I am contemplating writing a game loosely-based on the original Star Trek text game.
It will have characteristics similar to board games like chess, checkers or Battleship, but incorporating a "boards within boards" feature, as you can have sectors within quadrants. Each sector or quadrant is a 10x10 grid. The Wikipedia page I've linked describes roughly the rules of the game. It will have sparse, sprite-like graphics and spare sound effects to represent various ships and battle scenarios. It will have control panels as the user Interface. It might have planets, but will not have real-time, full-screen graphics or orbital mechanics. It will probably not have any human character visualizations.
Eventually, as the game evolves, it may incorporate market-type resource management features that games like Paradise Bay have.
I've considered using the Unreal game engine, but the more I look at it, the more I think it might be overkill for what I want to do, as every example of Unreal games that I have seen involve vast landscapes and highly-detailed first-person characters, none of which I will ever need. The closest thing to that in my game might be some sort of hyperspace travel effect but that is not required.
So, given that this will essentially be a board game, would some other engine and technological stack be more suitable?
Other considerations:
Should use C#, Typescript, or some other modern, expressive programming language.
Should be cross-platform, able to be cross-compiled to iOS, Android and PC.
Should support publishing to the major gaming platforms (iOS, Android, Steam)
Should be royalty-free (Unreal qualifies, because I don't pay a royalty unless the game makes money).
