Replaceable Parts: Part One (The Concept)

Suppose you were designing a writing system, and forget everything you already know about written language. Your problem: a way to communicate language through a two-dimensional medium. Your first step should be to linearize your medium; speech is a one-dimensional quantity, in that all speech is sequential, and for any given value of time, there will be a single value for speech. A writing surface is not necessarily sequential, but can be made so: everything you write will be in a line, and when your line reaches the end of the writing surface, you restart in the same direction from a new location, with the understanding that this is understood to be a continuation of the first line, merely transposed to a different spot to save space. The next step is easy: match symbols to a unit of spoken language in a one-to-one fashion, such that each symbol corresponds to one and only one equivalent in spoken language. Then the reader that has knowledge of what the symbols mean can view writing and translate it into spoken word.

Here's the important part: what unit of language do you choose to be represented by symbols? The obvious choice is called a character system: Each character corresponds to a word. The obvious issue is that any given spoken language has so many words in it, and you need one symbol for every word, so your readers will have to memorize a vast quantity of symbols and their equivalencies just to be able to read a book. Another solution is a phonetic system in which characters correspond to sounds. Similar sounds have similar-looking characters, and words are represented not by single characters, but by a set of characters for each word. Characters are then frequently reused, but there is one set of characters that corresponds to each word, so it still corresponds to language in a one-to-one fashion in that you could translate from written to spoken and back effectively. The alphabet system is only slightly removed from a phonetic system; characters don't correspond perfectly to sounds, but they generally do, and there's still a principle of similar-sounding words having similar-looking written representations; the main difference is that some sounds are broken up even further to correspond to a set of characters rather than a single character. Rather than learning thousands of characters for the thousands of words in the English language, or the ~100 (I'm not sure of the exact figure) sounds produced by the human voice, there are only 26 characters and a few punctuation marks to learn in the English language.

Up to now I haven't brought in the game design aspect of this analogy. But I would argue that all (edit: most. Earth 2160 is the only one I've seen so far that implements this idea, though) RTS games today (at least all I know of (edit: this knowledge is apparently lacking)) are built mostly on a character system: each unit on the field corresponds to one decision on the part of the user (with exceptions). There is a set of _ units available to you, and each unit has essential and unmodifiable characteristics (i.e. one marine is identical to another marine, regardless of when, where, and for what purpose it was built). This is slightly changed when upgrades enter the equation; a 1-1 marine is not identical to a 2-0 marine, nor is it identical to a combat shield+stim 0-0 marine. In most situations, though, this does not change the marine especially, other than just making it overall better than it was before.

So what I propose is to rearrange the unit construction system. Rather than being faced with a decision of whether to build a siege tank or not build a siege tank, the player should have greater control over their unit design. That is, there is a model for a basic mechanical unit. Building it plain isn't good for much more than scouting, and adding elements to it is more expensive. What weapons do you add? Long-range? Small, quick-fire? Big, single-shot? Big, slow AoE? What kind of mobility do you want it to have- faster, more maneuverable units will be more expensive, and large, powerful weapons and armor will automatically weigh the unit down, reducing mobility. Thus the possibilities for units are not infinite, like in map editor, but they are significantly increased by being able to modify specific aspects of a unit to meet specific purposes.