Hello Gamedev community, I recently brainstormed an idea purely theoretical (I say purely because I have never coded or scripted from scratch, I'm about as new to this whole world of programming as you can get.) I have researched for days and haven't been able to come up with results that answer my question so I'm posting here.
I want to make a game that is based, in a very general sense, off of something like the Total War series' campaign. It's a blend of a 2D world map with a simple representation of your army (Like the Hearts of Iron series for example) but instead of the combat being carried out on a grand scale, I would want it to load a representation of the battle in RTS styled (Like I said, similar to the Total War series' campaign or Rise of Nations CTW campaign) when 2 or more armies collided. As of right now step one I believe would be to design a game that displays a map with different players and different provinces. I'm not trying to overwhelm one post with a million questions (In the finished product I will have diplomacy, resources, all that jazz) but my main focus now and question is: Where would I want to start in order to make a map (Similar to a Risk map) that has different provinces that I can move pieces to take/attack or defend from other pieces? The engine I would use to carry out the RTS combat would be the GEM 3 engine. So keeping that in mind, what would my best route be to start this? A map that displayed your armies on a large scale but then loaded the battle in the GEM 3 editor.
Thanks for any help or info, I truly have looked online and in these forums for a few days and just couldn't find where to start, and most that showed up just weren't what I was looking for.