You''ve all played the warcrafts.. the total annihilations.. the command and conquers. Many of these games emulate war to a degree that achieves a careful balance between fun and realism, but still i find myself wondering- how many wars has the world seen where one entity went undefeated? Which brings me to my design idea: Why do we always have to win? Defeat is inevitable (to some degree) in any war or series of battles. Every win and loss is part of the intricate web of war. Some battles you will find yourself in a situation so precarious, a surrender may even be necessary. Every battle should attribute something to the end game''s results. For example, say in WW2, the battle of iwo jima had gone a different direction. that island would have directly affected the war, and thus the next ''mission''. anyone have any other ideas such as this, or ideas on implementation? -eldee ;another space monkey; [ Forced Evolution Studios ]

Do NOT let Dr. Mario touch your genitals. He is not a real doctor!

huh? are you talking single player or something? I play multiplayer and I lose plenty.

to get the ball rolling, i thought of an idea that ''forces'' a more
natural outcome (to avoid but not eliminate the ''save/load till i
win'' syndrome).

eliminate ''save anytime-anywhere'' features.
instead, create a timed-save per level. every 5 or 10 minutes,
save the battle''s progress, so if the user wants to leave, its not
a huge sacrifice (or he can wait another minute if it is a sacrifice). i know this violates some of the other "save game" debates
floating around, but in my little world, defeat is not exactly a
bad thing.. it just forces you to change up your strategy a bit.





-eldee
;another space monkey;
[ Forced Evolution Studios ]

Do NOT let Dr. Mario touch your genitals. He is not a real doctor!

quote: Original post by Anonymous Poster
huh? are you talking single player or something? I play multiplayer and I lose plenty.

hahaha... well either way i think it would work.
single player was my primary thought, but in multiplayer you
could have some sort of campaign as well.

i dont think it would work well for those ''one shot deathmatch'' style
battles.

-eldee
;another space monkey;
[ Forced Evolution Studios ]

Do NOT let Dr. Mario touch your genitals. He is not a real doctor!

Going *way* back, The original Wing Commander had a mission tree setup. IIRC, the next star system you went to depended on how well you did in the current star system. If you did well, the war in general went well, and you kept advancing into enemy territory. If you did poorly, the war more or less went against you, and you ended up getting beaten back from system to system performing more and more desperate defensive actions. It was possible to jump from the ''lose-the-war'' path to the ''win-the-war'' path several times, although as the game went on, it grew harder and harder to change the ultimate outcome.

The big disadvantage of this approach is that you have to make many more missions than you would in a linear story, and it would require several replays to play all the missions. Indeed, the player would have to both win and lose the game to play all missions.

yckx

Here''s an interesting idea. In real life, we don''t know if we''ve won or not, so why shoudl the player have an exact win or lose. By this I mean in a battle, not a war. An example you ask for? Let''s say we have a war between two nations, North and South. One South army is retreating after a defeat, with only 500 soldiers left. Near the border, they encounter another North army , looking to cross the border and sweep the South countryside, which is mostly unguarded, since South is on the offensive. This North army consists of 4500 men. Here victory is slim, but if the South general decides not to surrender (which could be interesting in the war as well), he may die taking out 34 of the North''s men, or 3400. Well, if 500 men kill 3400, but die doing it, is it a win or loss? Have the story change depending on how well the player does, not whether he wins or loses. I''m not sure how the Wing Commander game runs, so this may be just a repetition.

--Vic--

all great ideas..

yckx: yeah, it would be alot of work making alot of extra missions, but
the replay value on the game would be incredible.

RTP: i agree there, win/loss is never really defined until the end
of the war when you can look and see the big picture (and sometimes
not even then). Which also brings me to another RTS hangup- resources.
since when do armies set up camp and start digging for gold and
cutting down trees (granted the warcraft games are a bit silly
sometimes, but all RTS games have a somewhat similar resource gathering
system)?

i''d like to see some realistic supply lines (that could actually
be severed in an offensive manuver).

-eldee
;another space monkey;
[ Forced Evolution Studios ]

Do NOT let Dr. Mario touch your genitals. He is not a real doctor!

Hello,

I think this problem is again whether games should tell a story or be a simulation.

If the game is a pure simulation then it''s easy - just define total defeat as the player controls no units and total victory as the player''s enemies control no units. Players will figure out whether they won or lost a particular battle by themselves.

I think that if you want a game to have a story then it will be mostly linear. Sure, you can have some choices like be good/evil but there''s only so much voice acting/cinematics you can put in a CD (or five).

I like games to have a story. It''s just personal preference.

Of course, the X-COM series had a story and you didn''t have to win every battle (except the last one, or the ones for your last base). In fact, on the higher difficulties it was certain that you''d lose many battles. But then, X-COM is unique.

As for supply lines - have you played M.A.X.? Materials, fuel, gold, power and manpower had to be transporter either by trucks (only materials, fuel and gold) or with connectors that connect various buildings. For example, you find a spot wih nice underground resources and build a mine on it. Then you need to build a power generator so that it can operate. You connect both and now you have a working mine. Next you connect it to your existing complex so you can store the mined resources in warehouses or use them to build units/buildings etc...

It added a nice element to gameplay. For example, on low resource maps you might find gold in the middle of the ocean. Then you had to connect it all the way to your main base. Only, connectors are very fragile so you had to actually defend them if you wanted your gold supply to last.

You also had to keep your forces supplied with ammo and repair them (both of which take materials to do, so you have to fill up trucks and repair vehichles, send them to the battlefield, do whatever you have to, then return for more materials). So fighting near your base became easier.

- lmov

In RL, Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan are the only generals I can think of that went undefeated. Some others came awfully close though.

As another poster mentioned though, how do you really know you''ve won? The problem with many if not all RTS games out there really DON''T model warfare very well at all. They have the trappings of war to make players think they are being armchair generals, but the factors that make real wars such nail-biting affairs are missing from them.

In RTS games, the players know too much and have to much explicit control. Battles (missions) are far too static and already make true strategy a moot point (battles should be chosen when and where by the superior strategist...not predetermined by whatever the level designers decided to come up with).

The trick is that is there truly a "pivotal" battle? Many say that had Hitler destroyed the French and English forces at Dunkirk, WWII would have been an Axis victory. Ditto if the Japanese had sunk our aircraft carriers at Midway. But how do you really know? Perhaps the destruction of the English forces at Dunkirk would have made Americans finally tip in their hat a little early. And even if the Japanese defeated our carriers, would the japanese have been able to contend against America''s industrial output?

Just as in chess, when you sacrifice a unit, is it merely to set up the opponent for a bigger fall? Many historians think that the Axis ultimately lost because they overextended themselves. Germany should not have attacked Russia, and Japan should have consolidated its hold on China, India and Korea before tackling Indochina, and the malay/indonesia/phillipines corridor. Their easy victories stretched their forces too thin for a counter attack. So in a game situation, what may seem like a victory may indeed not be one.

The trouble is....and I''m sure this forum is tired of hearing me blow this horn....that RTS games really aren''t "strategy" in the larger sense of the word. They focus primarily on a battle or perhaps a few battles at a time. Let me offer another WWII example of why RTS games are not truly strategic. Both Germany and Japan failed to take into consideration "people equation" into their manufacturing. They both realized their needs of raw materials and oil, but they failed to take into consideration the resources needed to train the factory workers and specialized fighting units (for example fighter pilots or tankers). While Germany could claim the best weapons and tanks of any nation in the war, and Japan theoretically had a superior Navy (since they cheated on warship specs created by the Treary of Washington), they didn''t forsee how to replace their losses. They didn''t set aside the training facilities for their workers or their special units. Believe it or not, Germany didn''t stop building capital ships for the lack of industry, they stopped because they didn''t have the trained labor to do so.

RTS games do not tend to consider things like this either. They have resource or technology trees that supposedly simulate this, but they do a poor job of modeling what really happens. Because they focus on one battle at a time, the larger picture gets lost. Look at the American Revolution in which the Americans lost virutally every battle but won the war...or the Vietnamese versus America in which we won nearly every battle, but lost the war.

In RTS games, each mission is the "war" rather than the "battle". The trouble with this approach is that there are ways to win the war without winning the battles. RTS games do not really give you options to do things like that. What I am basically saying is that RTS games are too simplistic. If they offered more detail, they could offer more ways to win while simultaneously offering deeper gameplay.

Stupid mistake on my part: Wing Commander was a space combat sim, not a RTS. Still, the mission-tree concept can be abstracted to many game genres, so the idea is still valid.

yckx