There’s a joke among strategy game enthusiasts that they love playing ‘map games,’ intricate strategy titles such as Hearts of Iron or Stellaris that command hundreds of hours of playtime and require attention to granular details. For Masterplan Tycoon dev Bureau Bravin, that kind of buy-in is hard to justify.
“I'm in the older generation of gamers,” Bravin said. “I don't want to spend 40 hours playing a game, then another 200 hours doing all the side quests.” Masterplan Tycoon is a different type of strategy game, which focuses solely on maximizing the efficiency of supply chains and is designed to be digestible and forgiving to the player. Game ZXC sat down with Bravin to talk about how that goal sets his title apart from the rest of the genre.
As an Older Gamer, Bravin Sees the Value in Simpler Strategy
Bravin has always been into strategy games, he said. “When I was a kid, I was all about Theme Hospital, The Settlers 2, and Warcraft 2.” As he got older, though, his level of patience for the genre — and his free time to play strategy games — dwindled.
It’s harder for the older generation of gamers to understand all the complexities of expansive strategy titles, he said. Even if simply understanding the mechanics of a strategy game wasn’t an obstacle, though, the time commitment would be. “Taking a break and coming back to the game six months later is torture.” The other issue that Bravin noted with traditional strategy games is replayability. Some titles just have far too much content, he said.
“I can't say I've ever been able to play a single modern strategy game to the end.”
Bravin related his experience playing the sci-fi grand strategy title Anno 1800. He was only able to finish the main campaign — by the time, he got to the game’s expansive network of side quests, he was burnt out. Some modern strategy titles are also too punishing to players, Bravin said. “Most resource games are pretty hardcore, where the most important thing is how detailed the production chain is broken down into components.”
All of these problems affect the ability of a larger population of gamers to enjoy a strategy title. When it came to Masterplan Tycoon, Bravin said, he wanted to achieve something different and to create a more universal experience.
Masterplan Tycoon is the ‘Ascetic Tourist’ of Strategy Games
Masterplan Tycoon takes the spirit of the strategy games Bravin loved as a kid and attempts to distill them down for a more casual player, he said. “I wanted to make a game with a similar experience, just without all the extra stuff.”
The game, a minimalist logistics simulator that tasks players with creating efficient supply chains connecting resources to production lines and vice versa, seems to have a lot of the trappings of traditional ‘map games.’ But, Bravin engineered a few differences to make the title more accessible.
One of the biggest differences between Masterplan Tycoon and other games in the strategy genre is that it won’t punish players for making bad decisions by ruining their experience. The game “doesn’t even have a clear definition of losing,” Bravin said. Players won’t run out of resources, and there aren’t any in-game enemies to destroy their cities and production notes. The only challenge for the player is “time,” Bravin said. “If the supply chains don’t work efficiently enough, the system starts slipping, and it’s your job to right the ship.”
Masterplan Tycoon is also a bit more bite-sized when compared to some of the larger strategy games out there. “Our game is not that huge, but we'll definitely be releasing some content updates to give people the chance to play more, too,” Bravin said. Despite that, Bravin’s goal with Masterplan Tycoon is not to provide as much content as possible to the player. Instead, the aim is to give players a good strategy experience without leaning too much into features that make those kinds of games inaccessible, he said.
"Masterplan Tycoon is more like an ascetic tourist, not a trucker who spends his whole life on the road."
At the same time, Bravin said that he had to strike a balance between simplicity and more traditional strategy mechanics. Lean too much into minimalism and the game “would've turned into a puzzle like Mini Metro,” he said. “I wanted to do something in the middle, and in my opinion, we succeeded.”
Masterplan Tycoon will release on March 9 for PC.