I need help, IDEA help.

I've been building a game for a couple of hours a day for the last two weeks and I need some ideas that might make it more fun.

So far you have a map of European Continent, and there are two ideologies that both want to dominate the whole of Europe.

At the start each ideology has one Country, and they spread to the surrounding neutral countries and eventually clash when the two ideologies are holding two countries that border each other.

Its in real time, i could make it turn based i suppose. ive never played turn based games though :(

MAIN PROBLEM:

its not fun to play at all.

Any ideas about mini games?

what kind of pickups could the two main ideologies collect at neutral countries they choose to dominate that would make taking over neutral countries fun while also building up an arsenal to fight the opposing ideology?

Anything would be helpful, thanks

its not fun to play at all.

Oh the number of time I've made a game and had this realization. :D

I should add that people, including myself, really like Upgrading. for some games their whole appeal is the upgrading system. Take the fallout series. every fallout game I've ever played I've stopped playing about an hour after I've achieved the last upgrade I desired, but that was enough for me to invest hours of playtime. Just break up the game into many components that can all be upgraded individually. Then the player can fantasies about how much easier they will be able to crush their enemies, or convert neutral states with the various upgrades/ technologies they will obtain.

@ Tom,
Thanks for the ideas. Very contemporary ;)

I had thought about the "Population Unity" being an integral part of something, and adding the ability to sow fake news to undermine Unity, or Viral Tweets to build unity is a really nice, dare i say it "Easy" way of adding
something interesting to the game.

added to the list :)

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@ Awoken,
As you can probably tell from the screen shot, im no artist :)
I really would love to add upgrades, and almost certainly will in some manner, but it will take some working around the fact I dont have the skill to make the art for 10 different versions of each up-gradable.

I know there are a lot of players who get excited about a simple stat boost of "0.1"dp on their weapons, maybe I can get away with just adding stats without art lol :)

added to my list :)

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@ Unduli,
Never heard of "North & South"
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until you mentioned it, I see it on GooglePlay, the screen shots look nice.

thanks, ill download and take a look :)

First of all, I should say that without playing there's not much anyone can say.

Anyway. There are so many different directions you could take this to make it "more fun". Fun is relative, so I'd start by defining exactly what you mean by that. Maybe you want to make this a brainy game where fun comes from feeling like you overcame a difficult puzzle (so there's some fakery going on, as you can't overwhelm the player). In that case I'd suggest going turn based and working on the rules of the game. But maybe you want something with a little more adrenaline. In that case, maybe you need more gameplay layers to keep the player busier on more than one level. So he's managing events happening on the map level at the same time managing some mini game that happens every time you invade a country or something like that. Maybe there are more levels, "higher" than the map (I hope you know what I mean by that) like an upgrade system.