Devlog/Tutorial 01 - Unreal Engine Grand Strategy, Blood and Iron 

if you cant find tutorial on something, that means you are making something new/fresh/unique so keep em up :)

I used to work for paradox many years ago :) Great work!

The way you assign the right colour to each province is insane yet genius. Bravo! We need more developers like you

I'm a UE tech artist and have been brainstorming the best way to do this in unreal for a long time, and you've pretty much matched my thoughts 1:1, which is comforting since it tells me I'm not insane :D Really excited to see other people working on stuff like this, as you mentioned basically nobody has been and the resources are very slim.

I love what you’re doing, man! Finally someone who goes for the grand strategy with a full fledged plan and good ideas/skills. Will be following you in this endeavour, keep it up!!!!!!

your voice could be louder - i had to crank up the volume quite a lot to hear you

Now this is intriguing.

love the insights on your thought process creating the map and first gameplay mechanics 🙌

This is so cool, will be def following along your journey. As a hobbyist 3d modeller, texturer myself, I know a bit of the struggles involved on getting something from idea to reality, love to see when you mention that you haven't found a tutorial for something yet, because I totally take that as a good sign myself :))

looks dope, and finally an accurate world map

What you are doing is very cool. I once dreamed of a game in which it would be possible to combine 4X strategy and the ability to play from a third person, but before that I had not come across a game in which maps from the paradox games were implemented in the Unreal Engine.

That's impressing! I've always been fascinated by maps, but quite intimidated by the process of making them (even basic images; there's not a lot of good software to simplify the process with good results)... So I never dared to even think about making a Grand strategy game (which I absolutely love)! But I've been working on a kind of flight simulator game lately and had to find a way to make the earth in Unreal, so it initiated me a little to the materials blueprints and while doing it I superimposed different kind of map on it (climates, resources, etc) just for fun and thought for a brief moment that it could be an idea for a future project. So seeing how you did it is certainly interesting!

Super impressive! I tried making a grand strategy map too a couple of years ago and used the unique color technique too, but it was still way too difficult! I subscribed and look forward to more devlogs!

JUST IN TIME! I was just googling on this exact same topic! Thank you so much :D

Ive been looking into this on and off glad to see its do able motivation to get back to it

Appreciate your hard work ❤

It's really coming together

Looks great

Looks beautiful

I know that you have your own vision for your game and it mostly follows vic2 but one thing that would be great and can be implented even in the province system is the distinction between rural and urban areas. That can be done by making separate provinces for most large enough cities that existed in that time. This will allow your game to represent massive population movement that happened in the process of urbanization at the time and differences between these areas in general. Maybe there could be a dynamic system of province creation and destruction, but that's seems like to difficult to implement and too taxing on the performance.

The map looks great, but I hope the graphics won't compete too much computing power against actual gameplay mechanisms. I think 1 resource per province is not good, should a labor-intensive resource like cotton change to a capital-intensive resource like oil, the consequent mass unemployment would be both unrealistic and problematic.

Good job man

Godspeed you goddamn madman

Respect

Main thing about this i gotta comment on so far i believe the map is generally just very dark

very cool!

Always wanted a 3d globe map game.

If you listed the map editor to purchase in the store, I'd buy it ASAP. I always wanted to create worlds with Paradox-style interaction

Subscribing and looking forward to your progress! I've dabbled with UE5 paradox style map but failed. My problem was using separate meshes. While fine for small amount of them it became slow, as you mentioned. I should use similar approach to yours next time!

I love the change in video style, keep it up! This is a very impressive project already, what plans do you have for gameplay?

Great map I hope the game will come out in the best shape possible, I tho think that 3 trade goods per province might be a better idea to more stimulate a realistic economy

Nice

Looks great. One question I want to ask is if the topographical granularity actually brings anything beyond the point where you understand what they represent? In other words, is there a point showing the full granularity of say a mountain after the point at which you understand it's a mountain? In which case, wouldn't it be better to reduce the resolution such that readability is increased instead?

Looking great so far! Just a suggestion, but could you have distinct “border” and “terrain” map modes? Terrain with province colours alongside the heightmap, and Border as a flat map similar to maps of the 19th or 20th c.s?

gyaaaat dayumm

Please make this as an asset on the store. I would pay money for it immediately. I actually am working on a similar project but set in ww2 and this will be perfect for my project. As you mentioned there isnt many videos online on how its done, so if you cant make detailed tutorials. I would gladly buy it on the marketplace.

This looks very cool, did you plan on opening a discord server? Understandable if you dont want to worry about stuff like that at this point but I think that just having a Server for the development, contributions, questions etc would be pretty nice. Cant wait for whats coming :))

Man its really coming together! i wish i could try and do a grand strategy game with your worklow too but iam way too unexperienced to use the information you just gave us in this video, any tips how i could go on about reacreting this as a beginner in blueprint??

Interesting! What time period are you expecting the game to simulate? I assume starting from the early modern period based on the ideas of banking and fiat. Besides that, I think the mountains are a bit spiky, particularly around the balkans :p

Can you please make a tutorial where you explain how you did achieve the movement of units from province to province, with a line (arrow) drag from start to destination? That i cannot find any kind of tutorials how to achieve it! thanks in advance!

I always wanted to do something like that part with the map, but I am just too stupid to even start it. To bad.

UI can be improved other than that it looks good I will keep an eye on the development👍

It is interesting that you are doing grand strategy in Unreal. Have you found that this works better than Godot or Unity?

where did you get the data on these historic map borders?

Very cool. You should turn up your audio in your videos though.

could you add teyrnllwg as an releasable nation? I want to do a teyrnllwg world conquest

is this vic2 being redone ?

Ah man, the game is that far from completion? It's just taking up space on my wishlist now.

So I guess this is a "suggestion" but I don't want to come off as 'telling you how to make your own darn game'. You obviously may do as you wish. I'm mostly curious about the economy. Mostly 'Production' and 'Trading'. When you say that you have a system where provinces all make one good each is that just a good of any description? Or do you mean something like victoria ii's style 1 RGO with factories separate? You can break goods down into to categories like: mineable/farmable (RGO) (i.e. comes out of the ground) and value-added (i.e. made with factory from other goods). Now, if it were my game (which it's not) I would say just let every province have a 'production modifier' for every kind of good that is an RGO and for some the modifier is just '0' (if there is no oil then you can't produce it). After that one could just treat mineable and farmable resources like factories i.e. a basic farm is just a factory that takes no inputs and makes food. I'm also pertinently interested in the market. Trading, not just between countries but within the, is something I've never seen handled really well by any game. Most games use a simplistic approach to things like pricing and usually have magic, free transportation. I totally understand if the same thing happens here too. You mentioned having not only different currencies but different types of currency. That sounds really cool. Also sounds like a nightmare to implement and then actually balance game-play wise. (I could imagine a lot of potential exploits from this) Overall I think this looks really cool and you clearly have a lot of talent. It would be amazing seeing a well optimized (c++!) grand strategy game for once lol. I wish you the best of luck.

Keep up the good work. Question: Are you going to include the cost of transportation of goods? When it comes to economics, the most important part and the most overlooked, is the cost of moving goods from one place to another. People scratch their heads as to why Russia is so much poorer than the United States, when the obvious answer always comes down to the cost of moving goods. This Mississippi River system has more interconnected navigable waterways than the rest of the world combined. Once the Erie Canal was built, you could get on a paddle boat in New York, and go into the interior. Connecting to the Great Lakes. Connecting to the Ohio River. Reaching the Midwest and the interior of the continent. You could float down to New Orleans and connect to the rest of the world. Or you could go west to the Rocky Mountains. You could even paddle all the way up to Montana. 200 years ago, when people migrated to America. They would get a horse and cart. They would head west. They would put seed in the ground. And 6 months later they would harvest the produce and float it on a barge almost for free down to New Orleans, where the product would then be shipped to the market that would pay the most for it. This was the invention of Capitalism. As in, for the first time in human history, ordinary normal people had the ability to generate their own capital. Changing the economy from being primarily dominated by exchanging goods and exchanging time, to becoming all about exchanging money. So, Capitalism as the social standard came to be. Dirt cheap land and dirt cheap transportation means a massive surplus. Natural economic growth with minimal State interference. The total cost of moving something on a river and moving goods through mountains, is something like 80 times. Building roads and railroads requires maintenance, resources, and manual labor. Floating something on a barge, or having a barge be pulled by a steamer, costs nearly nothing. You require few to no people, few resources, no management, tiny risk of disruption or delay. Et cetera et cetera. The United States is unfair and overpowered. They have the Mississippi which I have already described. On top of this, they have the largest agricultural zone in the world. The whole interior is flat and easy to build infrastructure on. The climate is stable, not as stable as Western Europe but stable enough to not wreak havoc on infrastructure. You have different climate zones from the north to the south, allowing for a wide variety in produce grown. The whole thing is in the middle of the Continent, which means no foreign power could ever threaten it. You also have near infinite iron, coal, and oil, right on top of the interior heartland close to rivers and population centers. This creates a system where independent industries and people can set out and produce a profit for themselves, without needing the Government to intervene. In Russia the situation is completely different. Almost like a sort of "mirror universe" version of the United States. The Russian rivers do not connect to each other. And the large rivers of the interior all flow north to the north pole. You have a shorter growing season. The temperature variation is bigger, causing a yearly nightmare to road and rail. Everything is more expensive to do. Everything produces less. Making a detached American-esque approach impossible. As independent industries simply cannot make a profit on their own without the collective investment from the National Government to brute force the enormous geographic barriers. There is a reason why Russia went from the Autocratic Tsar to the Totalitarian Soviet system. Because the only way of handling the Russian geography, is to brute force it. And once you brute force it, it barely produces a profit. The Americans could manifest their destiny, because it generated growth and profit. But when the Russians tried to do it with Siberia, trying to spread and build new cities, trying to expand the Siberian Railroad. It never made a profit. Causing the inevitable collapse of the USSR, as they were unrealistic and tried to do with the impossible in a geography that would never allow it. ---------- In Victoria 3, goods simply teleport and float around in the ether. They have a nonsensical "Transportation" resource, which is arbitrary and nonsensical. They have "Infrastructure" which is applied like the mobile phone game that it is. Electricity is no longer teleported across the globe through arcane magical portals. Instead, electricity is entirely locked to the province. Which means there is zero electrical transfer from New York to Connecticut, but the Appalachian Mountains separating East and West Pennsylvania is completely ignored. Good fly over the Andes, the Alps, the Himalayas, the Urals, and the Rockies as if magical elves on arcane flying machines carry them all across the world. I am becoming a tired old man. With the improving technologies and increasing computing power of the past decades, I thought the natural process would be to add complexities and features to give us games that were closer to reality while at the same time being playable as video games. Instead, we have improving graphics, while the gameplay features stagnated over a decade ago. And me as a natural result, becomes obsessed about every small project that tries to make a Grand Strategy game during the Victorian Era. I am glad I found this project. Now this and Gilded Destiny and live together on a mantle in my brain. Keep up the good work. I will be praying for it and you.

ну, надеюсь у тя получится

Hoi 6 or Eu 6 ?

Do you have a Discord?

bro the audio too low, im on max volume, still quiet

Hay sorry cool dicord ?

I was interested until you said every province will only contain one good, i know you said you wanted this to be like vic2, but don't copy the worst aspects of vic2, having one resource per province is lame and isn't realistic. Vic3 did this best IMO. Still curious to see where you take this.

new EU4?? ;)))

Whats the point of deleting comments? Macedonians are not bulgarians!

Blood and Iron ... Reminds me of a lego game uhm

Unreal Engine does have superior graphics and is superior in many ways. But nothing beats free and open source in the long run. Godot are slowly winning indie's and now some small studios.

Bologna, not Bolonga. Looks great otherwise!

and your minimum specs are gtx 1080 and 14th gen intel XD

Yes but, it will never be better than a Paradox game trust me

i absolutely hate the province good EU 4 style system, its utter nonsence, vic 2 or 3 would be a much better example of an actual economy.

Have you looked at how to place and render rivers and roads? Are you planning on modifying the map at all during the game (e.g. craters or expanding cities)? Do you have a visual target, like a collection of pictures, for how you would like the map to look in the end? (Edit: oh, didn't realize you have a bunch of videos already - thought this was your first)