Strategos : Classical antiquity RTS wargame

[Asid]

Strategos


Strategos is a real-time tactics wargame set in classical antiquity. Simulate large-scale battles with over 120 factions, and 250+ units, from the ancient world. Create custom battles, or take command of historical ones.

Steam
Game engine: Unity


Manual: PDF
Editor: Moddable
Theatre: Mediterranean
Time span:600 BC to almost 300 AD
Turns: Real time
Genre: Tactical
AI: Yes
Players: 1
Multiplayer: NO



Strategos : Classical antiquity RTS wargame





About

Simulate Historical Battles

Simulate large scale warfare with the armies of antiquity in Strategos. With thousands of men on screen, you can recreate real or speculative historical battles between the major and minor powers of the ancient Mediterranean.




Manage Complex Mechanics

Strategos is an ancients wargame with large scale formation movements and disorder, unordered charges, pursuing, evading, routing and morale shocks, fog of war, terrain effects, flanking and command and control simulations that bring a hardcore tabletop feel to digital, real-time wargaming.




Command the Armies of Classical Antiquity

The armies of Strategos span nearly a thousand years of the classical period, from the Hoplites and Immortals of the Persian Wars, to the rise of the Sasanian Empire against Imperial Rome.




Master Advanced Command and Control

An advanced command and control simulation encourages the player to think about the positioning and use of their generals, and when to commit them in order to balance giving orders, sending couriers, providing morale support, and fighting in direct combat.




Select From a Huge Number of Units and Factions

The game contains over 250 unique units and nearly 120 unique factions, including the various Hellenic Empires, The Achaemenid Persian Empire, Rome and Carthage across different eras, Gallic, Germanic and Iberian tribes, Umbrians, Samnites and other native Italians, the major city states of ancient Greece, the Thracians, and more.




Customize Battles

Custom battle options include selection of army lists, allies, units, army sizes, era, map, deployment distance and sides, difficulty, AI type/aggression, whether to use AI at all (alternative is hotseat), and optional randomization of army lists with options to filter random armies by era, importance, and whether they are steppe armies. Current historical battles include Issos and Raphia, with more to come.


Factions:

    - Abyssinian/Aksumite

    - Early (Persian Wars) and Later (Alexander) Achaemenid Empire

    - Aitolian

    - Antigonid

    - Alan

    - Apulian

    - Armenian (Tigranes and non-Tigranes)

    - Athenian

    - Atropatene (Early/Late)

    - Bithynian

    - Blemmye/Nobades

    - Bosporan

    - Campanian

    - Carthaginian (Early/Late)

    - Commagene

    - Caucasian

    - Dacian

    - Etruscan

    - Galatian

    - Gallic

    - Georgian

    - Germanic

    - Germanic (Later) Horse/Foot Tribes

    - Graeco-Bactrian

    - Graeco-Indian

    - Early Hoplite Greek (Later Hoplite Greek armies are distinguished by city state)

    - Hellenistic Greek

    - Hasmonean Jewish

    - Iapygian

    - Illyrian (Early/Late

    - Indo-Parthian

    - Indo-Skythian

    - Italian Tribes

    - Judaean

    - Kappadokian

    - Kushan (Early/Late)

    - Kyrenean Greek (Early/Late)

    - Latin

    - Libyan

    - Ligurian

    - Lucanian

    - Lydian

    - Lykian

    - Lysimachid

    - Maccabean Jewish

    - Macedonian (Early, Alexander, Late Alexander, Early Successor, and Late Successor)

    - Massalian

    - Meroitic Kushite

    - Moorish

    - Nabataean

    - Numidian (Early/Late)

    - Paionian

    - Palmyran

    - Parthian

    - Pergamenid (Early/Late)

    - Phokian

    - Pontic (Mithridates Early/Late, and Pre-Mithridates)

    - Ptolemaic (Early, Mid-Early, Mid-Late, Late)

    - Pyrrhic (Early/Late)

    - Rhoxolani

    - Roman (Tullian, Camillan, Polybian, Marian, Early Imperial, and Mid Imperial)

    - Saka

    - Samnite

    - Sarmatian

    - Sassanid (Early)

    - Seleucid (Early, Mid-Early, Mid-Late, Late)

    - Skythian

    - Slave Revolt

    - Spanish (Iberian, Celtiberian, Lusitanian, and Sertorius)

    - Spartan

    - Spartan (Hellenistic)

    - Syracusan

    - Tarantine

    - Theban

    - Thessalian

    - Thracian (Early, Gallic, Hellenized, and Roman Client)

    - Umbrian

[Asid]

What sort of game is this?

Strategos is a real-time tactics wargame set in classical antiquity. Mechanics include large scale formation movements and disorder, unordered charges, pursuing, evading, routing and morale shocks, fog of war, terrain effects, flanking and command and control simulations that bring a hardcore tabletop feel to digital, real-time wargaming. You can create custom battles, or take command of historical ones in major reenactments, or across campaigns that string together related battles.

[Asid]

[Asid]

Progress Update
Wed, 9 October 2024



Addition of many new factions and units, etc...

We've been making steady progress on Strategos over the past few months, so I thought I'd update the steam community here. We've added visuals and army lists for Gallic, Germanic, Dacian and Galatian tribesmen, including warband and other infantry, noble cavalry, light horse javelinmen, and light foot, as well as a huge variety of unique and characterful units added to existing factions like Germanic Symmachiarii, Roman Marines, Palestinian Clubmen, Sassanid Armored Horse archers, Falxmen, Anatolian Levy, Spartan Pikemen, Ligurian and Lucanian Warriors, and many more. There are many new unit lists (we are nearing 100 total army lists!) and screenshots you can see on the store page as well.



Cataphracts are in progress currently, as are new maps. I am also about half way done with localization of the game to German, French, Spanish and Russian. We're also experimenting with unit card portraits, and of course always improving the gameplay code and squashing bugs.



There's no update on the release date for now, but progress is steady and the game is playable and fun!

[Asid]

Progress Update
Wed, 27 November 2024



New Unit Visuals, Armies, Maps, Settings, Keybinds, Plugins, Tutorials

Hello! We've been hard at work since early October with a large number of Updates:



For new units, most notably we've added a large number of Cataphract visuals and variations, including Parthian, Anatolian, Sassanid, Kushan, Early Roman, Hellenic and Early Hellenic Cataphracts, and some visually related Late Companions, Persian Guard Lancers, Kappadokian Cavalry, and Hippeis armored Greek cavalry from the Hellenic era. For the Apulian region Italians we've added Daunian Warriors and Iapygian Warriors. The Galatians now have their own Galatian Armored Cavalry, and there are a few variations of eastern spearmen in the game now, including Sassanid defensive spearmen with their characteristic large shields. Tarantine mercenary cavalry are now a distinct unit and visual from native Tarantine Cavalry, and the Romans now have dedicated Equites Sagittarii in the late period. The Ligurians have their own veteran warriors, and ancient Lydia was added with Lydian irregulars, Lydian Armored Hoplites, and Lydian Lancers, and so was Lycia/Caria with Lycian Warriors, and Armored Veteran Hoplite visuals were added to some of the older Greek lists. With new assets, we also updated many existing units with new helmets and weapons like Italian Cavalry, Steppe Lancers, Agema Cavalry, Auxiliary Infantry, Celtiberian Infantry, and more.





For new factions, the game now features Atropatene (early/late), Georgian, Caucasian, Indo-Skythian, Indo-Parthian, Arab City, Dacian, Germanic Foot/Horse tribes, and a few other choice additions to fill out the Near Eastern areas especially with more lists.





The AI has undergone various improvements to behavior and deployment. They are able to pick auto drop flanks better, move and maintain their line better, deploy and use horse archer armies more intelligently, and I've added more and better bespoke AI for Lancer lines, overwhelmingly light foot armies, medium foot armies, and bowmen deployments (including some bespoke deployments for bowmen armies that mix staggered lines of bowmen and infantry to protect their shooters, and for certain medium foot armies that will post up in terrain and draw you in with light troops/shooters). There are fixes to pursuit to charge, pursuing and evading with intervening routed units, moving and attacking coherently in formation, using more reserves, having multiple units coordinate against single targets, more intelligent evades based on matchup, pursuers pursuing other pursuers, and fixes to pathing around combats.





We have a few new Desert style maps now, and are in the progress of integrating various Gaia terrain plugin features like GTS, which we're using for terrains and foliage etc...I've also updated the Unity version, and significantly updated the plugin versions for GPU instancing and Pathfinding/Navigation, so those features are more advanced and performant now. I've also greatly expanded the tutorial and added a second tutorial for advanced concepts.





Couriers are now all cavalry in a light cavalry style appropriate to a faction, rather than just being drawn from soldiers in the General's unit, which is more appropriate and visually consistent, and generally looks better. For settings, FPS caps, VSync, many keybinds and other options have been added, and more and better UI support for different resolutions are now in. There have been many tooltip updates as well, including on hovering terrain, showing unit portraits and descriptions on unit selection, displaying allies and era information in the in-game menu, and many more small things. There are also many more allied faction selections and optional randomization of allies with randomization of factions.





Localization has made much progress with localized unit names and descriptions, faction names and descriptions, menu items, and tooltips, and new font atlases for Cyrillic (right now we are localizing into Spanish, French, German, and Russian).

Thanks for reading, and we'll keep you updated with the latest as we make more progress!

[Asid]

Progress Update 3
Wed, 8 January 2025



Campaigns, Maps, and More

We are still hard at work updating Strategos (barring some down time over the holidays) and have a few updates for you.

We've started work on a very WiP basic campaign that simply strings battles together in a thematic way with some unit selection and some mandatory units. The first test one is based around the campaigns of Alexander the Great, and has battles across different maps vs the Thracians, Illyrians, Thebans and Persians:



We've also added more maps in the new style, including more desert or arid themed maps:




There are now highlights to show final unit position on movement:


We've added unit card drag and drop, increased unit appearance randomization with disorder/cohesion loss, many deployment and AI tweaks (especially to Parthian style deployments), added vsync, small unit sizes, and detail density options for older computers, made grass and shadow improvements, did some animation fixes on swapping between ranged and melee hands, fixed many tutorial scripts, and made many bug fixes.

And, last but not least, perhaps the main improvement since the last update has been many minor optimizations to formation movement and combat, which have collectively improved performance substantially on larger army sizes.

[Asid]

Progress Update 4
Tue, 18 February 2025



Hello! We remain hard at work on Strategos, always updating and improving based on feedback in the ongoing pre-alpha playtest.



For settings and UI, we've added settings to the in-game battlemap menu, banners are more readable in the woods and on elephants, we?ve fixed bugs that broke the combat log, added a UI size scaling option, draggable windows, on-hover over dropdown options that display unit details, various campaign UI updates like pagination, lasso size options, an improved pause functionality, an ammo UI bar to the unit banners and cards, a free look gamepad camera mode for cinematic shots, background music for the menu and in-combat (including randomization of tracks, all music from Tyler Cunningham: https://www.pond5.com/artist/tylercunningham), an FPS display settings option, new custom map image previews, a black lasso and unit placeholder UI visual for maps with white snow or sand background, some tutorial text updates, a toggle to disable text popups, and changes to popup size and font, and speed up zoom controls, and we no longer show unneeded idle or moving state icons. We also added a quality difficulty setting for all battle types (in addition to existing quantity setting), a display for shift modes on banners, fixes to map borders, edits to post processing and grass settings inputs, and we added a button for highlighting all player and (visible) enemy units at once.

We very significantly improved performance (>50%) with a total overhaul to the movement of men, the use of an update manager for soldier and projectile movement and animation, and improved unit coordinator code. We also removed unneeded components and gameobjects from soldiers after initializing, edited build settings, and changed pathfinding calculations to make them async in order to fix fps spikes on moving many units at once.



For maps, we've added a new map entirely for the battle of Issos, and overhauled the maps for Trebia and Raphia. We?ve also made large updates to the quality of the grass and its blending into the terrain, along with wind and shadow effects, map lighting and better color matching on existing maps.

For gameplay, we've slowed down the general pace of the game, including unit speed and especially the rate of unit rotation for more realistic movement, made some changes to early battle command and control, and rebalanced light horse pursuits and evades. You can now give queued up commands to un-commandable evaders, pursuers and recoilers so that once commandable again they execute the move. We?ve tweaked rally checks and made fixes to courier movement, and updated the deployment mode experience. Routing units now can't rally when overlapped, goading has been fixed to be less annoying in extreme cases (ie no goading repeatedly off the map altogether), and we?ve made many move-to-shoot fixes so that behavior is more intuitive. We?ve added the use of historical battle maps in custom battles, and made recoil fixes to integrate them better into gameplay. Ranged units now become ?50% shooters? beyond 20 shots (with accompanying ammo bar).

The line shift modes have been substantially updated, and now units in mutual melee passive can rally check. Pushback mode units don?t go back into melee passive, and still push further, but suffer greater morale shock when losing, as do units in fallback mode. We also fixed some overlap bugs from line shift modes.



For the AI, we've improved cataphract, heavy infantry line, and elephant deployment. We?ve massively improved AI flanking maneuvers, and improved the AI's ability to skirmish and recover skirmishing positions after evading. Peltasts do a better job of standing and fighting sometimes, and bowmen and skirmish group moves have been improved. Fragmented AI seek out a commander to rally, and sparabara/bow line infantry are now better at taking nearby available auto drop flanks. The AI make better use of reserves, and are much better at navigating around combats and into flanking positions. We?ve also fixed bugs to AI hindrance on overlaps ending, and light/ranged cavalry who are out of ammo are now more likely to charge if available to do so.

For various visuals, we've updated the animation controller and soldier orientation on slopes for combats at steep angles. We?ve improved the smoothness of transitions between shooting animations, added dust particle effects, and improved idle animation randomness. Shooters face their targets better, and we?ve made improvements to animation visuals updating at long distances. Units are better at changing back to melee weapons after throwing javelins, and fixes have been made to pikemen coordinating while shifting in and out of combat. Deaths while dispersing, courier movement, soldiers moving out to meet flankers, and soldier scaling have all been improved. The initial offset position of projectiles is much better, and various new types of trees have been added.

For other content, we?ve added Syrian heavy bowmen, Machimoi pikemen, Machimoi swordsmen, and Germanic axemen, along with Aitolian and Dacian allies. We?ve updated the Ptolemaic, Seleucid and Marian and Polybian Roman lists to be more comprehensive and historically accurate. We?ve also added more battles to the existing Alexander campaign (Jaxartes and Chaeronea).



We?ve also fixed many combat and UI bugs, including to stopping multiple units at once, double clicking unit card movement to destroyed units, selection faction randomization, some return to menu buttons, and some issues with units stuck in place after combats in rare circumstances, as well as various other bugs which are always being squashed.

Thanks for reading and stay tuned for future updates!

[Asid]

Publishing Announcement!
Thu, 27 March 2025



Strategos to be published by MicroProse

Hello All!

We at Strategos Games are proud to announce our publishing partnership with MicroProse!

This exciting opportunity will provide the funding and development assistance needed to realize our vision for Strategos. MicroProse will also help bring the game to a wider global audience of simulation and strategy enthusiasts.

Check out coverage this week from content creators on youtube, and see the announcement trailer below:



Remember to follow and wishlist on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3064810/Strategos/

g

and to join the discord community to meet and discuss with myself and fellow Strategos community members and potentially join the playtest:
https://discord.com/invite/Y98uqcydwe

[Asid]

Progress Update 5
Sat, April 19, 2025



In the time since the last update two months ago we have of course announced our publishing partnership with MicroProse, while also remaining hard at work on Strategos. See various updates below.



AI:
fixes to reserve movement for cautious ai
extreme angle move to player fixes
fixes to ai shooting/move commands given while shooting
make AI better at using superior shooting advantage to draw player to them
fixes to AI very long skirmisher lines
improvements to AI use of reserves, move to morale support and mid line shoring up positions better
improvements to AI ability to meet player line and match combats as main engagement begins
AI better with flanking light horse
uniform line movement improved
cav turn in better for flanks and calculation location of player line/flanks better
AI better at remembering units they've seen already
Parthian type armies mixing some lancers and many light horse archers better about using horse archers to soften player before charging
fixes to ai orienting to player on extreme player horizontal moves, better line movement coordination with skirmishers
improvements to AI pursuit/evade collisions
fix to AI pursuit/charge follow up after routing target as flanker
non melee capable lights like slingers more likely to evade melee capable lights like javelinmen
using k means cluster analysis to massively improve AI main line advance against unorthodox player behavior
update to AI dynamic look for priority targets
improvement to use of generals by AI
nonlight evading cav better at evading steady spears/pikes



Maps:
New Maps (some historical battles):
Improved Raphia, and new Grassy Flatland, Rolling Hills, Forest, Asculum, Ilipa, Mountain Forest, Flatland by the Sea, and two other additional skirmish maps
grass improvements to fading and few distance
dust in water fixes
fixes to some deployment locations and bugs
new rock, tree and water visuals



Tutorials:
Two new bespoke maps for tutorials
localization and short videos to help understanding
localization of the manual.
improved tutorial text, information and bolding important info



Camera/Inputs:
min zoom setting, fixes to max zoom on higher maps
improved UI-less free look/cinematic cam
improvement to left click cancel while right click dragging so don't deselect and other movement input QoL improvements
massively improved move to shoot/attack commands following of target
improved move to attack/shoot when given to multiple units at once towards same target
fixed starting camera position bugs
default post processing effects to off



UI:
new Unit card and portrait visuals
new unit card routing/dispersed overlay visual
new unit banners visuals including pole/bar, star, cloth, frills, etc...
made unit banners selectable
Main menu background video
added combat turn timer circle/slider indicator on flags
new popups for if units goaded etc...
new waypoint marker visuals
made combat tooltip player vs AI order less confusing for resolution chance text
added separate music volume slider



Units/Armies:
deep infantry unit type, and applied to Theban sacred band.
added leaders/officers to units (including killing them if general dies)
more civilization categories and thus leader/courier visual variety
updated Etruscan, Latin and Parthian allies lists
added Ptolemaic and Kushite allies for one another
new Elephant visuals in progress



Balance:
rebalance of elephant deaths and auto breaking
balance for demo build units (Polybian Roman, Pyrrhic, and Carthaginian (Late))



Bugs:
fixed some bugs with movement jankiness
fix to popup lifetime so decoupled from game pause
bug fixes to projectiles expiring
banner height fixes in trees
fixes to line shifting and unit overlap bugs
edits to pursuit times
fix to sparabara animation shooting timing
fix to combat sparring partners code
fix to pursuit direction being initially off in some cases
fixes to line shifting and flanks together
fixes to later melees following end of front melee combat bugs
fixes to blocked adjacency calculations
pike banner height fixes
adjustments to courier give orders distance bugs
updated poa charts
fixed adjacency calculation bugs
fix to units breaking out of combat bugs
fix to courier spam bug
fix to zoom/scroll window mix up bugs
more UI fixes for ultrawide
many fixes to attacks/charges caused by unit overlaps from pursuits
fix to banner rotate to face camera
pike/spear unit extreme angle reorganization fixes
fixed stab hands javelin direction for some light foot
fixed evading into terrain bugs
fixed coordination/spot assignment on certain attack commands
fixed issues with charge combat casualties calculations
fixes to skirmishers wait/shoot/move timings
fixes to flag holder positioning while in combat
fixes to AI use of guard mode and pushback
some missing tooltip translations added
fix to stop command given while in combat that caused overlap bug



Sounds:
changed out/added sounds for:
-start game
-move command
-deselect
-drag move command loop
-ambient wind
-move to unit swoosh
-melee vs ranged attack command
-blocked vs un-commandable sound
-charge and rout horn sounds
-receive and fire arrows, slings and projectiles new and distinct sounds
updated sound distance settings and general audio mixing



Optimization:
of world space popup messages, pooling them better
improved some debug performance on soldiers moving
improved garbage collection on highlight units performance
rewrote ammo management to be much more performant with more pooling of components and avoiding GC allocations
more caching of UI elements around unit cards
fix combat log calls to to-string for improved performance, switches to stringbuilder
cached hashsets for list of soldiers, searchable soldiers, nearby entities and such to improve garbage allocation



Text Campaigns:
option to play as opposite side once campaign finished
updated alexander campaign armies, added battles of Gaugamela and Hydaspes, improved campaign text and added new campaign maps, added some new Persian units like average Iranian cav and Immortals, improved campaign translations.

Map Campaigns:
Made first steps towards creating a basic, wargaming style map campaign to provide some dynamic, operational level maneuvers context for battles. It will include things like electing where to march and besiege settlements, limited fleet actions, simple diplomacy, dice rolling for most decisions, recruitment of locals, generation of armies and generals, and such in specific theatres of war (for example part of the First Punic war in Sicily).

Demo:
Nearly finished with limited build for a future public Demo.

[Asid]

Demo is Live!
Mon, April 28, 2025



The Strategos Demo is now live for the Steam Wargames Fest

The demo for Strategos can now be downloaded from the main store page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3064810/Strategos/

The demo includes custom battles on two maps, using default army size settings, with three of the final game's over one hundred factions: Polybian Roman, Carthaginian (Late), and Pyrrhic.



have fun and don't forget to wishlist!

[Asid]

Demo Update
Fri, 2 May 2025



new faction, new map, bug fixes, better animations, better grass performance

  - Added Macedonian Late Successor (+ optional Illyrian allies) list
  - Added third map (grassy flatland)
  - Significant improvement to soldier animation controller so they walk/run the right speed better (not so much slow-mo run in place), including minor performance improvement to moving units
  - Added fps display counter option in menu settings
  - Disabled grass by default, and significantly improve grass performance (simpler lighting, no shadows, closer cull distance, more efficient GPU instancing shader integration)
  - Minor tutorial text updates and typo fixes
  - Fix to multiple units right click attack bug if some selected within charge distance and other not
  - Edited many general's command/leadership ratings, especially making sacred band not so OP
  - Changed default group key from shift to control

this update is live now