The future of RTS games - Page 39

Players forge their own races from predetermined rules. Of course, as you say, the whole game would have to be built around such a thing from scratch, but same has been done around Starcraft maps and races.

E.g. Choose one from each category
Basic Infantry: Infantry, Attack Dog,
Support Infantry: Medic, Flamethrower, Rocket Trooper
Tank: Attack Tank, Siege Tank
Light Vehicle: cheetah tank, okto gunner, transporter
Artillery: Mortar Trooper, Howitzer
Air Support: Heavy Bomber, Top Dog Fighter
Special Troops: Commando, Vehicle-X, Dropship

Defenses: Flaming Betty, Multifunction Tower, Rocket Station


And then this game could introduce more and more units to the categories and monetize this modell similar to how LoL works. So with a free account you get some (somewhat balanced) predetermined constellation of units and then you can unlock/buy more units and every week and you can test 1-2 other units.
And like with the MOBAs, it wouldn't matter too much if you had the one or other unit that isn't used too much in proplay, as you could just get a looooot of units that also somewhat overlap in roles (especially in the same categories, what I posted are rather the extremes that you build upon but don't strecht further).

And for balance purposes, so that "your deck" doesn't get countered too hard by "his deck" from the beginning, you could do a "choose deck/use deck" before the game actually starts, and then sideboard one unit in and another out, after you have seen his basic constellation. E.g. "Oh, he is using an aggressive infantry build, I guess I should play with a Flamthrower instead of the Rocket Trooper here".

Also the amount of factions/races should be kept to a minimum with such a system (for balance purposes). 1-2 should be enough.

I like the idea of 2resources, it introduces depth without making the game really complicated. However I think the base scaling and constant worker building is not something easy to keep, I rather like concepts like the automining Vespene Refinery from the campaign or how Ore is being mined in RA3. Set and forget is the concept.
Also resource locations should be very small, so that they do not limit your mapping. This makes it possible to have 1v1 maps played in 2v2 by simply spawning more resources at (shared) spawn locations.

The production cost of units is straight forward:
1 production building uses all resources of 1 mining location. This can either mean you get 1 infantry unit every 20seconds from a barracks - so a total of 3per minute - or 1 tank every minute if you build a factory.
Since there is two resources, but not every unit costs both resources, there are two types of expansions. The "mineral only" type and the "mixed gas+mineral" type.
There are 3-4 different buildings for about 8 buildable units and regardless of which units you choose, there is always at least 1 unit on that building. This unit is a "mineral only unit", all others are "mineral+gas" units.
Two units from the same slot - e.g. Infantry and Attack Dog - always have the exact same costs and production time, and somewhat share roles - e.g. excel against infantry. However they can be on different production buildings - e.g. Howitzer and Mortar Team which makes for some "natural" deck combinations (like infantry heavy or mechanical heavy play).
Other costs like Power or Supply are not in the game, apart from a maximum Unit cap.

There are no commandable workers in the game, the resources are either mined by uncommandable bots that slowly autorebuild when they are being destroyed by harassment or just by the mining building, which when damage starts burning and mines less efficiently while autorepairing.

The construction of buildings is achieved by going into "Construction Mode" via pressing of an important hotkey like Space. In Construction Mode, all Units are being deselected and in place of the Unit Interface there is an overview of all buildings. From that you select buildings and put it down anywhere on the map which, once you have the required money for the buildining, causes an uncommandable/indestructable Construction Drone to leave your Headquarter, fly to the building location and start construction.
Additionally in Construction Mode there is a complete queue list of everything that is being produced currently. >ou could influence the priority of anything that hasn't been started yet by drag and drop:

Anything on autobuild (yellow) always stays on the bottom of the list unless ordered otherwise. Anything you queue yourself like a building or a specific unit you want to build one of goes to the bottom of the red list.

The construction of units can be done both via the construction, as well as via the control mode. Either by clicking the production building or directly giving the orders in the basic Interface.

The Interface could look something like Starcrafts with a few adaptions.
E.g.
- swap the Command Interface with the Minimap so that its screenposition matches your left hand's hotkey position.
- the resources are being shown right above the Command Interface
- additional autobuild unit buttons
- buttons unnecessary for controlling the game (such as allies, chat log, firendlist) go to the menu, but can still be directly opened with hotkeys. (makes it less confusing for a new player imo; at least I'm often overwhelmed by such stuff in a new RTS game, just to find out that I have no ingame use for a lot of stuff that is on the screen)
+ Show Spoiler +

Resource nodes taking up little space and getting rid of a lot of spaceeating buildings should provide extra space (comparitively to Starcraft) so that a 1v1 map can be played in 2v2 as well, spawing extra resources and extra players at the 1v1 spawning locations. Similarily, starcraftlike 4spawn maps may be played in 4v4 as well. This gives a more convinient way to produce "one mappool to play them all".

Fog of War works differently than in current games. Instead of having a Fog of War everywhere and a visionrange to scout into it, Fog of War is being produced around a players buildings, once finished. The fogged area is not a radius but a suiting area created by the mapmaker (e.g. the whole highground of a mainbase).
The rest of the map is alltime revealed, unless specific fogcreating tools are being used. Of course there could be naturally fogged areas as well like swamps, but the basic idea is to have huge parts of the map alltime revealed.
This prevents excessive proxying and completely hidden army movement, especially in the early game. There is less emphasis on the defender to scout something hidden, but rather the aggressor needs to find ways to hide something (e.g. by using cloaked units, crawling units, burrow moving units...).
It should also prevent that less mobile unit constellations have to sit back in fear and give the complete mapcontrol to more mobile ones.

With the macro aspect of the game tuned down like described in the steps above, there is a lot of attention that can be paid to controlling units.
For that, every unit must be very deep. At the end of the day, this comes down to unit design. A few ways to achieve interesting unit designs:

- Characteristic abilities: Similar types of units (e.g. infantry units) share some basic skills (similar to how stim is being shared). This could be run or crawl abilities for infantry, pull or push abilities for vehicles and certain maneuvers like loopings for air units.
- Multiple layers of height for airplay. E.g. one "standard" air layer and one "highflying" one that makes air units safe from ground attacks and vision and vis verca. Air maneuvers (which e.g. could be used to avoid missile attacks) could be controlled that way, e.g. sending an airplane up and immidiatly down again causes it to fly a looping or down+down could make it perform a combat roll.
- units that don't necessary need some mobility drawback should have hardly any damage point
- unit attacks should usually be more interesting than the hitguaranteeing SC2 projectiles and insta-damage attacks. They should rather come in the form of skillshots, splash attacks, sucide attacks, linedamage, first-obstacle-colliding projectiles and so on, to provide hit and dodge micro.