Why are their neutral territories? They're being invaded by hostile Earthians. The entire planet should be on your side if you're defending them from Earth.

Hmm, that's a good point... but I don't want at all to give everything upfront to the player because of the setting. I definitely want the player to have a progression from two-regions-crappy-infantry to empire-with-awesome-tanks.
And to do this you need to conquer your neighbours.
I think I'll go with the "the're neutral because the're unhabited because colonies are new" explanation.

@Goodis: makes sense

My monitor just failed and I just disassembled it on my bed. I'm amazed that it still sometimes works as before, but I really can't figure what's wrong with it

Three days' worth of work on my latest project:

Code:

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Language                     files          blank        comment           code
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
C/C++ Header                    27            506            149           1395
C++                             14            272             49            720
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SUM:                            41            778            198           2115
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

There's already a lot of stuff in it, I'm doing a good job at keeping the LOC count down
Still no GUI tough, the source of all the bloats.

Terranoid. It's not even already used, has a nice retro ring to it, and refers somewhat to the background. I might go with this one

It goes like Hub -> Planet -> Regions, you can see each planet as a procedurally generated map made of regions, and you can have as many planets as you want.

Each planet campaign should start in a state where enemies already own a few provinces and expand from there on neutral ones, just like you.
But in fact the defender/attacker situation is worth some thought... I think this is what goals are for.
An "Attack Goal" could ask you to reclaim conquered territory, while a "defense goal" has you defending a vast friendly territory from ie- orbital drops.

As for the name yeah, you are definitely the righteous rebel.

Enemy: Earth
Alien Earth (I could like this one)
Iron Earth (by the sudden insertion of earth's robot overlords)
Metal Earth (as before)

yeh, fact is that I only designed the mechanics so far.
The story attempt something like "centuries ago Earth founded distant colonies losing any contact with them; now Earth turned evil and wants to conquer its colonies (you) back".

It's important to have colonies because it will have a central hub from which you can start different random games from scratch; each game being a different planet

So, the game is very sandbox-oriented but yeah, maybe something better will come out with some background in place

This is even harder than what I tought

Infinifracas? too silly?

This War Never Ends

Infiniwars?
Miniwars (ripoff-like but nice)
Warworlds
Miniarmies
Uprise
Planetfront
Frontlines

I'm getting a shower, it will help 

Endless Conflict is cool
But it's still very "serious"! I'm trying to think of a single-word name, not necessarily a common or existing word... Mobius is on the right track I think.
mmm

So, I'm usually quite proud of the names I come up with, but I can't really think at something for this one...

It's a sci-fi, turn based strategy game; it has Advance Wars' combat system mixed with an infinite procedural map divided in regions, each region featuring some city building that unlocks you off-map abilities in combat and local unit bonuses. And

It will have a semi-serious scifi setting but will still be a light game, being able to advance in a campaign with short and contained bursts of combat (thanks to regions and goals).
And will have colorful and pixelly graphics (I hope).

... but coming up with a decent name has proven to be an hard task, here's some:
Future Conflict
Battle Plan
War Plan

but they are just too bland an unoriginal and not at all in line with how I want the game to be.

Halp

A clone of Advance Wars that spun of in a procedural "Advance Wars meets Civilization meets Risiko" thing made of objective-driven awesome

It's needing quite a rewrite of my AW-clone codebase, but after all clones are bad

I think I'll go with a lowres and pixellated 3D look, because I need something fast for iPhones AND something neat for PCs. Attempting anything photorealistic would be crazy... or maybe plain 2D is better?

yeah but that's just correlation, not causation -- it's like saying that lines of code is proportional to the amount of funding a game has, and that adding more lines of code will get you more funding

yeah, but usually it is also a cause, as most things that reduce the amount of LOCs also reduce the risk of introducing a bug, ie - the code is well designed upfront, you're using an high level language, you're not reinventing the wheel, the code doesn't repeat, data is well separated from code, etc.
Just don't shorten by obfuscation

Just played my first home-made Descent dungeon with friends, playing as the DM. Pure game designing experience, I love that game  
I added a bunch of custom rules such as terrain height and DM's avatars.

It was a mixed success as the map was both funnier and more balanced than official maps, but being balanced and all it lasted something around 7/8 hours... too much to even play half of it.
Iteration time

That shouldn't be. What window system API are you using? WGL and GLUT can certainly resize without having to reload anything.

this.
It only needed some hacking to enforce res > 800x600 and aspect between 4/3 and 16/9.
On mac it is straightforward, on Linux I'm using SFML, but looks like it's straightforward too.

Something that is an hassle instead is hot-fullscreen-switching: OSX won't really support fullscreen, so I resorted to a really big window (after all OSX is just as fast when windowed! gotta love quartzGL) and on Linux... on Linux it still hangs on random switches
And glXContextMakeCurrent closes my app without explanations, but that's another story.

Ever heard of CUDA? OpenCL?

PhysX 2.8 didn't run with cuda, it was a driver-magic thing. And anyway if the API isn't there CUDA won't help you
Btw, you could read back things, but with some frames worth lag and not everything (ie-you got a stream of positions without being able to know which particle was which one, for what I remember). There is a reason if every single GPU-enabled game only uses this for one-shot debris offloads.
Again, IDK if this changed in 3.0. Also, consoles have a much wider bandwidth or even shared memory, so this doesn't apply there.

Kind of true, but not really.
PhysX can/does do things on the CPU, which is why one doesn't need an Nvidia card to play games that use PhysX. On systems with compliant cards it can offload some/most/all of the calculations to the GPU; However, to guarantee that the actual play experience doesn't differ from system to system most developers only use the GPU capabilities to tack on additional visual effects and make sure that the CPU can handle all of the core physics required for the game.

Well, I used PhysX 2.8 extensively and it's a rigid body physics engine like any else - and ironically it CAN'T offload any rigid body work (read: real work) to the GPU, it can only offload some kinds of one-way work (you can't read results back!).

I dunno if this changed in 3.0, but as of 2.8 PhysX was a good CPU-only engine with a crappy GPU addon tacked on... and Nvidia marketing did wonders to confuse everyone on what it could do, making everyone think that PhysX = useless eyecandy.

lol, it's kinda weird.
Still - physx is mainly used just for adding some graphical detail (breaking glass etc) so it's ussually only for the looks not for the gameplay.

btw. PhysX is nvidia's technology, so probably it's not usually used as the maing physic magic doing thingie because it doesnt work on ATI

No, PhysX is a CPU physics engine just like Havok and Bullet, with some eyecandy plugged on by Nvidia. It is used as the main physic thing much more often than for Nvidia-specific stuff, so that was actually interesting

traditional PC AAA games used to launch fullscreen at the wrong resolution, maybe with the added plus of resizing the desktop and moving all the icons.

If you don't really need the extra performance boost of the fullscreen (which anyway on modern OSes is very small) please start windowed! And make it easy to me to change the settings whenever I want.

Can someone explain to me why some people are addicted to write shortest code possible?
It is not like your program will run faster or something.

I guess it's a basic sense of elegance
"It seems that perfection is reached not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away"

Also, bugs are usually proportional to the number of LOCs, so having less code is a proven way to have less bugs.
And besides, programmers are lazy people that prefer to think thrice rather than waste the smallest amount of effort. I know because I do.

It is free *since* 1/1/2012, actually it's still free

oh, you mean loaded as in "downloaded"?
I understood that you wanted to know how many times it had been played! Indeed some games provide that info, but you have to rely on an external service like Flurry, or your own server.

As for free downloads, it's now over 1000+, mostly from China (for no apparent reason). Paid dowloads were much much less.