Different factions or different units

What sort of game? RTS, TBS, something else?

Do you want to appeal to a new demographic, or to long-time genre fans?

What is the focus of your game? Is it more about planning and strategy, or about efficient execution?

RTS.

I want to appeal to the newer generations while not alienating the gerne fans.

The focus is empire building. Expanding your empire while sustaining what you already have.

Different faction types with no advantages and disadvantages and each faction type has their own unique units

Always.

Though wouldn't each unique unit sort of build towards some natural advantages/disadvantages?

(Case in point, in Starcraft, the Zergs have the advantage of mobility and map control through the cheap zerglings whereas the Protoss have the power of concentration of forces (Zealots) and the Terrans have the advantage of range in most encounters (Marines, Siege Tanks, etc.)

Factions can be there for two reasons. Either story forces you to have them, or they exist to give the game more content.

If youre not forced to have factions, I wouldnt have them. If you want to give players a big "A, B, or C?" decision, just do it at the beginning of the match based on for example what type of factory the player builds as the first production building, or a similar big choice that you cant really undo or youll be weakened.

Importantly, doing it ingame allows for more possibilities. Ingame, you can easily combine many decisions to give a ton of permutations (do I start with two tank factories, or one tank and one robot factory, or one plane factory and then save the remaining resources for later etc.). With factions, you can have only so many (=very few) options until it gets messy, AND its probably a lot more work for factions anyways, because you want them to look different and so on.

In that sense, choice of faction is no different from any other gameplay decision, except its usually costly for you to implement and balance, and offers very little extra depth to the game in comparison to adding some other game mechanics that offer far more options for far less cost.

Basically, if you COULD make factions be a decision of which is the first building you start with, do so. This gives you the freedom to make the system more interesting. If you choose your faction from a list at start of match, its very difficult to expand on the system. If you keep it ingame, you could lets say change faction midgame. Or belong to 4 factions at the same time at endgame. Treat it as not being different from other game mechanics.

As with most things, it depends. Two examples:

-Starcraft gave each faction unique units and pretty much a unique playstyle. But bear in mind that they were different races.

-Supreme Commander gave each faction unique units but they also shared (in function) a lot of units and the base mechanics were almkst identical. The factions were all human but differed in recent history.

Here is the point: What are you trying to highlight?

Starcraft wanted to highlight how different each race was while Supreme Commander showed that they were all still human and all thought pretty much the same way at their core.

If your empires are of different races and you want that emphasized, give unique units. If you don't think that difference ia relevant or don't want to highlight it then don't.

As Waterlimon said, you can create different playstyles with the root node of a tech-tree alone, you don't need factions for that.

However, I do disagree that a pre-selected faction system is not expandable. Spellforce 2 is my counter-example. It allowed a player to select the order in which they upgrade their central building with sub-faction addons. Allowing every race to have 3 different basic playstyles. Giving players a selection of subfactions in-game is a good expansion of the system (in my opinion, and if I understood the arguement correctly). The ideal situation would be to give each player a limited number of sub-factions they can have, but also allow them any combination in amy order. You could also randomize some of them, etc.

Option #2 Different faction types with advantages and disadvantages with same units. Just my preference .

What would you prefer?

What would you prefer as game designer ?

As player it is more interesting to have different factions, but on the other hand it is an absolute balancing hell. And balancing is frustrating for the game designer and the player as well. And even, in a perfect world, if you have a balanced game, many player would feel cheated by virtual inbalance nevertheless.

If you take a look at the oldest competive games in the world, sport matches or chess, then you don't have any faction dependent advantages/disadvantages, it just boils down to player skill and training. The same could be said about MOBAs, no faction dependent advantages, yet you have a high degree of variance through different champions.

So, I don't prefer any of your options, because I believe, that you can create an interesting game from each of them.

What would you prefer?

What would you prefer as game designer ?

As player it is more interesting to have different factions, but on the other hand it is an absolute balancing hell. And balancing is frustrating for the game designer and the player as well. And even, in a perfect world, if you have a balanced game, many player would feel cheated by virtual inbalance nevertheless.

If you take a look at the oldest competive games in the world, sport matches or chess, then you don't have any faction dependent advantages/disadvantages, it just boils down to player skill and training. The same could be said about MOBAs, no faction dependent advantages, yet you have a high degree of variance through different champions.

So, I don't prefer any of your options, because I believe, that you can create an interesting game from each of them.

My current design is that all the players have the same units. This is what I prefer since I don't like to make decisions about factions and what advantages there are to each. When I play those sorts of games I just go with whatever looks cool and use what units I get to win the game. I just like to get into the game and start conquering without too much thought and rely on strategy. So that's what I'm going with.