Hi

Im doing a turnbased strategy game like (the management part of) total war. It's near sci-fi post apoc, you control an empire in ww3. The map is risk-like (each managemable "city" is a region of land such as "Iberian peninsula" or "west coast US").

There is 4 turns to a year (but i might change that to 2) so each turn is 3 months. Realistic army movement in the modern age wouold mean you can pretty much go anywhere on the globe in 3 months. I dont want that. I want it to take time (turns) to manouver to the other side of your empire, and have fronts and guarded territory behind the front.

But how breaking to immersion is it to have armies move only let's say a third of the US width per turn (which would be the typical distance of a single region)? Or any other comment on this issue?

If the gameplay needs the units to be slow, try to change the turns per year.

If the turns can't be changed but you still want the units to be that slow, find an in-lore reason for that.

"Your units are progressing very slowly due to minefields being all over the place"

"Air transports would be gunned down in an instant which means armies only travel by ground (even air units get transported on trucks until the battle)"

"Fuel is rare and needs to be conserved as much as possible which means only few vehicles are used for transport which makes movement of bigger armies very slow"

With this you can have small units that can operate all over the globe in strike teams while armies only move at a very slow pace.

If you don't want any units to move fast:

"Enemy drones are constantly scanning for single units they can hunt which makes movement ins small teams very dangerous"