putting the 'S' into 'RTS' (long)

Some great ideas there man.

I like your idea of having a set group of people who can become certain things and prefer careers based on your style of play.

But just in case that doesnt lend itself to someones game how about this.

You mentioned warhammer, and how it has rules about units with other units, now I dont actualy play war hammer but some of my friends do so ive picked up on some of the rules

They will play games with X Point armies (normally 1000)

now I propose that instead of setting the population like you would in AOE or something, you set the point value. And then assign different points to each unit. For example if you make the best unit in the game 100 then in a 1000 point game one army could only have 10 of them.

Done right this could solve the problem.

Actually, a lot of these points were addressed in Myth and Myth 2, which are my favorite RTS'' of all time. In a good campeign, each unit is important (especially experienced archers). You start with a limited number of people, and if you lose some, well, they''re dead, and you''re down one more person. In multiplayer, you can really see that tactics are key. Everyone has the same number of points to choose troops, and so you choose a good makeup of troops and then use strategy to meet your goals. In some of the multiplayer games, the point was not to kill your enemy, but to do other things, like control land, for example, and often, the one with the bigger army in the end was not the one that wins the game.

It''s really a shame Myth wasn''t even more of a success. Anyway, I just thought that i''d interject that thought into the conversation.

Back to debugging my game.

-ben.c

Thanks for the feedback guys... Ill answer some of your points.....

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1. No base building. You go in with a limted amount of supplies. If those run out, game over. You get supplies by bringing villages to your side.

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I agree with this wholeheartedly. I want to control armies, if I wanted to build stuff I''d play sim city. I think this could make for a much faster paced game - you can get stuck in right from the start instead of pissing around building factories.

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2. No unit building. Limited number of men. You get men by recruiting from villages. I was thinking, however, that the villagers would sign up, and then you could allocate them to different tasks. The more people die under you, the less willing they are to join. So then you''d have to start drafting. Which would lead to a poorer quality soldier for your side, desertion, defection, running to Canada, etc.

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Thats very similar what I had in mind, but it gives the player more control. The question is, how do you force him to build a balanced army, rather than massing the best troop type? I supposes you could combine this with my original idea, so that of all the people you have available to recruit, only a certain number will qualify for any given troop types. You can maximise your favourite units, but you still have to use them well or the maximum number you can recruit goes down next time around...

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3. You can only build large units(siege towers, ballistas, etc.) if you have enough men to crew it. People aren''t automatically ruslted up.

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Hmm. Seige engines in historical/fantasy games are a funny issue - I expect them to function very differently to ordinary units. However, in a modern/futuristic RTS there are things like tanks and so on that would require several people to crew (as well as associated maintenance staff. I think that there should be a law of diminishing returns asssociated with growing - in a small village at least half the population might be combat ready. In a large city, the percentage of military personnel is much lower, and more advanced units require more maintenance staff.

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now I propose that instead of setting the population like you would in AOE or something, you set the point value. And then assign different points to each unit. For example if you make the best unit in the game 100 then in a 1000 point game one army could only have 10 of them.

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Starcraft did something like this... Its a good idea but I think that arbitrary population limits are a bit false, and on its own this isnt enough to encourage players to build a balanced army. But it can still be factored in... If at any given time we only have X people available to recruit, but unit A requires Y people to maintain, you have the choice... wait until more people are available to recruit, or build unit B, which only requires Z people to build. And you still have a training time...

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Units should not be versatile. It either leads to superior units that dominate the game or inferior units that can''t be made stronger without turning them into superior units

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I totally agree. IMHO the protoss carriers in SC are far too powerful - they are incredibly effective against both air and ground units. Compare this to the terrran seige tank - an excellent unit, very effective at ground attack, but very vulnerable to air attack.

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Not that hard, perhaps you are referring to macromangement? Microing a couple spellcasters isn''t difficult at all. Trying to macro them... yeah that''s not easy. There are techniques to make stuff like this easier and occasionally a new interface enhancement comes out so it isn''t that bad. The problem is unwieldly armies. What is so much better about controlling three huge armies versus three men? That''s why I am in favor of smaller unit counts, it leads to better control without sacrificing diversity.

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Yes and no. Special abilities like spellcasters, as you say, simply become unworkable when used in large numbers. I also find it annoying when you group stuff together and tell it to go somewhere, and then lose the whole lot because you didnt babysit them on the way, and they got confused by a narrow passage and half of them wandered off into an enemy base instead. I think this calls for better AI routines, interface improvements and better unit grouping. As for making the unit count lower, this isnt really solving the problem. I want to be able to control vast armies, but I dont want to have to control every single little man in that army.

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yeah, there are a lot of fixes for this though. Making troops take longer to build for example, or making bases closer

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Doesnt work. Increasing rate of unit construction is no better solution than increasing the cost of the unit. It is too easy to get around - In starcraft you can get a gigantic fleet of carriers built in a very short space of time, simply by building several stargates. Experience systems may go some way to helping, but I think it needs to be made clear to the player that his units have experience - if he cant see it, he doesnt care. I also think that if he knows that losing all his best knights will mean that he simply cannot build as many knights next time he recruits, however many Knight Training buildings he might have, he would be a little more careful.

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just go with fewer units, that lets you focus on balance. If I am checking out a new RTS and I see them boast about how they have dozens of units per race I just hit the back button. I was playing a bit of Myth II a while back (got into it late, too bad) and there were so few units in the core set, like 6 I think, and everyone used the same set. It was such a good game though

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I completely agree. 6 well designed balanced units is a hundred times better than 600 badly designed unbalanced units. In any case, players do not want to learn the strengths and weaknesses of 600 different units - they will learn 5 or six and ignore the rest anyway.
The only situation I might disagree with this is in a game like SC where different races have very different units. I think this is a great idea, which adds a lot to the longevity of the game. Must have been a complete bastard to balance though....

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if you aren''t willing to scout you don''t really want to play RTS games. So much depth would be lost. Seriously scouting is a big big part of these games, the war of information can be just as important as the rest of the game. My most memorable games all involved intensive scouting

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I am not completely convinced... In my opinion, scouting (like building) is a distraction from the real purpose of the game which is to control an army. Now imagine this situation... Say you are tank rushed by a huge force. You know perfectly well that this force is so big there must be very little defending the opponents base, leaving it vulnerable. Now, if you know where his base is, then you can punish him severely, but if you dont, then you just lose to his tank rush and get beaten. Just think how differently you would play if you knew what the enemy was up to all of the time? (and he knew what you were up to ) Maybe this info shouldnt be completely free, you have to do work and invest in something to get it, but I think that it should be a lot less tedious than it currently is.

Hmm...... why tank push??
Some people tends to wall themselve inside the base and climb up the tech-tree real fast just to use some super advance unit. To counter these people fast, the easiest way to go is to mass produce some low-end unit and give these players some surprise since their base has less defense.

And you say there are dominant unit?
For a balance game, there''s no dominant units. Dominant it is, in the sense of unprepared player. IMHO Protoss Carriers almost rules everything in SC: it is easy to use, to attack, even maybe to defend. But with some Static fields, Dark Swarms, or some Lock-downs, your carrier-groups would be useless.

Of course, for an imbalance game, I can''t say anything.

And ....In a modern/futuristic game, perhaps you could also have a satellite that updates every so often (as it orbits the planet) revealing the enemy''s current positions (well, those that could be seen from the air anyway).... I think in modern/futuristic game, there should exist some intelligent or smart hacker units that scramble your satellite data so your maps won''t do you any good.

Anyway, I like your point. Especially (c)Troops have little or no value. They should have improvement in this. Good think''in!

Ok, first, I''ll make it clear that I''m not too brilliant at game design, I''m a programmer . I normally work on my own, do my own artwork (which sucks) and then once it is about finished, I find someone to do some better art for it, which I then put into my games. Because I work on my own, I also have to do the design, so normally I try and stay with fairly "tried and tested" things. Anyway, that''s the quick backgrounder

One of the projects I''m working on (well, the only real project I''m working on, but I''m doing a prototype for some of the concepts in it right now) is an RTS, it isn''t futuristic, it isn''t fantasy or medieval, it is completely abstract. As such, I don''t need to worry about realism, as long as I can keep the player familiar with the world.

What I''ve done, is taken a traditional AOE type RTS, and changed a few things:

Resources
The main ''resource'' in the game is the colour green. Every object in the game (objects being units, buildings and terrain) has a maximum capacity to hold green, so a bucket of green paint can hold a lot of green while a red bucket can''t hold any.

Any object which has green in it can be (thinking of verb and failing) mined by another unit as long as the unit can hold the extra green. Mining the green, is just a simple matter of moving up next to the object and instantly, the green is transfered from the object to the unit.

To build a unit, the structure which builds the unit must have enough green inside it to be able to pay for the unit, if it does, then the unit is created and the amount of green needed is subtracted from the structure''s green.

One of the units is the spanner, by putting a few spanners together, you can build structures, so one structure might cost 4 spanners, so you would put 4 spanners in the same position and the structure would be built.

(Yes, that is very confusing reading back over it, with all the green and so on.... but I can''t put it any other way)

Because green is so easy to mine, it makes stealing it from the enemy possible and often necessary.

There is also a short supply of green, meaning that wasting it is quite foolish

Tech tree
No tech tree as such, but when some units gain more experience, they might be able to upgrade for a cost (either time, or green, haven''t decided yet). The upgraded unit might not be unique either, a Type 1 unit might cost 50 green, a Type 2 unit might be 100 green. But if a Type 1 unit makes 5 kills, there might be an upgrade to Type 2 for 10 green or something like that.

Intelligence
Not sure now. I was going to have something similar to the traditional fog of war (like from C&C times, where once explored it is fully visible for the rest of the game) except after a few minutes, areas which haven''t been explored are ''fogged'' again.

Now I''m wondering whether to have fog of war or not, I think it adds another aspect to the game as different units can have different lines of sight, and recon missions can be done.

What would you guys recommend?

Trying is the first step towards failure.

ragonastick:

Wow, that has to be one of the most original concepts I have seen for a while. Its difficult to say what you should do about the fog of war... my reasons for suggesting it be removed are as follows....

1. It isnt terribly realistic, and if you want realistic strategies to develop you want to aim towards realism. This obviously does not apply to your game, since realism is not what it is about.

2. Knowing the terrain.. I dont believe that it is possible to plan a decent strategy without knowing something about the terrain you are fighting over. By including a fog of war, you are making scouting and exploration a very important part of the game (even more so if the fog regrows as the game progresses). Personally, I think that half the reason that scouting is encouraged is to justify the existence of a few fast weak units which are otherwise almost completely useless. (vultures anyone?) At least make it possible to use some other mechanism for scouting (eg the Starcraft Comsat station) that doesnt require quite so much hassle as babysitting a unit all the way around the map. Note that vision ranges are still relevent without a fog of war... spotting units, selecting units to fire
at, etc.

DerekSaw:

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Some people tends to wall themselve inside the base and climb up the tech-tree real fast just to use some super advance unit. To counter these people fast, the easiest way to go is to mass produce some low-end unit and give these players some surprise since their base has less defense.

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Surely a tank rush early in the game is no more tactically interesting than a tank rush late in the game? Its still a tank rush.

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I think in modern/futuristic game, there should exist some intelligent or smart hacker units that scramble your satellite data so your maps won't do you any good.

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Interesting idea... I'm going to have to think about how all that will work... I think the maps of the terrain shouldnt be effected, but mucking around with radar coverage might be interesting....

AP: Ive used it on many maps very successfully. The problem I have with most RTS's is that there is very little strategy in the individual battles. Imagine a game of starcraft, protoss VS protoss. Now imagine that one side has 12 zeaolots, the other has 6, and there are no other units left in the game. The side with the 12 zealots is being played by a lobotimised monkey which has been trained to recognise enemy units and click on them, the other side is being played by a military genius. Who wins? The answer is simple - the lobotomised monkey. I want a game in which the military genius can win.

Edited by - Sandman on April 30, 2001 7:16:54 PM

Just a thought:

Why don't we have tank rushes all the time in modern day warfare? Why isn't the free world's military fighting doctrine based on massed rushing? Why is it that only poor, desperate nations like Iran and Iraq resort to human wave attacks?


Damage Model

Playing a completely unrelated game, Counterstrike, really informs me of this one. Taken as a strategic contest, Unreal and Quake are nonsense (fun, yes, but strategic, no). But when one shot kills, suddenly all the "units" start behaving differently.

The linear hitpoint model then has to go in favor of either fewer hitpoints for everything, or a more varied range of damage possibilities. You will never rush a machine gun nest armed with machetes because a single bullet can maime or kill you.

The inclusion of facing (finally) opens up more rich tactical possibilities, as well. Tanks with weaker armor in the rear will be disinclined to retreat, and possibly vulnerable to pincer movements or ambushes.


Support

It sucks that no RTS I know of has gotten supply lines right. When units can just plop down a new base right in the middle of your territory, without any realistic limits other than defense, you get viral warfare, not military warfare.

I can't cut off and starve the enemy; cause him to become suppressed; nor interdict his forward operations because the main axis of his military power comes out of friggin' thin air!!!! How many entrenched bases would you have if they couldn't be supplied? And how many tank rushes would you have if you could mount rearguard operations forcing them to put more into defending their advance?

I like the idea I saw some time ago about tying unit health into supply wagons for a medieval wargame. Units couldn't heal after battle unless the supply wagons got through. The wagons would feed enough to be important, but not be so numerous as to be a micromanagement hazard. (Plus, resupply now would become a special, dramatic event) Oh, and for the love of the cosmos, make the actual resupply automatic .


Morale

I like the recruitment concept, but I'd like to also see the notion of morale extended to the actual fights themselves for the sake of strategic movements. Units that are isolated and cut off should have a lower morale (esp. if they've been without resupply). Units that have suffered heavy losses should have a chance to break and run. This could diminish with veteran status, giving yet another reason to preserve troops.


Well, that's all the brainstorm I have for now. Great suggestions, btw, Sandman!


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Just waiting for the mothership...

Edited by - Wavinator on April 30, 2001 11:16:13 PM

I like your ideas. 1 suggestion I would add would be about the air units.

The only game I have ever seen to get air units right is Total Annihilation where the air units had to land, only certain air units could just hover and blow the crap out of stuff, the rest had to fly-by and then turn around for another pass.

However, in a futuristic game, what is to stop an enemy from air-lifting a nuke right into the middle of your base, blowing you to kingdom-come? Air obviously needs a lot of work, as the previous strategy was often used to destroy someone in Total Annihilation.

Another thing about air. Air units in real life cost a LOT of resources and specially trained troops to fly them. That makes them VERY valuable compared to infantry and other ground units.

Also, air units can only land on runways/carriers/special fields, etc. However, in a futuristic game, it''s not difficult to imagine that most air units are like the current Osprey, able to fly like a plane and land/take off like a helicopter.

Hope this helps you out.

-Hyren


"Back to the code mines... ka-chink... ka-chink..."

I would have to say that Total Annihilation has did just about everything right. The level of control is high while also having enough automation to keep from being boged down by too much managment. A new updated verison of Total Annihilation using the lastest technology and building on the great features from 1 would be a real winner!!!

Afastrunner
AKA Camelboy

Wav:

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The linear hitpoint model then has to go in favor of either fewer hitpoints for everything, or a more varied range of damage possibilities. You will never rush a machine gun nest armed with machetes because a single bullet can maime or kill you.

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I completely agree... I was thinking about the damage model this morning. I was thinking that instead of hit points, you have a sort of critical damage system. Any hit will either do nothing at all, minor damage, or critical damage, according to some function of range, accuracy, weapon strength and unit resilience. Minor damage does not kill the unit, but may effect its performance in some way, but any critical damage will kill it instantly. So an infantry unit will be very vulnerable to single hits (most infantry will pretty much always be killed in a single hit) whereas a tank with multiple redundant systems might be quite hard to kill... but if you have a decent weapon, and are a good enough shot, you can still take it out in one. Snipers could be very effective...

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It sucks that no RTS I know of has gotten supply lines right. When units can just plop down a new base right in the middle of your territory, without any realistic limits other than defense, you get viral warfare, not military warfare.

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I had almost forgotten about supply lines... thanks for reminding me... If units have limited ammo then you have to be very careful about how far you reach - it is all very well if you manage to capture that enemy bridge, but if your troops run out of ammo then the enemy can just take it back again. You could have fairly tense battles, a few units desperately defending an important feature, gradually running out of ammo as time goes by, waiting for supplies to get through. Exactly how the supply lines will work I am not too sure - I agree they need to be fairly automatic.

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I like the recruitment concept, but I''d like to also see the notion of morale extended to the actual fights themselves for the sake of strategic movements

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I am in two minds about morale... on the one hand I think it should be included, but on the other it is *SO* irritating when your units wander off and do their own thing, particularly since they are normally doomed anyway.
One thing I was thinking about was giving the player the ability to set the aggression of the unit. If the unit is set to maximum aggression, it will *never* retreat - this is the equivalent of telling your men that failure is not an option - the success of their mission is more important than their lives. On the other end of the scale, you set them to a very low aggression, something like telling them that they should, under no circumstances, risk their lives. In this mode, your men will fall back very readily, on encountering any remotely significant resistance. You also have various levels in between. Also note that I said that they ''fall back''. Not ''run away like a bunch of cowards and let themselves get shot in the back''. Some players might think "uh, sod this, i''ll just whap the aggression up to high for all my units, there''s no downside" There is a downside... your units will happily sacrifice themselves, and you will have to replace them. And I intend to make sure that every casualty counts. Running away when you are outclassed is often quite a good idea... plus a clever enemy could use it to lure a foolish opponent into a trap....
The biggest problem with this is the interface, but that is something to think about much later....

Hyren:

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However, in a futuristic game, what is to stop an enemy from air-lifting a nuke right into the middle of your base, blowing you to kingdom-come?

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Several things.... Interceptors, anti missile defenses, and the big one.... the fact that your enemy doesnt necessarily want to...
If you nuke an enemy outpost, then it is completely destroyed. You have to build a new one, which takes time and resources. Instead, you have another option... capture it! A base, once built, can just as easily be a base for your enemy, it just depends whose troops are sitting in it. In a game where supply lines are important, an enemy base full of weapons, armour and food is a much more desirable prize than a radioactive crater.

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Another thing about air. Air units in real life cost a LOT of resources and specially trained troops to fly them. That makes them VERY valuable compared to infantry and other ground units.

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Definitely. I want the player to value all of his units... real life nations spend fortunes on training their armies and building state of the art weaponry, they arent going to want to waste it. Air units are particularly expensive - a single missile can cost several million dollars, let alone a whole plane + pilot.

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Also, air units can only land on runways/carriers/special fields, etc. However, in a futuristic game, it''s not difficult to imagine that most air units are like the current Osprey, able to fly like a plane and land/take off like a helicopter.

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Hmmm. Futuristic planes may be able to land anywhere, but they can still only refuel/re-arm at a suitable base .... As for hovering, again, a futuristic aircraft may well be able to hover, but does it really want to? It just becomes a sitting duck...

hm... it''s great to have so much ideas floating around!


Damage Model:
Doesn''t the Command&Conquer series have this? e.g. Artilary could kill groups of infantry but not even have significant damage to amoured tanks.

But there''s something unrealistic here in C&C: a tank shot cannot kill an infantry? That is rediculous. Please take heed on this if u really need to have some good damage model.

Supply line:
Anyone play Fate of The Dragon? They have this similar feature. When your men are out in the field, they will get weaker and hungrier... unless u have some food for them. So u need to bring along some food supply and then build up some tents/bunkers for your army to rest and get healed. Try to play''em, I can''t tell much.

BTW, Earth2150 need u to reload ammo during a fight.

Morale:
I don''t see any games that have good implementation on this yet. But Warlords: BattleCry is not bad. Or Seven Kingdom 2 also will do.


My 2% worth.

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DerekSaw
Damage Model

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Dark Reign did really well at that.



ANDREW RUSSELL STUDIOS

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Original post by Wavinator

Just a thought:

Why don''t we have tank rushes all the time in modern day warfare? Why isn''t the free world''s military fighting doctrine based on massed rushing? Why is it that only poor, desperate nations like Iran and Iraq resort to human wave attacks?

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Well being from iran i could comment on a few things first off we are not a poor desperate nation. But i do admit that my country did use a human wave attack on iraq but the only reason for that is because we just went through a revelution and had lost most of our military through it. The only reason for that was because defense was important when a country gets attacked it must defend like in any rts game you''ll even send in your settlers if you have to just to defend the country. Now a day''s my country is equipped to fight and i dont think we will be using that tactic anymore.
This is an example of what happens in rts games. For instance you were just attacked by ur friend and u defended ur base but had a ton of military die and then a minute later u get rushed from another player ur only hope is to send in whatever you have hoping that u will win the battle. But what is the point of this unity? Is it there just to destroy the opponents or for something else?
I think that for an rts game to have any strategy actually involved you actually have to change everything around. Having two people attack one of the enemy is not a bad strategy but at the same time nothing new either. We need something that will introduce new strategies something a person can use to give them more choices and mroe reasons to do something.
Maybe a small defense force in the begging of the game will help early rushers but what about later? Maybe if there was a better diplomatic role in rts games then it would be more interesting. For example what if one team had a ton of nukes while the other had a ton of gold. They need to trade and because of that they can''t attack each other. They have to play together to get rid of the competiton. Or maybe the person with the nukes just bombs them and takes their gold, but they have to get the gold or else they cant have enough money to build anything anymore. What i am really trying to say is there are a ton of things that can be done to an rts to change the way people play but very few people are willing to do that and until something happens we are stuck with same tank rush.

- Goblineye Entertainment

All very good and valid points. Let me throw in a few of my own, some of which mirror yours very closely, but in a more specifically focused genre...military strategy.

Let me begin however by first of defining what to me encompasses the term strategy. Most games out there today see strategy games as sort of a different version of chess. Each side has it's own pieces, and you formulate some kind of plan of attack to exploit his weaknesses. What differentiates this style of gaming from say a tactical first person type game is that it stresses the usage of various types of units and the management of resources to build such units to defeat your opponent.

But in very few games is there any long term or "big picture" mode. As I have said in other forums, just because you can win the battle doesn't mean you can win the war....or vice versa. Look at the Confederates during the American Civil War, which won the majority of battles, but lost the war, or conversely, the Americans during the American Revolution in which they nearly lost every battle, but still won the war. Very little thought in most RTS's is thought of any sort of campaign mode in which the logistics and resources of your faction is taken into consideration.

Now, let's also look at the paradigm of RTS's today. Basically, you micro-manage your side's economic resources, while simultaneously fighting battles. Frankly, this is ludicrous. That's not to say that resources are not a very important part of strategical thinking (it's what made both Germany and Japan lose WWII....not thinking about their army's endurance), but to manage both at the same time? Are we playing a war game or a civilization game? Then again, some games forget resourcing totally, and just focus on building units. This too does not reflect a good model of actual warfare, as one of the key components of any general's thinking is how to maximize his own resources while minimizing his enemy's. In the Filipino martial art of Kali, they say" if you defang the viper, he can't bite". That's why industrial centers are prime targets. So to simply ignore resourcing is also a bad model.

So what do you do? Well, I think a hybrid RTS/Turn based style game is the only way to go. In essence, here is my idea. You chose your faction's characteristics much like you would a character in a RPG. For example, a faction's characteristics might include not just material resources such as Metal factories, Oil plants, or plastics refining, but it can also be defined by things like high technology or even the psychological makeup of it's citizenry. Perhaps the best way I can explain this is a realistic comparison.

Let's say you want to model Japan. It would have poor material resources, but it would have a high technology base, middle population, and a fanatical morale. If you wanted to model Russia, you might give it middle resources, low morale (except when defending, then fanatical) and middle technology base. Hopefully you can see where I'm leading here. By defining a faction's characteristics, it shows what KIND of units he can make, how QUICKLY he can make them,the QUALITY of the units produced, and perhaps most importantly, how MOTIVATED/DISCIPLINED those units can be.

Let's look at that last point a little more. In the 80's, Warsaw Pact forces seemed like a juggernaut on paper. Other than the NATO forces naval power, far and away, the Warsaw Pact vastly outnumbered NATO forces. And some of the equipment...again on paper...was as good as or equivalent to NATO equipment. However, Warsaw Pact forces had a much MUCH lower motivation and discipline level (on average) compared to NATO forces. And not just the quality of the actual troop units themselves. As the Russians learned the hard way in Afghanistan, the Soviet command structure was simply way too ineffective to deal with guerrila type warfare, worse so than US military command structure in Vietnam.

These are just the tiny little things that game designers simply don't think about to make games more real, and therefore more immersive and intellectually challenging. So, here's my following list of things that Game Designers should be aware of:

1) Command and Control: Units aren't simply units without a chain of command or unit integrity. The amount of freedom of control to field officers can greatly enhance a fighting forces effectiveness (as an example, German forces in WWII had a very strict chain of command, when the 101st got scattered all over Normandy, many German Forces stood around and did nothing, because they could not take the initiative without orders from higher ups)

2) Morale: Just because you order a unit to do something doesn't mean he's going to do it. I can't stand how almost every game out there will let you treat all units like mindless fanatics obeying their "god". Morale however is more than just keeping cool under fire. Morale is also motivation to fight. If you are on a recon search and destroy mission, your units probably aren't going to as motivated as a unit making a last ditch stand trying to delay enemy forces from hitting fleeing civillians.

3) Issuing Orders: Speaking of "God", how come every game has the interface as some sort of omniscient God who can control units as if he had a magic radio to order his every command. The fog of war does not just apply to not knowing where your enemy forces are, but what your OWN units are doing. Patton once remarked, "don't give great orders, give orders that can be understood". It would be VERY original if you commanded units as a real commander would given the capabilities of the technology of the time. If you think this will give a lack of control, think about it hard enough, and you'll see the extra challenges it will present

4) Campaigning: Just because you won the battle today doesn't mean you can win it tomorrow. One thing I liked about Homeworld was that you carried over your forces from mission to mission. A real commander must take this into consideration. He has to think about when and if reinforcements will arrive. Another great game was the Close Combat series which modeled campaigning very well. Think about it. What game have you ever played that rewards you for retreating from a battle...and made true the old dictum "discretion is the better part of valor"? Sometimes, the best thing to do is to make a strategic retreat to consolidate your forces or hook up with reinforcements while your enemy stretches himself thin or puts himself in a disadvantageous terrain(Robert E. Lee was a master at this).

5) Logistics: Related to campaigning is the management of logistics. One thing that RTS's totally lack is any sort of TO&E (tables of Organization and Equipment). Properly equipping your units on a strategic scale shouldn't be any different than chosing your weapon load-out for Rainbow Six.

6) Balancing (aka "points armies"): While this isn't normally a problem for computer games, this problem is RAMPANT with miniatures. The entire concept of having a "balanced" game by comparing one army's point totals to another's is like saying since I paid 40grand on a Toyta Land Cruiser, I have a better vehicle than a Toyota MR2. Comparing army's by point totals is the exact same thing. Units are not additively summed up, they are GREATER than the sum of it's parts. Units are meant to compliment and or supplement each other. For example, Aircraft Carriers don't operate alone, they operate in Carrier Fleet Groups that are also composed of other ships, most namely escorts. Escorts are meant to provide a barrier defense (particularly against other aircraft). An Aircraft carrier by itself is a powerful unit, but unsupported, it has serious weaknesses. Ditto with Tanks. I'll face any gamer with unsupported Tanks in a city against Infantry....I'll eat you alive. So just summing up a army by some arbitray total is ludicrous.

7) Missions: This goes hand in hand with campaigning and balancing. In the real world, you assign missions because of several factors. Usually you have a specific target in mind or you have no choice in the matter. The whole point of a fight is because there is some sort of objective that you need to take ahold of. This is far more interesting than "I'll take my 1000pt army against your 1000pt army, and last man standing wins". BORING. The most amazing battles in history have been the lopsided ones, or ones with clearly misguided objectives (for example the Battle for Arnhem bridge, or Gallipoli)

Well, I've probably bored everyone to tears, but I just needed to get this off my chest. I think if Computer gamers would take a step back and look at some miniatures games, they would find some VERY interesting ideas to break from the stale convention that RTS's are today. I HIGHLY recommend picking up Jon Tuffley's DirtSideII and StarGruntII miniatures games, as he has some very good ideas on strategy gaming in a military environment, or any number of classical turn based games such as Johnny Reb, Fire and Steel, or Command Decision to name just a few handful.

Edited by - Dauntless on May 9, 2001 2:41:02 PM

I realized I didn''t make myself as clear as I wanted in my last post...that''s what happens with 4hours of sleep I guess

What I meant by a turn/real time element for a game was to do something like this: Set up a planning phase for both your resources and logistics, and then an overall battle plan for your units, then go into real-time mode for a pre-determined amount of time. One game that I thought was very unusual was Man O War. It was turn based, but within each turn, it was real time. During the planning phase, you gave orders to your ships of the line, and they followed through with the orders. Once the orders were issued however, you could only command your personal ship. I thought this was very realistic.

I think something like this needs to be implemented in RTS''s now. Have a turn to formulate equipping your forces (logistics), and to make sure you have the capacity to equip your forces (resources). And actually, the strategic phase will also be when you mobilize and commit your forces. A commander never sends out forces hodge podge willy nilly style.

I think the AI algorithms for units has to vastly increase before these ideas can be implemented however. Units must be able to have some autonomous capacity so that the player doesn''t have to micro-manage everything. The ability to set aggression, and give limited planning beyond pathfinding also needs to be implemented. Nothing bugs me more than a unit attacking another 5 times as powerful, simply because that unit reached it''s attack proximity range. It should be smart enough to know when it is outclassed, and retreat appropriately (without you the player having to hold it''s hand and tell it what to do).