Bear with me here, b/c this gets a little weird. And possible wired . And maybe even weired. But definitely not wiered, which is not even a word outside of that idiot crud-spewer Anne “Designated Hero” McAffrey’s mind.
So, anyway, I was spending my time thinking about nothing at all when somehow, someway a nifty idea for RTS games popped into my noggin. And I liked it, so I went to get me some more thinkin’ and larnin’.
The problem with most RTS’s is that they’re based on a good but aging model which descended from Dune: Battle from Arakis. In Dune, it was not unreasonable for everyone to be fightng over Spice territory, so when you sent out haulers in battle and had to defend them, this was pretty cool and gave a simple way to afford your awesome and growing war machine.
However, things start to fall down when you begin talking about other settings. I mean, let’s face it: normally, the US military doesn’t send an engineer out, construct a barracks, then defend it against the small squad of enemy troops while pumping oil from the ground until we can finally afford to upgrade our on-site factory and produce enough tanks to overwhelm the enemy. No, it doesn’t quite work like that. Gams were forced to find some reaching, really reaching, excuse for this kind of oddness, including in Starcraft, where somehow artificial space platforms had giant space crystals and weird alien gas pockets stick out of the ground. Some games went to a higher level and had more resources, like the Age of Empires series, but they were barely RTS games anyway.
To add insult to injury, this became a less and less interesting thing to manage with every passing game. Let’s face it: we were there to kick some butt, and the economy management aspect was limited. I like managing game economies, but that genre is a little thin these days and the RTS systems were never very good examples. I wanted to take an enormous force of super-soldiers and wipe out the the Harkonnen/orcs/Nod/Zerg/Soviets. And more recent games like Company of Heroes and Warhammer: Mark of Chaos or Warhammer: Dawn of War with its X-packs have gotten away from the old model.
However, none of them quite do it “right” by me. Mark o’ Chaos basically gives you no way to refresh your numbers, so if you have a single bad engagement you lose. Many missions basically come down to trial and error (i.e., reloading) until you learn exactly how to engage every on the field at maximum advantage. Dawn of War forces you to control “strategic points” which gives you, well, abstract point totals to buy units and buildings from. Of course, this is pretty bloody silly and relies on neither side defending their strategic points too effectively.
OK, almost done here.
What’s missing is a balance between What You Bring and What You Can Field. You want to trip up the player if he consistently loses “battles”, but also give him or her a chance to recover and go on to victory. Traditional RTS’s make units almost irrelevant: they’re just food for the slaughter machine. New version tend to make them a little to important, to the level where I carefully huddled every force in Mark of Chaos in a terrified defensive mode because it cost permanent campaign bonuses to heal and repair. I never knew what I might need in order to succeed at the next mission, so I ever risked anytihng until I was so stuffed with cash it didn’t matter.
Not very heroic. After a while, not exciting, either.
So here’s my proposal: some resources are static. Some are variable. Some are self-renewing. Resources will be broken into three types:
Units come back to you over time. You get INFANTRY and VEHICLE meters which rise over time (about which more below). However, you usually don’t buy units individually, but rather as part of squads or groups. The exception might be main battle tanks or maybe stealth bombers, and the latter (like C&C) are off-screen resources you call in to do your dirty work. Infantry are cheap but come from a different pool.
In another twist, you can preselect units to create squads. Before the battle, you can alter your squads as you like, putting in riflemen, machine gunners, rocket soldiers to bust vehicles, AA infantry, and medics. Furthermore, you have the option of giving them special skills and equipment, which they use automatically. No, you don’t have to manually tell every rifleman to throw their bloody grenades. They’ll do the job themselves. Some resources, like mines, they’ll auto-deploy when told to guard an area. Skills include things to improve their long-range marksmanship or go amphibious. Of course, pre-made squads are built-in to the game to help the player out. You can delete these for more personal room and save squads set-ups for easy access in different missions.
Vehicles work mostly the same way, but mostly you buy things like improved engines and better guns. Most of the cool stuff you can buy/build increaes weight and slows the behicle down, making ti a bigger target. Actually, come to think of it, there’s really almost just one basic infantryman and ground vehicle as far as the game is concerned, with different kinds of firepower and motors added on.
Air vehicles are in there, too, but as we’ll get to, they’re a little more complicated and are heavily dependent on your meters. For now, just know you can get on-site things like dedicated troop-support (helos and things like the A-10), Air superiority fighters, bombers, and so forth. These are less customizable than other units.
Buildings are put down by Base Engineers, although you can get Combat Engineers who do field fortifications and stuff (c’mon, daddy needs to kill a graphics card!). These buildings actually do a lot for you, because you can (of course) use them to field soldiers and vehicles. From a bloody “garage”, not a “factory”. Buildings can also increase the rate you get Infantry and Vehicle points. Sounds peachy, right? Let’s just spam those buildings and get more More MORE, right?
Wrong. Buildings do a lot more, and you’ll cripple yourself if you don’t use them. If you build First Aid Stations, Repair Depos, Field Hospitals, and so forth, you increase your RECOVERY meter. The higher this gets, the faster your troops heal and vehicles repair. It will happen as long as they are reasonably near a a relevant stations. The higher-class buildings give more bonuses, but require lower-class buildings before you cn make them).
Build supply depos and things like that, and you grant bonuses to your entire military with a high SUPPLY rating. Troops will run faster and fire faster. We could include a hidden endurance meter which declines in combat and thereby degrades performance; higher Supply factors slow its fall in battle and raise its recovery outsde it. Supply is awesomely needed for air units, because it lets them stay into the air for longer and puts them back into the air faster. To mitigate the annoyance factor, you don’t need to manually order air missions unless you want to: you can just select targets or tell air units to work with a given group of units.
The meters I previous described are the last aspect fo the game. Infantry and Vehicle meters rise and fall, while Supply and Recovery meters are static (with a certain number of buildings) and offer static bonuses the higher they go.
The major limitation is that you can’t just “train” up fifty Base Engineers and max out everything, then roll over the enemy. Doesn’a work like that. Home base sends you more over time, and they ain’t quick about it. But good combat performance can earn you more, too, which rewards players for smart play.
The big strategies you can have reflect different ways of managing resources. You can go for a rush strategy and pour everything into more unit-making. You can do the classic turtle and huddle your resources to grid down the enemy until you reach the critical combo of units/meters/upgrades to kill everyone. You can economy-kill the enemy by taking out their buildings with critical strikes and denying them resources.
Lastly, I decide that the final component was a tactical one. You want to be able to reward people for good tricks and so forth, and give people more than a blind resource sim. So scatteered across the map will be various “goodie huts” or just plain strategic points. It could be high ground (plop your artillary and massacre the enemy from range), buildings which add to your meters, a Base Engineer for your pleasure, or a set of ground which gives cover bonuses to infantry there.
I may post later. I could add a MORALE meter or decribe some of the consequences (god ones) for doing things this way. Yay.