Units (part I)

Traditionally, RTS units are non de-constructible. What I mean is that the actual units themselves, in almost all RTS games I’ve played, live a short ‘0 / 1′ alive/dead existence, with a certain amount of damage points (shown as health-bars) to represent damage in a fairly abstract way. Most RTS games display diminishing health/damage of a given unit with some kind of cute preset animation. For example, in Total Annihilation the units billow an ever greater amount of smoke. Upon actual death they possess a variety of explosion animations to represent their demise, such as breaking apart or full blown explosions with flying debris!

In Supreme Commander we see pretty much the same system but with fancier deaths or damage animations. The experimental units in particular go out with a real bang. I’m going to propose a more modern and importantly, more fun system in terms of actual gameplay mechanics. It is also, I think, a more realistic way of doing things and fits in with my RTS concept.

The Single-Resource Model

Those of you brave enough to browse my scrappy notes may have noticed that I was brainstorming a resource system for my futuristic RTS concept. I am still adamant that the more logical option, despite being a HUGE fan of T.A and Supreme Commander, is the single, not dual (energy/metal) resource system. The main reason for this is that it fits in with my ideas for linking the expansion of ones empire very directly to resource income in order to promote (but not insist upon) continuing growth.

This single resource which could be regarded as ‘energy’ or ‘finances’ etc, then links into two main areas of the game; research and production. Research is centered around the classical turn-based Space Empires-esq ‘tech tree’ system. Production is of course, anything to do with the actual building, maintenance, repair or reclamation of items within ones empire.

As much as I love T.A, I want to get away from its reliance on good eco-management skills and make RTS even more action packed and strategy/movement centered. The building of energy-metal converters and so on is a fine concept but it does detract slightly from the core notion of warfare and expansion of empire.

Scanning the blogosphere

“The Tangled Concept of Balance” – A superb article over at Gaming’s Alembic about balance, fairness, strategy and style with regards to RTS games. Excerpt:

The first concept generally associated with game balance is what I’m going to call fairness: an equal chance of victory given to all parties. A fair game is one in which no player begins at an inherent advantage or disadvantage, except due to intrinsic qualities of the particular players. Thus, a more experienced or skilled player may be more likely to win than a novice player, but there is no inherent advantage or disadvantage to being assigned a particular player slot (for example, we would say chess is fair if there were no inherent advantage in playing white or black).

Fairness, as I’m [defining] it, allows that players may make choices which are more or less advantageous to themselves, and that the game’s outcome may be affected by random events that favor one player or another. However, before the game starts, there is nothing about the game that will help you to predict the eventual winner…

Highly detailed and well written post if you ask me. Read more…

Also check out “Opportunity Cost” over at the cool Design.Wrong blog. Very interesting delve into how costs affect gameplay and quote “the traditional 3 early game strategies (expand, rush, defend)“.

Gamasutra Article

An article from Jan ‘08 by Nathan Toronto over at Gamasutra entitled “The Future Of The Real-Time Strategy Game” made some interesting criticisms about traditional RTS games, particularly micro/macro-management and the difference between tactics and strategy.