quote: Original post by Extrarius
What if, instead of having a few fixed units, I could make a database of strengths and weaknesses, and have the game generate custom units each game. That would make the game stay challenging, and be an interesting twist from the norm. Or maybe instead of making units totally random, make them slightly different each time though. Also, it would be interesting if the game would keep track of everything everybody bought and try to figure out what units are overpowered (or what attributes are bought most often) and make those units(or attributes) cost more.

I never really liked the idea of customizable units in RTS games, and to be honest, I like the idea of randomly generated ones even less. Not so much because it is a bad idea, but because it would be very difficult to implement without making it suck horribly.

First of all, randomly generated strengths and weaknesses may well end up not making sense. For example, an anti-infantry tank which is particularly vulnerable to small arms fire would be pretty nonsensical.

Then there is the problem that the player has no real way of knowing exactly what his units are supposed to be useful for. This means he has to waste time at the beginning of the game figuring out what all his units do.

Finally, I don''t really like RPS style balancing, it is almost as boring as having no balancing at all. Having 300 different units doesn''t make it any more interesting either. I would generally prefer four or five different ''races'', with maybe 5-10 different units each. Each one of those units has to fulfil a unique role, and be useful enough in that role to justify its existance. A certain amount of crossover might be allowed between units allowing for general purpose units, but these units gain their flexibility at the cost of power. I''d rather have 5 unique, well designed units than 50000 badly designed boring ones.

Well, I could address the problem of a unit have a strength and weakness cancel eachother out by some simple logic. Also, to prevent the player from having to build each unit to figure it out, I could just make the tooltip for the build button show what weakness and strengths the unit has.
I had no intention of making hundreds of different unit types. I would probably make around 15-20 different unit types, and I would eliminate the normal ''race'' that most games have to make it more fair. Each unit would have 1-3 upgrades, and upgrades could effect 1-5 units.
I planed on using the randomness to make 2^32*20 unique and interesting units instead of only 5, or 10, etc. I realize it wont be easy, but it wouldnt be a fun programming and design challenge if it was. I would post demos to make sure it doesn''t suck, and you would have the opportunity to review it and make suggestions.