@SimonForsman well you could control only a little squad but then you lose all the other aspect of RTS games, such as resource collection, base planning, macro, which is great fun. Also people could choose do whatever they feel like, so if they want to focus on managing expansions while some other player focuses on harassment, that's a big plus. Managing battles is actually only one part of RTS. Another player could focus on unit production, while another player focuses on micro? I'll look into the way WoW manages player instances as you described. Ideally a player should only know about what is happening to his faction and what is visible on his map that is not covered by the fog of war.

You need to keep the amount a player can possibly know about very limited otherwise it will become impossible to host the gameservers (And possibly impossible to play for people who don't have fibre connections), if a player can control a distributed army he might potentially have several thousand units in view and you'll have to send state updates for all of them several times per second, (It will add up to insane amounts of bandwidth)

i've played an mmorts before, it was an interesting approach. They had a huge map, and basically it was chunks of floating asteroids to build bases/gather resources. But it was pretty much boring for the most part, they made build times take hours to do anything, another thing is that an MMORPG is persistant, in that your character will never really disappear. with an MMORTS, you know that in a few days, you'll have to start again. As well most rts matchs last a few hours at most, and it's more fun imo to play in a single session, then to have to remember to login and make sure your guys are actually doing things.

I personally just can't see MMORTS's taking off the same way the rpg variants do, you need to give players something for all their work.

@Osidlus Perhaps, there could some penalty imposed for switching between factions too fast, aka spying. For example, a time limit. The tactical map would be a great idea, something along the line Company of Heroes has? What do you mean connected to its designer via intercomm? Do you mean voice chat? Also by time steps do you mean turn based RTS where there is a time step every 30 sec or so, and this would be visible to the rank of the player? Also how would players gain rank?

I think lower ranks does not need to know and plan many steps forward. These players might have enough work with microing each action scheduled and carrying their own ..s. These actions on the strategical map migh also contain voice messages- for example for deceiving operation it would be needed to explain that we are not so stupid to do that. Yes, intercomm as a voice chat, but options are many.

I did not meant turn based strategy, but for planing it would be helpfull to have actions broke down into time frames in order to imagine all the parallel movement. And you dont have to worry about detailed action matching within each timeframe since there should be interactions between units actions set. For example units can be set to attack with some delay after chosen unit, or simultaneously or with some "IF" condition...

Ranking I think thats what the designer loves find out. My proposal is like three pillar system. 1. missions completed (sabotages, rafineries built etc.) 2. elections (get the people on your side) 3. temporary rise by the moneys spent on the given army

well, what if you do something like tribal wars, ikarian, travian and etc? make a world, let the player build their city and join factions, but at the rts style. each player has his own base and supplies, but also can have a faction. members of the same faction would have a penalty for attacking each other (possibly set by the faction leader) and would be able to exchange resources between members.

the player would schedule actions for their units to take when he's offline, and when he's online, he can control each squad action in a more finer way.

as for the squad, the player could be able to group squads creating a huge squad. when grouped, the squads are treated like a huge one, so it's only 1 state update for possibly 100,000 units. the player can then extract a squad from the huge one, with the specific units he select.

Pathfinding with A* algorithm will freeze the game with huge map and many units. I know from first-hand experience.

Don't ask for what engine to use. In the end you know you'll write it yourself because it takes too long to learn somebody else's work.