I’ve had the idea for a while to do a proper real time, real world empire building game. The easiest way to describe it would be Real Time Civilisation. I had a few ideas about it, the resolution of the map was going to be way higher and cities would take up multiple squares as they got larger. Then I had a brainwave.

A gridless real time civilisation which is to scale on a real sized world.

I’m not sure if this has been done before, I’ve seen a few tech demos involving worlds in a similar fashion, but nothing involving the kind of flexibility of scale that I want to attempt. Cites are at best around 100 kilometres wide on a world 40 thousand kilometres in circumfrence. When you think about that kind of scale in a computer game it’s crazy. The player would have to zoom in a long way to even be able to see cities at all, and even furthur in to be able to see people. But I think it’s possible.

It’s an idea that will take a lot of work and discovering technologies to store, display and work with data on that scale. I’d have to go with a gridless terrain map that covers a sphere. I have a few ideas in mind, but I’ll share them later.

My main focus is still the RPG, progress it at about 10%. Engine is working great, but now there’s the game code and models to work on. Stay tuned.