Age of Strategy Forums

2032 NCY, we opened the Pandora's Box that should have never touched without clues.
Just within few days, the white HAZE dust leaked from the deep underground through the Rifts contaminated more than 60% surface area of the planet. An unexpected disaster we had never seen, that turned our once beautiful and lively world turned into grim wastelands of death, and took 72% of world population of the time.
With great loss of habitable lands and population, civilization and survival of humanity had been shaken to its foundations. It took us many years to struggle and learn how to survive in the wastelands and to preserve what's left by fallen civilizations, but at least, some of us managed to rebuild civilization and order in the lands not touched by HAZE contamination yet.
Less connected to each other than in the past, new conflicts arises from the past grudges, present ambitions, or just by our purest ruthless instinct to survive. Over the years since the HAZE catastrophe, many wars had broke out. Either to contest control of remaining habitable lands and resources, or to protect themselves from losing their survival rights in the world that could ever been worse.
With recovery and development of technologies, some smartest scientific minds begin to analyse the HAZE particles, hope to find ways to expel and neutralize them. Yet after some tragic accidents and incidents, the research yielded an unexpected outcome in the last decade - the unexplored potency of deadly HAZE dust to enhance human to new level.
The discovery turned out to bring conflict further into the deeper contaminated White Zones, where the purest HAZE dust can be found - the Rifts connected to the source of them.

This is the our world that was irreversibly ruined by the HAZE,
This is the time war rages on in the deep HAZE contaminated wastelands,
This is the era the fates of Mankind revolves around the HAZE.

This is Age of Haze.


This would be an reorganized version of my previous idea of Age of Haze.
Inspired by C&C Tiberium Saga, C&C Red Alert, Generals and Dune 2000. (Of course we don't need to strictly stick to them).
I might want to post part of the existing ideas, but what I have isn't enough to make this game interesting.
Of course, any ideas are welcomed!

Faction lores are coming next!


Quick links to messages of important lores, plans and lists
(Nothing yet!)

Continental Alliance
Inspiration: Allies from Red Alert, GDI from C&C

Among the current Great Powers, Continental Alliance is undoubtedly in line of being the most successful. Controlling the largest total area of habitable Green Zones of the world, it provided the Alliance a nurturing environment for civilization. These lands behind the Zone Barriers are irreplaceable and solid foundations for their present day cultural and economic achievements; although not without envies from other Great Powers, especially their nemesis Northland Frontier.

Continental Alliance military emphasize on quality, employing the most disciplined and prepared soldiers of the world, with utilization of the most up-to-date technological advancements. Alliance forces also features great flexibility and durability - having an arsenal composed of versatile, solid backbone units and highly specialized tactical elements, they have the strategic capability adapting to different situations and take on almost all kinds of threat.

Northland Frontier
Inspiration: Soviets from Red Alert

The Northland is a wide but unforgiving frozen wastes with little to none habitable lands after the Catastrophe, where Northlanders merely survived from local conflicts and toxic wastes by hiding in subterranean bunkers and vaults. With bitter history with continental nations in the past, the Northlanders united under the flag of the Frontier, claiming the present day Continental Alliance as public enemy responsible for all their suffering.

Northlanders are as ruthless and brutal as the lands they are from when comes to their military. The Frontier Army favors direct assault tactics in old-fashioned way, crushing enemies by means of brute strength and sheer pressure. Frontier military are notoriously known for their machines of war - intimidating existences on battlefield capable of fighting in the most harsh conditions, often combining deadly firepower and high survivability, but at expense of flexibility.

Trinity Entente
Inspiration: Empire form Red Alert 3, China from Generals

While many people sees only destruction from the Catastrophe, some sees new opportunities from it. Trinity Entente, the ambitious new Great Power of the Arsia Peninsula, is no exception. The combination of populism and religious ideas of the Entente have successfully gathered massive amount of followers from contaminated zones under their banner, which helped the Entente assimilated a large territory in a short time. These followers are willing to devote themselves to enforce the will of the Three Divine Emperors constructing a new world order.

Entente have massive manpower at their disposal. To utilize such advantage, the Entente adopts large battle oriented approach for their military. Entente military units favors quantity over quality - Units are individually weak, however this is offset by the bonus they get from adjacency to friendly unit, which can be powerful in a tight formation. The Entente also has a variety of powerful means of map control, to make sure enemies cannot get away easily without a proper battle.

Horizon League
Inspiration: ECA from Rise of the Reds (Generals Zero Hour mod)

The League is a group of loosely connected nations with a common defense pact with long history, controlling the Eastern coastlines of the Grand Continent and some minor offshore lands. For many years in the past they remained neutral in international affairs, supported by their own strongly defensive military power. However, after the Catastrophe catastrophically changed the world, neutrality did not become an option for them. In the world which survival weighs over all, conflict is inevitable. The League has no choice other than fight to defend their own right of survival.

The League is a defensively minded faction. They are able to set up strong and firm footholds to deny or at least delay enemies from controlling locations of strategic interest; their troops also fights at maximum efficiency with support of nearby friendly defenses. Their relative weakness of mobile offensive strength is offset by their powerful ballistics and artillery units able to hit enemies from safety.

DELTA Rebellion
Inspiration: GLA from Generals

The founding of Rebellion could be traced back to an failed mutiny led by colonial military police force DELTA in the early days of the Continental Alliance, which the incident became the symbol of anti-colonialism - In memory of DELTA killed by Alliance military, this rebellion movement was established to free minorities from oppression, spreading revolts across the world and assist the liberated colonies to become totally independent from chains and constraints of Great Powers.

Rebellion is scarce in power when comes to heavy military assets. Such relative weakness of direct confrontation capability is offset by utilizing ways of concealment, guerrilla tactics, and high mobility. Unlike other factions, some Rebellion buildings can also be packed up and switch to mobile mode when relocation is needed.

Eclipse Cult
Inspiration: Yuri from RA2YR and Mental Omega, Ordos from Dune, Brotherhood of Nod form C&C

The Continental Alliance is not the first to discover the potency of the neurotoxic HAZE particles on human body augmentation (though Alliance is the first to prove its effect scientifically). In the forgotten corners in the inner region of contaminated zones, a group of people discovered the powerful mutations of HAZE infusion, and claimed HAZE is a gift from Gods to help humanity evolving to greater beings. As such idea spread further into other White Zones, a mystic religious quasi-nation collective only known as Eclipse Cult is formed, with mission to spread The White Graces of the Gods to the entire world, and erase those who rejects it.

Unconventional warfare is the specialty of the Eclipse Cult - pushing warfare beyond mortal, moral and logical limits. Cult forces are bizarre compared to any other military, but deadly if used properly. Cult weapons, from mutants to biochemical weapons, are able to apply various form of powerful negative status effects on enemies, which allows the ordinary militants to finish them off with ease.

I have actually made some conceptual designs on architecture of different factions in form of loading screen wallpapers

Continental Alliance


Northland Frontier


Trinity Entente


Horizon League

Begin posting current sprites in batches:

second batch, CA stuff.

And here's some stuff for NF, part 1.

Part 2.

And I have a rough idea for adding some battlefield salvaging mechanics.

Destroyed vehicles usually leave a non-blocking scrap behind (in the same way as how corpses are spawned in AoF). These scraps can be destroyed by simply have a unit move onto it, or by any form of splash damage.
Recovery vehicles of all factions can reclaim scraps and convert them into salvage-packed trucks (with cooldown), and these salvage trucks can be consumed by production buildings and TCs for boosting production by one turn.

Some factions introduces some variations in salvage drops and salvage usages.

Continental Alliance (CA) vehicles with cost >3 turns leaves a special variant of salvage-able object, which contains data core of the destroyed vehicles. While recovery vehicles of all factions can still pack them into salvage trucks, CA's own version of recovery vehicle can perform a special action on these vehicles, retrieving the data core and load it onto a truck. The data core truck can consume itself to permanently boost another friendly CA vehicle (and the effect is stackable up to 3 times).

Some Northland Frontier (NF) tanks leaves neutral retrievable husk obstacle corresponding to the original unit, instead of directly turning into scraps. NF's recovery vehicle can perform action on these husks once every few turns, converting them back into original unit at functioning conditions - As long as these husks aren't destroyed, they are very fragile. Destroying these damaged husks would turn them into scraps, which can be a way to deny NF players from retrieving their destroyed tanks.

unit and building images look nice!

(remark: building images (normal, aoccupied) no longer accepted in one image, need to be separate images, occupied one is called *_occ.png)

Stratego (dev) wrote: ↑Wed Jan 18, 2023 6:47 am (remark: building images (normal, aoccupied) no longer accepted in one image, need to be separate images, occupied one is called *_occ.png)

Understood, though for representation purpose I still prefer to have two versions in the same image.

Some new sprite progress.

First of all, tech buildings! And some tech icons: Plus some neutral garrison-able buildings.

I'm reviewing designs of unit sprites, and trying to make improvements or introduce newer designs to them.
These three are what I've done just in last few days.

Rest of the infantry sprite rework