course. Professional level simulations of exceptionally high quality serve numerous fields, most prominently aviation and medicine. Intricate wargames allow personnel at all levels to practice combat in nearly realistic environments. And there are operational level simulations that function as Harpoon on steroids, giving users a fine degree of control over the radar settings on individual aircraft as they proceed through a scenario.

But these are specialist tools for professionals and rarely focus on more than one level of strategy. One of the biggest challenges facing defense institutions in democratic countries is maintaining a sufficient level of general military common sense in the population that new recruits understand something of the broader nature of the system they are becoming part of. Lack of even the most basic comprehension of military affairs has also alienated defense institutions from the general public, something that eventually feeds back into the policy system that determines the range of missions the military is expected to handle.

Of particular concern is the near absence of any systematic education in strategic thought. There is a strong tendency in the English-speaking world to leave matters of strategy to people who work at a very high level in an organization. Tactics are for ordinary folks, while managers get into Operations. This is a mistake.

It’s a way of thinking that breeds bad habits which undermine the potential of vital concepts like Mission Command. This fundamental principle of modern warfare translates to an individual having the right and responsibility to take action beyond or even in defiance of standing orders if the situation in their area of responsibility demands it. And fully appreciate how tactical choices can inform operational developments in a way that advances an organization’s strategic approach requires a basic education in strategy and operations down to the squad level.

Training strategic thinking in a holistic, experiential way suitable for rigorous evaluation of what works and doesn’t demands a simulation that carefully manages complexity. It needs a gameified sim that stands between a board game like Risk or Axis & Allies and computer games like Hearts of Iron, a grand strategy title that lets a player manage a country through the 1930s and 1940s.

Ideally the design could be further simplified into a board game (much appreciate the suggestion,

Bryn Williams-Jones

!), but the way that I’ve designed the simulation to this point requires a bit more computation than most people enjoy. Gross Domestic Product and Population numbers can get large, and putting them in a ratio makes for some ugly output…

An intuitive sim that can be easily played on a game console or even phone has the potential to reach a lot of people. Built on a fairly simple set of rules drawn from insights in social science, especially macroeconomics, sociology, and international relations, Unite The World is meant to support a huge array of custom scenarios beyond the default I’ll describe below.

In my grandest dreams for this project, this or something like it will one day be widely incorporated in general education. If many of today’s world leaders and senior military personnel had grown up playing a decent strategy simulator in school they wouldn’t make as many poor choices that waste people’s lives. Perhaps if journalists understood something of strategy they wouldn’t cozy up to politicians and let them get away with nonsense until the system both depend on crashes and burns.

The same can be said of Vladimir Putin. As one clever online commenter put it soon after his assault on Kyiv faltered, even a Hearts of Iron player would know not to send insufficient numbers of soldiers in a straight up bum rush on the enemy’s urban centers. Turns out, Putin and his orc generals are even less competent than a video game AI from thirty years ago. Whatever clever innovations that ruscist soldiers are able to make at the tactical level are swiftly undone by inept minds far to the rear.

As for Ukraine specifically, given the need for rapid training of large numbers of leaders, it could do worse than have a reasonably realistic game that personnel at all levels and prospective recruits can play. How simulations are integrated into a curriculum matters, but the power of building something that can be easily modified is that users will discover possibilities a designer failed to imagine.

Military units around the world have reported success using tactical simulations like War Thunder to practice basic tactics during the pandemic. One Bradley gunner from Ukraine’s 47th Mechanized Brigade credits the game with helping him defeat a T-90M tank in a bold feat caught on multiple drone feeds. I really hope that he and his buddies survive this war, because they’re legends and I want to buy them all many rounds of drinks. Since I can’t deliver peace all on my own, unless someone gives me a weapon that can reach the Kremlin.

My goal is to get grant funding from organizations sufficient to pay a Ukrainian software development country to do the code work for a demo version. I’m no programmer - I can understand a lot of code in a broad, structural sense, but my abilities with respect to writing it are limited to painstakingly cribbing together scripts in Python or R. Once you’ve got a working demo it’s much easier to convince a publisher who understands the nuances of markets to sponsor a full build.

I’m certain that there’s a substantial latent market for a new breed of grand strategy simulation, especially after the visible return of great power conflict to the world stage. The very smart people of twenty years ago who declared that major wars were impossible were wrong. And the skills taught in a strategic simulation are infinitely portable: boiled down, they’re about making profitable investments, something that depends on a rough ability to forecast possible futures.

With that, I think there’s no better way forward than to dive into the design outline. Please bear in mind that this is, by definition, a work in progress - virtually no software design project winds up where it expects to at the start. This is also a high level summary, not a full treatment of every system, especially the guts of the combat and economic models.

I’m actually opening up comments on this one in case anyone would like to suggest existing games or sims that they know of which contain elements of the plan below. If someone has already made the killer ap for this and I just haven’t seen it, I’d love to know! It would save a whole lot of time to be able to mod something.

Simulation Summary

Unite The World is a console-first hybrid of 4x Strategy and Country Simulator. In a very loose sense it’s like Risk married to Civilization, however UTW isn’t turn-based. An old title from the 1990s, Command HQ, is a predecessor in spirit. UTW is powered by scientific models that allow it to act as a teaching tool in addition to being a fun game platform that can support endless custom and user generated scenarios.

The base game challenges the player with bringing the world’s disparate nations together during a campaign spanning the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries. The ultimate challenge is broadly the same one facing world leaders today: how to balance environmental impacts with human prosperity on a planet where not everyone agrees on how to get that done.

Most commercial titles that include a global strategic layer are historical in nature, few touching on developments past the early Cold War. They also tend to be a kind of historian’s dollhouse, striving to give the player control over as many aspects of their empire as possible including historical figures.

This is what makes them more games than simulations: in the real world, leaders often have very little effective control over the national systems they are expected to manage. A healthy economy in particular cannot be directly managed in a command and control fashion: this always leads to disaster because market pressures are like a force of nature.

In UTW, if you think it best to achieve global unity through deliberate economic development - great. Prefer diplomatic efforts to bring the world’s nations together? Go for it. And if all else fails, military conquest is always an option.

But none alone will be sufficient to carry the day. And as time goes by, environmental impacts tied to economic activity will add up, eventually sapping the global resource base to the point that the world system crashes - unless the player averts this through skillful management of the resources at their disposal.

The Basics

Unlike most grand strategy games, covering the entire map in your color won’t mean anything if you fail to keep in mind the endgame, which sets in around 2050 in the default scenario. Rather than worry about accurate historical simulation - something that can be added on later - the scenario will begin in 1900 after a massive natural calamity in the late 1800s created a world where Europe’s empires have fallen and the planet is split into hundreds of city-state provinces.

The player’s job will be to take a single or small group of provinces and expand their reach until they are strong enough to impact global affairs. The country is in a race against the clock to develop and expand faster than potential rivals, but it must also build international connections to keep their own economy and society humming along. The player spends much of the game moving between and across three different connected map layers: the Global, Regional, and Area.

The Global map shows, as you might expect, the country in relation to all others. It’s where you access diplomatic options like opening an embassy. The world is filled with provinces that slowly come together in larger countries that pool resources and power - though often uneasily.

This would be maybe 100 years into a game, minimum.

Below that is the Regional map, displaying the provinces in area countries as well as key statistics associated with them. Within a country, provinces maintain a distinct identity and can even break away if local conditions become poor.

An exceptionally crude overview of the economic foundations of Western North America. Though I guess I really have put another Chips label by Seattle. This is also a map of about how the USA would look if state boundaries were drawn in a remotely natural way.

Then there is the Area map; this is where battles take place, incorporating features like terrain across a hex grid with cells. Armed forces take up physical space on the map and move across it like an amoeba, limited only by logistics and enemy action.

Again, I can’t do justice to what this should look like. And if you want your spiffy miniature tanks and jets shooting at each other along the line of contact between Cascadian and Deseret forces, I’m sure that can be added. Anyone looking at this is simply lucky that I don’t have the skill to draw decent NATO symbology instead of shaded blobs. And yes, I *do* have standing plans to defend the West Coast if zombies or aliens or partisans invade. They mostly involve mountains, deserts, and oceans. Also a few hundred nuclear warheads stored up in Seattle, if Putin needs a reminder that just because there are places with the place name “Russian” on the West Coast we’re not part of his borderless world any more than Ukraine ever was.

Each map level is primarily focused on one of the three core domains the player must balance to succeed: the Social, Economic, and Political. There will be numerous exceptions to ensure the user interface is as intuitive as possible - part of the reason for designing a console-first application is to limit the control set a player can be expected to use and the menus they’ll need to interact with. Simple button pushes will let the player move up and down zoom levels as well as jump to different parts of the map. Selecting individual countries, provinces, and units to access their settings will be a matter of pushing a button to activate a transparent overlay.

Success demands a tactful combination of diplomacy, investment, and force to bring the majority of the planet under the player’s sway while keeping the ever-growing domestic population satisfied. However, the player will in fact have relatively few levers to pull, just like real world leaders. They will have to craft strategies that play out over time and are shaped by geographic contours and resource limits.

At the most basic level, players have to decide how much to tax their population and where to invest revenues. Policy choices can be made that incur ongoing costs but have a variety of different benefits. Populations demand growth but also dislike taxation, creating a constant tension, though populations will grow as well. Growth also requires ongoing access to additional and different resources, requiring that it be managed to avoid negative long term impacts like inflation.

As a country goes about the process of building relationships with provinces abroad to sustain their growing economy they will come into conflict with others seeking to do the same. Inevitably this competition will sometimes lead to outright conflict; that in turn causes changes in population growth rates as people migrate away and also damages the economy in the affected area. Sustained conflict will consume precious resources, leaving countries ill-prepared to cope with the environmental crisis when it comes.

Each core game system has its own character, with the interplay of the three creating the dynamism that makes each iteration unique but also comparable. This is important, as it will enable structured evaluation during after-action reviews. Knowing why choices were made and what pressures were most decisive in influencing decisions is priceless if your purpose is education.

Social System

Internally, a country’s population must be sufficiently satisfied above all else. Their happiness is a function of a number of factors, but economic conditions are paramount.

Upsetting the population has negative impacts on economic growth and tax revenues, and angering people in a particular area too much for too long can trigger open revolt and loss of territory. Self-reinforcing feedback loops are possible that a wise player will strive to avoid - and induce in an opponent, when necessary.

Wars and policy play another important role, with defeats and personnel losses raising discontent at home while policy measures available to the player can have a range of impacts. Always coming at a tradeoff, a player who rides too close to the edge of a major public discontent threshold for too long can expect a sudden crisis to unravel long-laid plans.

Policy options run the gamut, invoked as cards that take effect the start of the year after they’re played with varying effects on economic growth, public satisfaction, and military performance. How many cards can be played at once is a function of the country’s average wealth, GDP per capita (GDP/c) and the total cost of policy measures that can be sustained is tied to the portion of the country’s annual budget devoted to social spending.

Abroad the player is also more or less working to make people happy. To facilitate this an embassy is dispatched and expanded over time to have enhanced effects, including expanded and more potent policy options. However, a player’s broader actions also matter, as foreign populations judge a prospective partner by how similar their domestic policy looks.

Managed correctly, over time relationships can become into deeper agreements, even political unification. Movement is slow, with most provinces requiring a full generation to go from tentative partners to full allies and even longer to assimilate into a single united entity. Players must be cautious about the relationships they cultivate and remain mindful of the consequences of actions that endanger them.

The natural differences between the strategic aims of players, human or AI, will generally separate the world into blocs, provoking conflict. While a wise player will be able to leverage diplomacy to avoid war most of the time, sooner or later they’ll make an enemy. When that happens, it pays to be rich, well armed, or both.

Economic System

Tax revenues in UTW are a function of economic performance and player tolerance of the social consequences of changed rates. Provinces are home to a population of some size endowed with a baseline level of economic wealth. Both population and the economy grow at a natural rate over time, but it is affected by the consequences of policy choices made by the player and their investment choices. Each province hosts reserves of natural resources ranging from food and wood to oil and uranium, which are extracted from the area at a rate which can be increased through investment.

As economic growth drives average wealth in a country higher, the economy becomes more and more resource intensive. Once past certain GDP/c thresholds, to continue growing at its native rate the economy needs access to new commodities and more of old ones. Where a low-income country only needs food, wood, coal, and iron, one who reaches middle-income status requires access to oil, natural gas, and aluminum. Those that reach a higher income level yet demand things like radioactive isotopes, silicon chips, and rare earth metals.

The economic aspect of UTW is mainly about directing a portion of tax revenues into domestic and foreign provinces to improve their output. With each additional level of investment the rate of extraction goes up until it reaches a maximum level. Domestic provinces are more profitably expanded than foreign as their entire production is added to the player’s national total, while those abroad offer only half of any new gains. If a vital resource isn’t available within a country’s borders, however, there is no choice but to invest abroad.

Many resources are unevenly distributed around the globe, meaning that the right combination of diplomacy, force, and investment can give a player effective control over important markets. Strategic investment is therefore necessary to avoid becoming vulnerable to the benefits monopoly power offers the player able to obtain it. A player can also be heavily invested in a province only to see it swallowed by a rival who then gets to decide the terms of the relationship from then on. Provinces can be nationalized or restricted to investment from allies, eliminating benefit flows to prior investors.

Investing in a given province boosts its wealth and stimulates growth rates, population and economic. Too much too fast, however, creates inflation. This incurs a growth penalty that evaporates a portion of annual economic gains and has pronounced negative impacts on domestic content. In addition, when differences in average wealth grow too quickly between provinces in a country, poorer provinces can develop a separatist identity that further saps growth - or even lead to secession.

To offset inadequate domestic resources, a country’s economy will automatically import what it needs from the global market. However, this incurs both a growth penalty and also exposes the country to even more severe consequences if economic embargo or war ever cuts off access to foreign markets. And certain resources, like oil, will become more scarce as reserves are drawn down, a challenge that can only be dealt with once the right technology becomes available.

This simplified global trade system is far less demanding than trying to simulate an entire working economy, something that rarely goes well in non-professional simulations. Abstraction is necessary, and in a macroeconomic sense a great deal of country-level economic performance is strongly influenced by tax rates, population dynamics, and the general availability of resources. Translating these impacts into bonuses or penalties applied to an underlying base level growth rate is an old game solution that can work surprisingly well in effective simulations, too.

This highly gameified macroeconomic model also tracks with practices in the world of International Development, where the ratio of Gross Domestic Product to Population (GDP/c), very neatly substitutes for education levels, productivity, resource demands, and a host of other core aspects of economic performance in applied statistics. It also eliminates the need for anything like the traditional technology trees you see in most strategy games, requiring a separate budget for research.

Players will instead automatically gain access to more and better policy options and fancier military tools as their country gets richer. This creates an incentive to grow as or more quickly than their rivals, which runs up against the need to manage inflation - another pedagogically valuable strategic paradox to work through.

During the course of each game year the player will spent most of their time deciding how to allocate investments - and running military campaigns, when that proves necessary. Once a year the game clock will pause and prompt the player to review their tax policy and budget for the upcoming year. All investments selected by the end of the calendar year are fixed and take effect; the new tax rate determines the next year’s overall budget.

Political System

When foresight fails or the going gets too tough, a country can always choose to go to war. Sometimes one will be forced on it by an aggressor. If the player manages the country badly and discontent becomes entrenched, civil disorder and secession movements can erupt that exceed the capacity of law enforcement to handle without military support.

Zooming in to the Area level displays the civil, military, and logistics infrastructure for the provinces in view. It’s meant to be a reasonably accurate representation of real-world topography - or, if you wanted to do a spinoff set on Mars or far-future Earth, another base map would work. Imagine Google Earth, but fine-tuned and covered in invisible hexagons representing distances of 5km.

Military units deploy from fixed bases and take the form of amoeba-like blobs on the map. They occupy space and direct firepower against any targets that come into range of their different weapons systems. If hit too hard by an enemy they retreat, and each day in battle incurs losses at a rate corresponding to the volume of fire coming their way and a host of other factors. Units naturally link up to form broader fronts, though their combat power is rarely evenly distributed.

In a conflict, seizing a province requires deploying military forces to a set of critical points and keeping them there long enough to demonstrate full control. To simulate operational level military dynamics without forcing a players to have substantial prior knowledge of military affairs, players have only limited control over deployed units. They assign them an area of responsibility, a physical shape that defines their coverage area as well as much of their effectiveness in a fight, and posture, whether aggressive, defensive, or something more role specific.

Beyond that all that is needed are decisions about how much combat power to commit and where. Fielded forces fight automatically, and take time to respond to new orders. This makes careful planning of operations essential, especially as the logistical support network in a province can be overloaded, with deleterious impacts on combat performance. Battles take place over the course of minutes and campaigns a few hours, ensuring that games don’t bog down with players having to focus solely on warfare. Military forces will also lose capability quickly and take a long time to replenish, encouraging caution in starting wars.

Managing combat will still be inherently more time consuming than other aspects of the game in part to limit the amount of fighting a player can actively manage. It will be very difficult to wage multiple offensive campaigns at once with any degree of fine control. If you want to outright conquer the world, you’ll have to work for it.

Air and Sea warfare will function much like fighting on land, the main exception being that these formations have to deploy from a particular air or naval base and have a more limited endurance. Units can be set to surge to a target area, maintain a continuous presence, or some other alignment. Like ground units they can have multiple weapons types that engage targets at different ranges, but Air and Sea formations are unable to secure provinces. They can, however, deploy ground forces through air or amphibious attacks if properly equipped.

Players will be able to custom design their unit composition through a screen accessed at any military base. However, those who prefer automatically generated ones won’t be at a serious disadvantage if they manage their formations well. How much combat power anyone can afford to support will depend, of course, on tax revenues. Certain policy initiatives can also alter aspects of the military’s performance, and investing in a province’s economic infrastructure improves its ability to supply armed forces operating on its soil.

Taking over command of an alliance’s armed forces is also possible once the player is an important part of one. This allows a player in a small country to have a much broader impact than would otherwise be the case. That will help solve an old problem in grand strategy games where marginalized players have few if any options. A player can respond to a major disaster by altering their strategy, evolving through the course of a scenario.

There’s obviously a lot more detail I could go into on the combat aspect of the game, but I hope this brief offers a clear enough sense of the system. It integrates several different traditions in the history of strategy games into an experience that productively links the operational and strategic levels of international relations.

It’s still worth tying the combat model back to the map, because geography matters in UTW. Terrain values assigned to each 5km hex on the Area map will be decisive in determining the performance of military units operating near them. Each deployed formation will be attached to the country’s logistics network, with hexes containing roads critical to keep out of the enemy’s hands to ensure its smooth function. Running low on supplies dramatically diminishes combat power, so a key to successful fighting will involve cutting off enemy formations from their main supply base in order to induce them to retreat.

Further, using the right type of formation in a particular area is important. An army full of tanks won’t make much progress in mountain country. Seizing cities is a whole other question altogether, requiring immense amounts of force to displace even small light units if they’re properly dug in and supplied. And sieges are resource drains - also they tend to upset people at home and abroad.

It might seem like a misnomer to label this the political system, given the emphasis on military affairs, but like old Clausewitz said, war and politics are the same. Warfare is an application of policy, power expressed in material form to achieve some end. Whether you wish to save the world or conquer it, power is the same, the lifeblood of the world system at large. It’s how power is distributed and used that counts.

Time

To hold the design together requires a careful consideration of how to manage time. An element of urgency is necessary to simulate the fundamental constraint that the passing of time places on all real-world strategic thought. So time will have to continuously pass, with three natural rates seeming best.

Whenever a player zooms into the Area level time will pass at a rate of one sim hour every real world second. This means that the game clock will move forward by one day every twenty-four seconds and one year after just under two and a half hours. That’s enough time to make meaningful choices in the middle of a long-lasting campaign like a play-through covering the entire Second World War. Outside of wars, though, this speed level is a lot like being on pause.

Zooming to the Regional level makes time pass six times faster: one game day is gone every four seconds. With year of game time now only taking a bit more than half an hour, running a neutral country like Switzerland or Iceland that mostly avoids fighting and seeks to expand through influence alone would be more enjoyable until closer to the end game when the player will ideally have placed them at the center of a global alliance.

On the fastest speed - Tournament mode, you might call it - a game day goes by every second. At that rate a game year is gone in slightly over six minutes, with all of World War Two done so fast that a tournament defined by nonstop war would be a frenetic and exhausting twenty hour affair. For some, that would be an extremely well-spent long weekend. Others should still find it a useful training experience.

An instructor could break a group of students into 6-10 teams of 2-4 and play through a couple game decades each week for a term. The pedagogic objective would be to have students experience what it’s like to develop a strategy and have to adapt it over time. And towards the end, everyone would witness the consequences of their past choices in a manner that allows for structured discussion and reflection.

Endgames

I think of UTW as being an engine as much as a game. Build the right base map and you could play out any conceivable scenario. That’s why I’ve emphasized rules and mechanics over story in this brief. The right simulation is a platform for exploring emergent stories, ones that flow directly from player choices and how these modify the world.

The reason I call the project Unite The World is that the default scenario I have in mind covers the two centuries when humanity’s industrial output has become so intense that the entire biosphere is at risk. Even if industrialization was knocked back to basics by a meteor strike in 1890, in the early 1900s humanity would be burning coal faster than ever before and oil not long after.

The World Wars probably wouldn’t have happened, but in a sense 1914-1945 was for people living in those days the actual apocalypse. The aftermath would lead to a different world system than what was in place before no matter the cause or timing. The fall of European imperialism was written in its DNA, just like the collapse of the Greek and Roman empires that Europe’s elites still keep trying to imitate - Putin included. After the end, ordinary people would have had to pick up the pieces and confront the same challenges that vexed their forebears.

The twist to UTW that sets it apart from grand strategy games is that even as players spend decades striving to expand environmental damage is adding up. The levels will become critical in the 21st century, creating an escalating drag on economic growth, intensive migration to more stable climate zones, and global unrest. Any ill-prepared country will be thrown into a state of permanent crisis and likely fall apart.

This creates the paradox that drives the game: only by securing enough of the planet’s resources and population can a country or alliance it leads hope to afford the policy measures that will be required to stabilize the biosphere. Instead of an endgame defined by a few powers struggling for domination, by the last years all anyone will care about is survival. This can lead to cooperation - or the worst war imaginable. It’s up to the players.

But beyond the default scenario there’s a whole array of possibilities. By altering the timespan and tweaking the economic model an effective World War Two focused grand strategy game is possible to construct. One looking at the Cold War is too. Additional centuries are also possible - while technological development past about 2100 is very difficult to credibly forecast, the right system could explore all kinds of possible futures.

Regardless of the specific scenarios, UTW should fill a niche that no other platform I am aware of can with the same degree of flexibility and accessibility. Especially not on consoles, where more and more people do their gaming these days. Which makes sense since so many of use use a mouse and keyboard all day long.

Aside from that, one of the biggest reasons that people don’t get into strategy games is the justified perception that they are hyper-complex. I think that UTW can evade that trap by, in a sense, going back to the basics of modern digital simulations. Once upon a time titles like Command HQ, simple as they might be, offered more strategic depth than a lot of fancier titles released since.

I see broader comprehension of strategic thinking and affairs to be a matter of national security for everybody. We’re living in the age of the strategic corporal, where some Ukrainians wearing cheap cameras can almost instantly tell the world that they’ve seized an enemy position and taken prisoners. Understanding where you fit in the greater scheme of whatever operations you’re a part of ought to be one of those skills everyone is taught in school.

So, with the rough manifesto out of the way, how to get the job done?