r/strategy

I've been building a browser MMO alone for the past year. Opening alpha soon, looking for 150 people to break it.

It's a persistent strategy game that runs in your browser. You join a shared galaxy with real opponents, build a nexus, and compete until someone wins. When a galaxy ends there's a final leaderboard, a winning faction, and it's done. Then a new one starts. Your history carries over, the galaxy doesn't.

The core loop: economy ticks while you sleep, three resources, eight buildings, scaling costs. You train troops (twelve types, everything from cheap fast units to slow heavy platforms that take two hours). Travel times on the map are real so timing actually matters. You scout before you commit. You raid to steal resources. You conquer by sending an Overseer unit with an escort, winning the fight while it survives, and repeating until enemy control hits zero. Then the nexus is yours.

There's an espionage layer too. Embed operatives inside enemy nexuses for live intel, or burn them on sabotage runs against build queues and stockpiles. A well-leveled Shield Grid exposes enemy spies. It's not decorative.

Factions can declare war, sign NAPs, trade agreements, vassalage. World events fire on the live map and everyone races to respond. Derelict ships with unguarded resource depots, production storms, rogue AI cores that start raiding nearby nexuses on their own.

No pay-to-win. No energy bars. Runs in the browser, installs as a PWA.

I'm opening 150 alpha slots. Founders get a permanent badge, a hall of fame entry, naming rights if their faction wins the galaxy, and a referral system where you earn something real when people you invite stick around.

vexara.world

Ask me anything. I wrote every line of it so I can actually answer.

Hi everyone,

I’m currently interviewing for a Content Planner role at a large international agency network, and I’d love to hear some real-life perspectives from people who’ve worked in similar positions.

The role description mainly talks about full-funnel content planning, structuring content ecosystems across channels and journey stages, and aligning content with brand, media, and campaign objectives - no production!

My background is more in brand/social strategy and integrated communication planning, so while a lot of the thinking feels familiar, I haven’t officially worked under the title “Content Planner” before.

What does a typical day/week actually look like in this kind of role?
What tends to take up most of your time in practice?
And what skills turned out to be the most important day-to-day?

Thank you for the answers!

It’s a persistent galaxy game. Shared world, real coordinates, real travel times. You build a nexus, expand your economy, train troops, scout neighbors, raid them, or get raided. Every player is in the same galaxy and the map doesn’t reset.
No pay-to-win. No premium currency. Just you figuring out whether your neighbor is a future ally or a future problem.
There are 12 troop types with different roles, 8 buildings per nexus, and three resources keeping everything running. Fights are resolved by composition, not by whoever spent more. You can capture enemy nexuses by grinding their control down with an Overseer unit, which I like a lot as a mechanic.
It runs in the browser and works as a PWA so you can check in from your phone. The economy ticks 24/7, you queue builds before bed, and plan strikes around real travel times. Very much a game you can play alongside your life rather than one that demands you sit in front of it.
Alpha is open now. 150 spots total, 12 taken so far. If this sounds like your kind of game, link in the comments.
Happy to answer anything about the design or current state of it.

https://vexara.world/register

EDIT: Added register URL

I’ll start.

Recently I heard:
“We should focus less on digital and AI visibility and go back to offline sales.”

I been shocked to hear that today brand still believe u can survive by not nurturing your brand online.

What’s the wildest strategy take you’ve heard internally lately?

Hi,

Something I noticed while looking at Google Maps for something unrelated.

Search CVS in any mid-size American city, then search Walgreens. Zoom into the main commercial corridors and look at where both sets of pins land.

They're at the same intersections. Not in the same general area. Directly across the street from each other, corner to corner, sometimes for miles.

I looked at a few different cities to see if it was local. It's not. The pattern holds across the country.

One way to read it from the outside: pharmacy customers probably aren't particularly brand loyal. They go to whatever is most convenient that day. So if your competitor anchors at a high-traffic intersection, finding somewhere quieter might mean you're not competing for the same customers at all.

There's obviously more going on internally than what's visible from a map. But the pattern itself is pretty hard to ignore once you've seen it.

Has anyone looked into this more formally or seen similar dynamics in other categories?

Some businesses are easy to categorize, while others have enough moving parts that investors struggle to label them early on. That can create interesting opportunities sometimes. $TROO feels like one of those mixed-model companies to me

Looking for stories from F1000-style deployments where:

• Only the chat interface + M365 Copilot–style plugins are available to end users
• No Codex / Claude Code / Antigravity / agentic dev tools
• Users can upload instructions and knowledge files but can't deploy custom apps
• User base is mostly non-technical knowledge workers
• Non-tech companies specifically — where the best engineering talent went to big tech and you're working with what's actually available in the market

Part 1: What actually works post-rollout

1. Which use cases stick vs. quietly die after the novelty wears off?

Long list of things these tools can do — extracting data from docs, comparing documents, generating PowerPoint drafts, data analysis on uploaded files, SQL/VBA/Python help for non-coders, brainstorming, drafting long docs, even building basic HTML dashboards. But "can do" ≠ "people actually do daily." What survives in your org 6+ months in?

2. How are you measuring impact at all?

Chat is notoriously hard to instrument. Self-reported time saved via surveys? License utilization / DAU / message volume? Use case inventory mapped to workflow-level estimates? Anything that actually maps to dollars on an exec readout?

3. Is chat-only honestly enough to move the needle?

Or does it feel like you're leaving meaningful value on the table because you can't put agents / coding tools in users' hands?

4. Rough ROI numbers — % time saved, $ savings, productivity uplift — what's the directional shape if you have it? Numbers finance actually signed off on, not vendor benchmarks.

Part 2: Building the AI org

5. How did you build an AI function that drives real change, without consultants?

Specifically interested in non-tech companies that pulled this off without leaning on implementation consulting engagements or some sort of FDE-style arrangements with the labs themselves. Success stories of in-house teams that actually delivered.

• How is the central AI team structured?
• Where does it sit — IT, Strategy, CDO/CAIO, a specific business unit?
• Headcount profile: engineers vs. product vs. business translators vs. change management?
• Realistic talent strategy when the best ML/AI engineers aren't joining a non-tech F1000 in the first place — are you upskilling existing tech talent? Partnering with universities? Paying outsized comp for a small senior bench?
• Who actually owns the program at exec level — IT leadership, a Chief AI Officer, a business sponsor?
• How do you avoid the failure mode where the team becomes a glorified shadow consultancy running pilots that never scale?

Rough anecdotes welcome. Especially keen on companies 2+ years into this where the honeymoon is over.

Hi everyone,

I’ve recently become interested in learning about strategy roles in business, especially areas like strategic initiatives, strategy consulting, and consultant strategist roles. My academic background is in science, but I’m considering exploring this field seriously for the future.

I would really appreciate if anyone could help me understand:

• What exactly are “strategy initiatives” in a company?
• What does a consultant strategist/strategy analyst actually do day-to-day?
• Which degrees or certifications are usually useful for entering this field?
• Is an MBA necessary, or are there other paths?
• How is the current job market for strategy consulting and corporate strategy roles?
• What skills should someone begin developing early?
• For someone from a non-business background, where would you recommend starting?

I’m trying to understand the field realistically before planning my next steps, so any advice, resources, or personal experiences would genuinely help.

Thank you so much in advance.

Hi there, im looking for ideas of research in operational excellence in service industry, would appreciate any help!

I’m experimenting with an AI-assisted strategic framework designed to generate a coherent Business Model Canvas starting from upstream business analysis. The objective is not simply filling BMC blocks independently, but maintaining consistency across the full strategic chain:

PEST → Value Chain → Porter’s Five Forces → SWOT → Business Model Canvas

Most AI-generated canvases look plausible in isolation.

The real challenge is preserving coherence between:

macro environment → industry structure → internal capabilities → positioning → operating model. Looking for feedback from people working in strategy, consulting, FP&A, product or business analysis. If you had to structure the reasoning process behind AI-generated BMCs, how would you approach it?

BMC from AI

AI Generating

Hi there! Can those of you that are Sr Brand Strats drop in your portfolios/websites below so that I can get some inspo? Also, what are some work samples you’d highly recommend having in your portfolio? Thanks!

Hi,

Look at gas stations on Google Maps in a few cities. Not the spread across town, just the pattern at specific intersections. Three or four competitors, same corner.

The obvious read is poor location strategy. Direct visual competition with stations right across the street.

But one thing worth considering: gas is mostly reactive. You wait until the gauge drops, then you look fast for something obvious. An intersection with several stations becomes a recognizable reference point over time. Drivers remember exits that way, probably more than they remember one isolated station a few miles down.

The hypothesis is that the cluster contributes to making that corner a known stop, not just divides traffic that was already going there. Hard to quantify, and probably not the whole story.

The emergent vs. intentional question is the interesting part. Station 2 likely followed station 1 because traffic was already there. At some point the corner builds its own pull, and it's not obvious how much is strategy versus compounding behavior.

Broader question: does this hold mainly for reactive, time-pressured categories, or is there something more general about when visible competition signals category presence rather than just rivalry?

LVMH reportedly exploring a sale of its stake in Fenty Beauty is a good example of how large companies think about brand portfolios differently than the public does.

A brand can be culturally dominant, profitable, and still become a candidate for restructuring or divestment if the capital can be deployed more efficiently elsewhere.

At a certain scale, celebrity brands stop being marketing stories and start being evaluated like portfolio assets.

First of all, this is my first post here, so please excuse any mistakes.

To put it briefly, how can I train myself to generate ideas that yield maximum efficiency toward my goals? For instance, let's say I come up with an idea and assign it a value of +10 points. There might have been a +20-point idea out there, but by settling for the +10-point option, I inevitably fall behind someone who found the +20-point one.

How can I identify the highest-leverage actions that will deliver maximum impact on the path to my objectives? Any advice or frameworks on this would be greatly appreciated.