Pohsuan Wu

In the past few days, I have been working on sorting out the functional needs for the RTS Rogue-like game. We eventually decided to make a path picking system like FTL or Slay the Spire. It is an important system for balancing strategic planning with the replayable chaos that makes roguelikes fun.

I wanted players to navigate through a branching network of nodes, each representing a mission. The player chooses a path through this map, picking missions that align with their resources, army composition, or long-term strategy. Unlike card battlers, RTS missions are longer and more intense — so every node needed to matter.

To capture this, I aimed for a tiered layout with a clear top-down flow. Each tier has several nodes, and each node can connect to one or multiple nodes in the next tier. This structure balances randomness with control: the player is never fully at the mercy of RNG, but still gets surprises and tactical choices.

The system allow to set rules–for example, the first and the last tier will only have 1 node since they are the beginning and the ending. We also give each node count its own probabilities so we can shape the map based on other settings. Another rule we added is not allowing one node tier to be followed by another one node tier, since it practically removes the point of having a selection map like this. To make the map dynamic and versatile, all the parameters are adjustable, from the number of tiers to min/max number of nodes allowed.

Here’s how the system works:

• Fixed number of tiers: For example, 6 rows of nodes.
• Each tier has 2-4 nodes: Chosen randomly within a max width.
• Connections are constrained: Each node connects only to nodes in the next tier, ideally 1-3 downstream connections.
• Guaranteed reachability: Every node must be reachable from the start, and all path must always lead to the final node.

This is just a working prototype. The next step is to create the scene that will connect to/be connected from this path-picking map.