A couple of weeks ago I spotted The Last General in the wild, on a Youtube advert, and was intrigued by its looks and the lack of coverage in what appears to be a decent-looking title.

You might have seen it from the corner of your eye, particularly with this screenshot, where Panzer IVs meet modern-equipped soldiers. I reached out to Wakety and asked Alejandro, the sole developer, about that.

He had some interesting things to say.

Care to introduce yourself? Who are you and who is your team?

I am Alejandro Nunez, a 37-year-old software engineer from Buenos Aires, Argentina currently living in Seattle, Washington, USA. I have developed about 30 software products on the web and mobile, and now I am building my dream game The Last General full-time by myself.

How did the idea of creating a strategy game come to you? 

I have loved strategy games and military games since I was a kid so it’s something that has been on my mind for about 25 years since I started programming. At first, I didn’t have the skills or experience to build anything as complex as an RTS game, and later I didn’t have the time to do it. Now that I have both, I decided to work on an RTS game idea I had about 10 years ago, but switching from a basic 2D top-down view pixel game to a massive 3D game, while keeping the same initial vision.

What’s the concept of the game?

The Last General puts you in the boots of a general in thousands of fictional modern conflicts, commanding an immense army using high-level orders to conquer enemy territory and defend yours, while also gaining access to different city resources and key infrastructure.

When you say “Modern conflicts” what are you referring to? This day and age, or something like Cold War?

These fictional conflicts are set in this day and age, with vehicles and technology that are in service now (even if some are old designs that have been discontinued but are still being used by some countries, but no Panzer IV for example).

How’s the game going to play?

The game will mainly be played by drawing your orders on the terrain, indicating where your troops should push and from which directions, which areas to defend, and establishing logistics routes, like a general would do when discussing strategy on a map. You can still move around however you want and give specific orders to companies, squads or even individual troops or vehicles. Still, there will likely be too many to handle individually in larger conflict scenarios.

Is it going to be single-player or multiplayer focus? 

It will have both single-player and multiplayer (PvP and co-op), although single-player will probably be released first.

How is The Last General going to innovate in its genre?

The Last General will offer a new way to command your army by drawing those high-level orders to set up your strategy. Your troops and supply vehicles will automatically follow your strategy, and travel to where they are needed to execute the orders. Those features, combined with vast territories, varied city economies, power infrastructure, and a reputation system will allow you to focus on the grand strategy to win the conflict rather than telling John Doe to shoot that soldier over there. Despite being a really large-scale game, you will still be able to see the combat and destruction from up close and go on spy flyovers inside enemy territory.

What’s so different about it?

One of the differentiators of The Last General is its sheer scale. Instead of creating a few fixed maps with a few towns and fighting to control small areas, I decided to procedurally generate massive islands, some larger than the country of Malta, so you could play in a different environment every time, or save your favourites to play again. There are dozens of towns and cities scattered around each island with different characteristics that can help you achieve your objectives.

I can imagine this game playing out like a very big WARNO or Wargame, from Eugen. Is my assessment correct? And why?

A big difference between WARNO and Wargame besides the scale (both in size and troops) and map generation, is that The Last General is focused towards the general strategy setup and war economy rather than the deck building and tactical part only.

For example, in those games and other war RTS games, you select units and tell them where to go or exactly what to attack. In The Last General, you can draw attack/push arrows towards specific towns, cities or any areas on the map, with curves to go around a patch of trees or a forest or to attack from a certain angle and you don’t even need to select specific units to do that.

You can draw 4 arrows to attack city A from different angles, set up a defensive line or area around another town near the border, and two attack arrows to attack city B. Then your troops will distribute themselves to perform those attacks and defend your town as you expect. Because your attack on city A has more arrows, more troops will be part of that attack, and fewer troops will attack city B. New units will also head to the points where they are needed based on your strategic setup, and supply trucks will also follow your supply lines back and forth on their own.

That’s a lot of features! How is the AI going to handle all that in a competent and fun manner?

The Last General uses 3 layers of AI that are in development (General, Tactical and Individual). For AI enemies, the General AI takes care of deciding long-term and short-term objectives and then places high-level orders on the map, using the same arrows, zones and lines as the human player does.

The Tactical AI distributes the troops and supplies to the right places to respect those general orders, regroups or redirects them as needed, and takes care of coordinating the movements within a company and for nearby orders (synchronizing attacks, protecting vulnerable troops or support vehicles, etc).

The individual AI takes care of specific details of each soldier or vehicle and what exactly they should do based on their tactical orders, their status and the specific situation around them.

I’m curious as to how the UI will turn out, if it allows you to draw large strategic maneuvers, but also handle individual units. How are you tackling that challenge?

Regarding the UI, for the strategic part, you can view and change the arrows, lines and areas you draw whenever you move your camera higher, and you can also see your territory border and some basic city information.

When you are handling individual units and telling them where to go you won’t see big arrows, just little indicators of which units are selected and where they are going.

All the UI and indicators show or hide depending on how close you are to them so that it’s not cluttered. I am keeping the UI very simple and minimalistic to avoid an information overload.

I have to ask, from the screenshots, the maps look huge. Are they going to be playable?

The largest islands that can be generated are hundreds of square kilometres and you can play on the entire island. You can also choose between a few smaller sizes too, in case you want a shorter conflict that won’t take multiple hours to complete.

So…what’s the deal with the WW2 Panzers and modern troops?

The trailer currently available was a teaser from September 2023 with a lot of placeholder units and buildings, mostly showing the progress I had so far for the island’s generation and the game environment and scale. Since then I have completely revamped the island generation and visuals, improved performance drastically, and replaced those WW2 units with modern vehicles. I will release a new trailer next month showing all those improvements, new units and some gameplay.

What are some of the team’s inspirations and some of your favourite games?

My inspirations are a pretty diverse bag from my childhood, ranging from classics like Age of Empires 2 to massive open-world military simulators like Operation Flashpoint, combined with a love for chess’s simplicity and virtually infinite possibilities.