Why are we writing our own grand strategy engine?

At the end of September, one Discord ban was all Turkish strategy players could talk about. On Paradox Interactive's official Hearts of Iron IV server, a player who used a photo of Atatürk as their profile picture was banned. According to reports, they were told the ban would be lifted if they changed the photo; a moderator describing Atatürk as "controversial" made the reaction much bigger. Calls for a boycott followed, along with negative reviews of Paradox games.

Paradox's Hearts of Iron game director later issued a statement. He acknowledged that the server had a rule on photos of real people, that it had been applied inconsistently, and that it had created the impression the company was taking a position on Atatürk; he said the rule and the bans would be reviewed. A stricter rule on profile pictures of historical figures was announced afterwards.

This post is not meant to reignite that argument. The incident reminded us of something we have known for years but never said out loud.

We play the game, someone else sets the rules#

Grand strategy games have a large and passionate player base in Turkey. We have spent countless hours playing the Ottomans, the Seljuks and the War of Independence in these games; we wrote mods, fixed maps, translated text. But the game, the server where the community gathers and the decision about what counts as "controversial" all belong to someone else.

We do not need to look for bad intent. A moderation rule written in Stockholm can put the founder of a nation in the same box as any other political leader, because whoever wrote it does not read our history the way we do. The problem is not one moderator. The problem is having no say at all in the kind of games where our own history is told.

Why an engine first, not a game?#

The heavy part of a strategy game is invisible on screen. Underneath runs a simulation in which hundreds of countries, thousands of provinces and millions of population units are recalculated every day. Building that simulation from scratch takes years; that is why very few studios make this genre, and each of them uses its own closed engine.

So we started with the engine, not the game. It is called MKA Engine: a grand strategy simulation engine written in Rust and not tied to any single game. It has three principles:

• Deterministic: The same start and the same commands produce the exact same game, bit for bit, on every machine. In multiplayer only player commands travel between machines; everyone computes the same world themselves.
• Game-agnostic: The engine does not say "how war is declared"; it only makes sure such things are computed quickly and correctly. Rules, numbers and content belong to the game.
• Moddable: The game itself is a mod. A mod can change content, add new systems or switch existing ones off.

Who tells the history?#

An engine that is independent of any game is more than a technical choice for us. How a game portrays Atatürk, the War of Independence or the Ottomans is the decision of whoever makes that game. With our own engine, we do not have to leave that decision to someone else's community rules. Other teams can tell their own history from their own point of view on the same engine.

We are doing this to open a door, not to close one. Many players will keep playing Paradox games, and we have learned a lot from them too. But if an ambitious game in this genre is going to come out of Turkey, the foundation has to be in our own hands.

Where are we now?#

MKA Engine is in development; there is no playable game or released version yet. We are working on the engine core, multiplayer infrastructure, save system and mod interface; the game built on top of it will come as a separate project. As we progress, we will write here about what we built and why.

A photo of Atatürk being treated as a "rule violation" on a server was a small incident. The question it reminded us of is not small: who writes the rules of the worlds we play in? We decided to write some of them ourselves.