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I love Traveller's Pocket Empires and Warhammer 40K Rogue Trader. They're among my all-time favourite pen-and-paper RPGs, and among the main inspirations for Uncharted Sectors.

I love their empire/colony management mechanics, but even more, I love the freedom they offer! You want to build a city made of wooden pyramids on top of a mountain and inhabited by religious fanatics? Go ahead. You want to terraform a sterile rock just to prove you can? That becomes a whole campaign, but you can try. Hand in hand with the GM, you'll write that story, and it'll be fun.

Very few computer games capture that feeling. The only ones I know (and love with all my heart) are Dwarf Fortress and RimWorld. They let you set almost any goals and make them fun to pursue until the end (usually losing your colony to some catastrophic failure or crazy chain of events).

But I also love the power fantasy of ruling an empire. I want stories about the destiny of millions. I want to explore the unknown, discover wonderful planets in dangerous places and go all-in on them. That's why I love Rogue Trader and Pocket Empires. That's why I love Europa Universalis, Victoria, Stellaris, Civilization. And that's what Uncharted Sectors is about: the crazy sandbox where you write your own story and losing is fun, but at empire scale.

So how to achieve that? The core of Uncharted Sectors is layered, interacting systems. Planets are divided into territories, regions, and provinces. Buildings depend on the culture that builds them and on the materials your construction workers use. You choose the inputs, the workers, and the outputs. Those wooden pyramids in mountainous terrain? You get them by combining culture, materials, and geography in a specific way.

Want a spa-resort province where people eat dolphin cakes? The systems will let you try. You build fisheries that catch the local weird dolphins. You build restaurants that turn them into delicious prepared meals. You ensure these meals sell at a low price. People flock to them and grow to love them for the taste. Your tourist trap quietly turns innocent vacationers into dolphin-cake addicts.

But responsive systems alone aren't enough. The real trick is making the computer notice what you care about and weave plot around it. The storyteller watches for signs of emotional investment. Are you babysitting a specific province? Renaming things? Moving populations? Pushing a particular culture? Then you care about that place. It becomes narratively important, dramatically charged. Story beats begin to revolve around it: you risk losing it, it changes, you fight to keep it or to improve it. That is what a good GM does as well: build plot around what the players are emotionally invested in.

Drama emerges from many sources. Procedurally generated sectors create different starting situations: dangerous FTL making worlds isolated, nearby alien empires, neighbors claiming your lands. Internally, economic management becomes conflict: crop blights, new drugs your pops crave, luxury goods they grow accustomed to that suddenly disappear, migrants whose culture clashes with yours. The systems generate problems; the storyteller notices which hit what you've invested in.

Then there's exploration and wonder. The generator creates genuinely strange situations, with life that has odd quirks. Maybe photosynthesis doesn't work so creatures evolved drum-like organs to harvest seismic energy; maybe the dimensional veil is thin and flora feeds on that energy from outer worlds. You discover giant bulls with addictive meat, potent poisonous plants. These aren't just flavor text. You can build ranch-based economies, craft drugs using those plants as inputs with unique modifiers, use bulls as mine labor. Weirdness becomes raw material for creativity.

But there is a fundamental difference: in tabletop, the GM experiences and co-authors the story. In Uncharted Sectors, the storyteller AI is blind to the story. It just pulls levers based on what it observes. The story exists only in your head. And that's good! Because it means the story is always, genuinely, yours.

You care because your empire is called Númenor. You care because you chose the blue planet instead of the green one, because you decided you wanted that dolphin-cake spa resort. Every naming choice, every aesthetic decision, every weird economic specialisation is an act of authorship. The systems do not create your story; they create the conditions for you to author your own.

Just like in Dwarf Fortress, where different players see that volcano tile differently: some want to build something beautiful surrounded by lava, others want industrial power, others have a crazy goblin-melting idea. The sandbox doesn't care which story you tell. It just makes sure your story has weight.

I’ve always had a soft spot for Paradox’s Victoria series. Over the last decade I’ve sunk an embarrassing number of hours into turning minor powers into industrial giants, lifting those tiny (and now nicely animated) people into better lives, rushing for Johore because of course you rush for Johore, and generally seeing how far I could bend the XIXth century. As you probably guessed, those games are a major inspiration for Uncharted Sectors.

What Victoria does exceptionally well is make the economy feel alive. You build things that actually feed other things, pops respond to what you produce, standards of living climb, and you get that very satisfying “the graph is going up because I made good choices” moment. It’s a great loop because the parts of society depend on one another, and the game actually shows you that.

But there’s a built-in limitation to that formula. In most runs you gravitate toward the same path: secure iron, coal, wood, gold, rubber, oil; pump out steel and tools; grab the good states; get more people; research the obvious techs; and eventually let the AI do the heavy industrial lifting because pops can do it faster than you. Whether you start as a European power or something smaller, you end up playing variations of the same industrialization story.

That big limitation is, in my opinion, unavoidable. It’s baked into the pitch itself. You’re playing an industrializing nation during the industrialization era in a historical game. The whole game engine revolves around that, as it should. There is no way to make “the march of progress” not railroaded (pun very much intended). You can get to automobiles first, you can be richer than the others, you can optimize better, but you’re still playing off the same screenplay.

A science-fiction setting breaks those constraints. We can keep the part that’s fun (inputs becoming outputs, populations reacting, standards of living changing) but we’re not required to have only one “correct” way to power cities, feed people, move goods, or entertain a growing population. Who’s to say that, in your sector, people will prefer canned food over homegrown vegetables? You can build your economy as you like it; you can influence your people to live the way you’d like.

That’s one of the key directions for Uncharted Sectors' economic system: keep the Victoria feeling of a society that actually breathes when you touch the economy, but put it in a place where progress isn’t one staircase everybody climbs at the same speed. The graph will still go up, but now you get to decide what the graph is about.

Hello everyone!

I'm working on a sci-fi grand strategy game named Uncharted Sectors and I'm trying to get feedback on the capsule art.

A good capsule art should convey the game's genre in addition to, of course, make people want to click on it. My problem is that "grand strategy" doesn't have clear visual markers (like a hammer for crafting games for example) apart from having 1-5 bossy-looking people and a somewhat elegant title. So I have some trouble finding the sweet spot.

Could I ask you which one you feel conveys "grand strategy" the most? On which you'd be more likely to click on seeing it on Steam or another platform? Which one do you prefer? If you have improvement ideas, or other feedback?

Hello everyone!

I'm working on a sci-fi grand strategy game named Uncharted Sectors and I'm trying to get feedback on the capsule art.

A good capsule art should convey the game's genre in addition to, of course, make people want to click on it. My problem is that "grand strategy" doesn't have clear visual markers (like a hammer for crafting games for example) apart from having 1-5 bossy-looking people and a somewhat elegant title. So I have some trouble finding the sweet spot.

Could I ask you which one you feel conveys "grand strategy" the most? On which you'd be more likely to click on seeing it on Steam or another platform? Which one do you prefer? If you have improvement ideas, or other feedback?

Hello everyone!

I'm working on a sci-fi grand strategy game named Uncharted Sectors and I'm trying to get feedback on the capsule art.

A good capsule art should convey the game's genre in addition to, of course, make people want to click on it. My problem is that "grand strategy" doesn't have clear visual markers (like a hammer for crafting games for example) apart from having 1-5 bossy-looking people and a somewhat elegant title. So I have some trouble finding the sweet spot.

Could I ask you which one you feel conveys "grand strategy" the most? On which you'd be more likely to click on seeing it on Steam or another platform? Which one do you prefer? If you have improvement ideas, or other feedback?

And it's loads of fun!

I'm playing it with my son nowadays, we love it :) it's not very deep but it's a nice lighthearted strategy game.

Head out to https://manicminers.baraklava.com/ to check it out!