Ask HN: What game do you wish existed?

Any game with modeled communication delays. For instance, you control ancient Greek armies from a central headquarters, and there are delays in sending orders and receiving information, because you need to wait for horseback riders to cross the intervening distance.

> a genre of checking off boxes and making numbers go up, along a linear way as laid out by the developers for you

Feels like a FAANG job

I would like a rather simple real-time war-game, as played from the POV of a field commander. You don't have a real-time view of the battle; all you have is signals, which are rather stylised, and a 2D map, with unit symbols on it. The map is always a bit out-of-date, except when a signal has just been received from a unit. Think something like a battalion HQ tent, with staff.

Commands are also stylised; I'm not a military person, and I don't know how to compose field orders, so there would need to be some kind of UI that allows you to construct orders visually. But in the end, the order that you send consists of text. You can't order-around squads; you can only issue orders to subordinate commanders.

You also receive orders from above. You start with a mission briefing, with objectives. But your orders can be updated mid-mission.

So this would be essentially not a video game; there's no motion video. It's a text game, with a graphical map. For added entertainment, you could have a retrospective video playback; but you wouldn't have realtime video from the frontline that you could act on.

I once had a game a bit like this; it was for military use, and I didn't really understand the format of the orders. Also, commands were issued by dragging on the map, rather than by text.

Something like: "You will advance to grid square X. You are to avoid engagement. You will report enemy positions."

I'm thinking of modern warfare, with radios/telegraphs, air power and integrated air defence, armour, and intelligence staff. But you could maybe take it back as far as the Napoleonic wars, with dispatch riders instead of telegraphs.

A full on space war sim. Think foxhole or planetside, but with additional features, like strategic aspect (stellaris, with simpler resource management and way smaller map - 10-20 star systems would be plenty) for strategy players who take role of government and fleet strategists, tactical aspects for fleet commanders (something like battlefleet gothic armada would be close enough), individual ships controlled by players or ai, from carriers and battleships to individual fighters (star citizen, x4, elite dangerous). All that with system rewarding players for following orders, option to court martial those who notoriously ignore them, and star system capture mechanics. Another layer of boarding ships, stations and planetary assaults would be great too.

I would like a game where the development company is only responsible for making the game.

No long, enforced intermissions between rounds.

Escape key works for all interstitial screens.

People can run their own servers.

Free to mod.

Basically, nearly every new game enforces how the player plays beyond just mechanizing the play. For instance, in Overwatch at the end of the game there are highlights. If you leave the highlights and queue again, you aren't actually in the queue until the highlights play out in your previous game.

Sure, each of the games breaking these rules may claim success, but this thread is about what I wish existed. It seems like a lot of games with these features used to exist (running my own server, mods/maps, etc...) and we've lost something.