Atlas of Scales

Overview
Atlas of Scales is a 2.5D online multiplayer strategy game I am currently building. Players found an empire in a persistent, seamless hex-grid world, raise a dragon unique to their civilisation, and expand through economy, diplomacy and war. There are seven mythologically themed civilisations (Celtic, Egyptian, Norse, Incan, Roman, Mesopotamian and Greek), each tied to its own biome, units and dragons.

Design Philosophy
The game is deliberately a sandbox: there is no finish line and no final objective. Cities are permanent, alliances build shared headquarters and collective projects, and a tiered espionage system rewards playing smart rather than just playing big. Monetisation is cosmetics-only. No pay-to-win, ever. The strategy genre is at its best when the only advantage you can buy is experience.

Under the Hood
The server side is a set of Go microservices. A Gateway handles Steam authentication and JWTs, hosts the WebSocket connections, and proxies requests to a World service (procedural map generation, tiles, camps) and a Game State service (cities, research, marches, reports). Combat is a fully stateless resolver called directly by the game tick. PostgreSQL holds the persistent world and Redis carries sessions, tile caches and the push events that flow back to players over WebSocket. The client is built in Unity.

Atlas of Scales server architecture diagram


The Hard Parts
I picked a persistent multiplayer world precisely because it is hard. The map is procedurally generated and grows through continental drift as the player base expands, so world state and simulation have to hold up at whatever scale the player count demands. Battles resolve server-side from unit composition and terrain, which means they need to be deterministic, fair and fast. And the world never pauses: economy ticks, marches and espionage all keep running while players are offline.

Where It's At
Atlas of Scales is in active development. The best way to follow along is the website and social pages linked above.