Pre-alpha · In active development
Chart a new world. Build an empire. Answer the Crown.
A colonial grand-strategy simulation. You start with one caravel and an empty map. Chart the coast, found colonies, and build the trade that keeps them alive while rival powers and pirates try to take it off you. Every world is generated fresh.
The whole age-of-sail fantasy in one game
You sail west with one ship and no chart. What's out there is yours to find: coastline under fog, islands nobody has named, and the resources that will decide where your first colony goes.
That colony becomes a town and eventually a capital. Feeding it takes production chains, and those take trade, which puts your ships on long routes and gives other people a reason to come looking for them. The Crown wants its tribute. Eight rival powers want your ports. Pirates just want the cargo. When it finally comes to a fight at sea, you can let it auto-resolve or take the helm yourself.
It owes a great deal to Anno’s production chains, to Europa Universalis’ politics, and to the exploration fantasy of Colonization. The hope is to end up somewhere in that lineage: simulation depth, without war-game complexity.
What you'll do
Every new game builds its world from scratch: archipelagos, mountain ranges, 21 biomes, and resources nobody knows about until a ship goes and looks. Worlds run from a seed, so a good one can be replayed or handed to someone else.
Pick a stretch of coast and start building. Colonies climb through settlement tiers as they grow, from frontier outpost to viceregal capital, filling out with housing, industry, services and defences while townspeople walk the streets between them. Your own rank climbs separately, Explorer up to Viceroy, and each step raises how many colonies you're allowed to found at all, so expansion has to be worked towards rather than just afforded.
Goods run through four tiers, raw material up to finished luxury. What keeps the whole thing moving is demand. Townspeople buy off the local market, so an oversupplied port works through its glut over time and the price climbs back. Sell into somebody else's shortage and you make money. Meanwhile the colony eats, burns fuel through the winter and pays upkeep on its buildings. Let it starve or sit idle and unrest builds, until people break into the warehouse and help themselves.
Lay out a route by clicking ports on the map, decide what gets loaded where, and the ship takes it from there. One window manages every route you're running, with profit graphs and templates you can reuse on another hull. The ships themselves follow the coast the way real ones did, along precomputed sea lanes modelled on the Portuguese roteiros. Nothing teleports and nothing sails through an island.
Back home, the Crown wants its share. Every so often a demand arrives: gold, a quota of goods, or one of your warships on loan for a season. Pay it and your standing improves. Refuse and it falls. Refuse often enough and a punitive expedition appears off your coast. That isn't a loss screen, but it does change the game you thought you were playing. The Crown doesn't ask. How will you answer?
Fleets that meet at sea can settle it on their own, or you can drop into the arena and fight it out. Choose your shot: round for the hull, chain for rigging, bar for masts and rudder, grape for the crew, hot shot to set the whole thing alight. Aim at what you want to break. Trim sail, mind your firing arcs, and come alongside to board if you'd rather take a ship than sink it. There's a tactical pause for when you need to think, and weather, storms and drifting wreckage while you do.
And beyond
Eight nations, each paired with a temperament: merchant, military, exploratory, religious. They run their own economies, cut their own deals and pick their own fights. A Dutch merchant plays nothing like a Spanish admiral.
Leave them be and lone raiders turn into fortified havens that send out hunting fleets. It shows up in your event log as it happens, so you get the chance to deal with it while it's still small.
The plan is your own world for up to eight players, with co-op teams sharing a faction, competitive play, spectators, chat, LAN discovery and a dedicated server. Most of that is built. The netcode still desynchronises though, so multiplayer stays switched off in playable builds until it holds together. See the feature status.
Five presets, from Standard down to Zen, plus a custom grid if you want to be specific. They switch off the systems that push back: pirates, Crown demands, unrest, bankruptcy. Turn everything off and you have a builder. Leave it all on and it's a considerably harder game.
Hand-built scenarios with objectives, branching story cards and win conditions, starting with a Roanoke mystery. The tools that made them are developer tooling for now, but they're the groundwork for player-made scenarios later on.
An in-game tutorial walks you through the first hours with on-screen prompts, for anyone who hasn't played this sort of thing before. Scalable UI and text, colourblind palettes, a dyslexia-friendly font and reduced motion are all in the options.
Media
Everything here is pre-alpha and still changing.
The world
A fictional 16th century, drawn from the period rather than reconstructing it. Each rival power gets a nationality and a temperament, and names its colonies and ships in its own language.
Explorer, Alcalde, Corregidor, Adelantado, Governor, Captain General, Viceroy. Each one is a politics research project, and each raises how many colonies you may hold.
Raw material, ware, product, luxury. Iron ore to pig iron to tools is a short chain. Cotton to linen to textile to garments is not. 100+ goods, 119 buildings.
Bankruptcy, mutiny, a Crown expedition, a declaration of war. You decide per event whether the game pauses, drops to 1×, or carries on. Nothing important happens while you're looking somewhere else.
Development
Terra Nova is pre-alpha, built independently in Austria and worked on most days. It's playable, and the core systems are in: exploration, colonies, the economy, trade, politics, rivals, pirates, naval and land combat, scenarios, a tutorial. What's left is polish, an art pass, balance, content, and getting multiplayer stable enough to turn back on. The feature status below spells out where each part actually stands.
It's a lot of game for an operation this size. Funding would put real artists on the placeholder art and more hands on everything else, which mostly means getting there sooner. Without it the work carries on regardless, just slower. It gets finished either way, and the aim doesn't change: to earn a place alongside the games that inspired it.
Demo & vertical-slice polish, the art pass, economy balancing, finishing the interactive tutorial.
Steam page & wishlists, more scenarios, audio polish, community channels.
No dates. You'll hear one when it's real and not before.
Where things stand
Not everything described above is finished. Here's what works today, what's playable but clearly unfinished, and what isn't there yet. Nothing on this page should read as a promise the build can't keep.
Seeded world generation, biomes, fog of war.
Founding, building, settlement tiers, colonial ranks.
Full chains and the demand-side market. Balance figures are provisional and still moving.
Automated multi-stop routes, map planning, overview and templates.
All in and running, though the rival AI still makes the occasional strange call and difficulty balance is ongoing.
~127 projects across navigation, administration, engineering, agriculture, military and politics.
Colony defence and field battles resolve through a shared, round-based engine.
JSON overrides for buildings, units, research and resources, with a mods screen in the menu.
The 3D arena plays and the tactical layer is done. The visuals are still being worked on and change between builds.
Several acts are playable; the full run-through isn't finished yet.
Some building and unit art is placeholder, and the audio mix isn't balanced. The art pass is the current focus.
Works, but saves from older versions can fail to load after an update while the game is in pre-alpha.
Those two are complete; others are partial and fall back to English.
Largely built. Lobby, teams, spectators, chat and a dedicated server all exist, but the netcode still drifts out of sync, so it's switched off in playable builds until that's sorted. It's on the roadmap, not in your hands today.
The engine and its authoring tools exist and drive the built-in scenarios, but they're developer tooling at this stage rather than a supported editor.
Planned, alongside a Steam release. Data mods work today via the mods folder.
This list gets updated as things land. If something here has gone stale, or you hit a rough edge that isn't on it, the Discord is the quickest way to tell me.
Streamers & content creators
If you stream or make videos about strategy games, you're welcome to this one early. Coverage from people who actually like the genre is worth more to a project this size than anything I could buy. Just ask.
Come aboard
The Discord is where this gets built in the open. Come and watch, or tell me what you make of the build. The Steam page isn't up yet.
Questions
Not yet. The game is pre-alpha, and any date I named today would be a guess dressed up as a promise. You'll hear one once it's real.
PC: Windows, macOS and Linux.
Not yet. Most of it is built: the lobby, teams of up to four sharing a faction, spectators, chat, LAN discovery, even a headless dedicated server. The trouble is the netcode still drifts out of sync, so it's switched off in playable builds rather than shipped broken. It goes back on when it holds together. For now the game is single-player.
Yes, and right now that's the whole game: single-player against AI opponents, or a sandbox with the pressure systems switched off.
Yes. Drop JSON files into the mods folder to override buildings, units, research and resources. Steam Workshop support is planned for later.
No. It's a fictional 16th century with historically flavoured nations, so the period shapes it without pinning it down. You won't find real dates or real people.
An independent developer in Austria. It's a lean operation at the moment, and no publisher is attached yet. That's a door I'd like to see opened, not one I'm holding shut. The right partner would put real artists on the placeholder work and get a better version of this in front of far more people. Publisher, funding or neither, the game gets finished; those things decide how good it ends up and how soon.
Terra Nova is being built with limited resources. To turn the vision into a playable prototype, I use AI tools in supporting roles — coding assistance, debugging, research, and documentation. Some of the images and the spoken narration in the current build are AI-generated placeholders.
That extends to marketing material. This website was built with AI assistance: the layout, the code and the placeholder graphics were put together from the game's own design documents, then directed and reviewed by me. The placeholders come out as real screenshots and human-made art become available.
My stance is simple: AI is a tool I use to prototype my vision — it must not replace human jobs in the games industry. Wherever possible, the art in this game (images, 3D models, music, sound effects, and voice) is created by me or licensed from human artists and performers, as credited in-game. Every AI-generated placeholder — art and narration alike — is temporary and will be re-created by a human as soon as the project can afford it. Getting human artists on board isn't an afterthought. It's the first thing any funding gets spent on.
About the game itself: no generative AI runs inside it. It creates nothing with AI while you play and sends none of your data to any AI service — all AI use is confined to development, and directed and reviewed by me. The rival powers, pirates, and marauders you face are classic rule-based game AI, not generative AI.
If you have thoughts or concerns about this, I'd genuinely like to hear them: support@fehlfunktion.com
Press, business & partnerships
Terra Nova — Age of Discovery is a colonial grand-strategy simulation in independent development in Austria. Set in a fictional 16th-century world, it draws inspiration from the production-chain depth of Anno and the political simulation of Europa Universalis, wrapped in a procedurally generated New World explored one fogged coastline at a time. Players found and grow colonies, build trade empires across a living market economy, navigate a demanding royal Crown and rival colonial powers, and command tactical 3D sea battles against AI opponents. Eight-player multiplayer with dedicated servers is built and planned, but is disabled in current builds while its netcode is finished.
Press and creators can have a build to try, plus logos, screenshots or particular footage on request. A downloadable press kit is being put together; until it exists, mail press@fehlfunktion.com and say roughly what you need.
Publishing and partnership enquiries reach the same address. No publisher is attached at present and I'm open to the conversation: the right partner puts real artists on the placeholder work and gets a better version of this in front of more people. A playable build, a detailed breakdown of the systems and the full development history are all available to anyone giving it serious thought.
