I''ve been pondering an RTS idea for quite a while now. Some of you might have read my post about the problems involved with a massive RTS in which there are always new areas to explore and expand to. In addition, my idea also involves a little of the city simulation genre. You would build up a city and your money revenue would come from taxes, etc., instead of harvesting. However, there are some problems with this that I''m not sure what people would think about. The main thing is the incredible micro-management required. The kind of people who like building cities are not typically the same group who love mass destruction, so the two might not like certain aspects of the game. Maintaining a city could really take away from the warfare experience. Here''s some ideas I had for taking care of these problems. If you have any more ideas or suggestions about my concept in general, they are greatly appreciatiated! Idea #1- I leave the idea as-is. For people who don''t like building cities, well, that''s just too bad. Idea #2- The player starts off by building a city. Once it meets certain requirements, it becomes a "capital city", or something like that. The player then can give "grants" to virtual mayors who will build more cities and generate a little tax revenue. This cities (strategically) should be protected by the player. The player could still also extend their own city or build distant ones. Another potential problem with this is that the AI required to design a city adds to the already humongous overhead of a massive RTS. Idea #3- Drop the city idea. A massive RTS is original enough. Idea #4- Each player must protect an "allied" nation with millitary strength. The player is rewarded with a % of taxes. Idea #5- (This one is really far out) Release two games in the same series. One has city building, the other, warfare. They can be played independently offline. Online, the player can ally with players with the opposite game and protect them/provide tax revenue. Long post- if you got here, your support is really appreciated! Any ideas are even more welcome.

I''ve never read your first post, so forgive me if I say something that has mentioned before.
How bout this:


You could build multiple cities, forming a country, which could recruit armies and take over other countries and cities. Eventually you could take over continents and ultimately the world (therefore win). The cities (once they reach a certain point) should be able to handle themselves without much maintenance so that the player wouldn''t be bogged down with the job of managing possibly hundreds of cities. This would satisfy both city builders and mass-destruction lovers.

Good luck!

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Realm Games Company

Thanks for your help! Now that I think about it, I could probably implement city-building on a much more macro-scopic scale than in, say, SimCity. This way, as you said, they would quickly reach a critical mass and be self-sufficient.

What does everyone think of this idea? Does it seemed too patched together, or do you think it''d be worth a shot?

First off, your idea is fairly close to the game that my friend and I have been working on in our spare time and this only proves that an idea is original for a very short period of time – then someone else has the same thought (the light bulb being patented by Edison).

Many of our city management designs have been based on a old TBS game, Empire . When you start the game you have one city that is yours, and the rest are for conquest. We’ve patterned the startup to our game after Empire and have given the player a fully (algorithmically) built/generated city along with enough citizens to call the city a capital. So, the starting city becomes your capital and is the most important city. The player is allowed to move the capital to a city that has been captured once during the game but only if the starting capital city is not under attack.

Some of the issues with regards to City Management and building can be implemented in a way that does not require as much micro-management.

I’ll tackle building first:
Looking at Sim City 4 or any of the Sim City games for that matter, you basically zone land and the simulation does its thing. So, for the most part, that isn’t too terribly time consuming. Using that pattern and extending it just as SC4 has, we can add sub-categories to the three types of zones that we want to build. For instance, under Industrial Zones, we could add sub-categories for small and large weapons factories and the AI sub-system would build the facilities for you.

I agree with you that some people enjoy the city building aspects of games. So, for those people you provide a second interface that lets them place the actual buildings as opposed to just zoning.

City Management:
City management, for a game like this can seem overwhelming. I have concluded that you have two options to follow in an effort to reduce the time a player spends managing a city and its facilities and they are GUI and game play (You might find more, or may not agree with me).

GUI:
The main problem is the GUI, or the lack of a real GUI. When we have a limited set of gadgets to present to the user, we are forced to present data in a very rudimentary manner. One example is setting the output of a weapons factory (this suggests that a factory can build anything, taking re-tooling into account). The first approach might be to force the user to click on each separate factory and interact with the Dialog for that specific factory. This is slow and tedious forcing the player to scroll around the map looking for all weapons factories. So, how can we rethink this to allow the player to quickly tune the output of the weapons factories that are under their control? Looking at non-game GUI’s, you’ll see a trend in options dialogs to present a Tree representation of the options available on the left side of a window. When an option is selected a Dialog for that option is displayed on the right side of the window and the user can quickly adjust the settings and move to another option.

So, if you a Tree representation in a City Control Dialog (CCD) that allowed the player to select Factories and see the list of factories that belong to that city and then select a specific factory and adjust that factories output, the player could move through the list of factories very quickly and then get back to other task. Another option is when the player clicked on the Factories section a Summary page for factories would be shown to give the player a quick overview of the current situation and further still when the player selects a specific factory the minimap would provide a visual clue of the location of that factory. You can use this pattern for all of the cities facilities.

Game Play (or what the player is used to):
Game play can be changed. In most RTSes players are used to building different types of factories to build different types of weapons. What if there was only one type of factory to build all of the available weapons? In Empire (what, more talk about this game?), a city could only produce one type of weapon at a time and further the available types of weapons was completely based on the location of the city. For example, all cities could build vehicles such as tanks and soldiers as well as jets but if a city was located next to water then that city could build ships and submarines, as well. So, extending that pattern to our factories we come up with factories can only build one type of weapon at a time and the available weapons are based on location. Here’s the part where GUI and game play overlap. Our City Control Dialog (CCD) for factories has been reduced to a list of types of weapons that we can build (based on the factories that belong to that city) and the ability to increase or decrease output on a specific weapon platform.


So, I think that these types of games are coming… heck, we’ve been designing our game (on and off) since ’97 so I know somebody else must be thinking the same thing.




Dave "Dak Lozar" Loeser

An alternative you might want to consider including is: rather than making the player micro-manage individual factories, instead have an option to just tell the game you want 30 tanks at a given rallying location, and have simple AI routines work out the production scheduling. The only tricky part is coming up with an appropriate way of judging when to scrap previous partial production in favour of a newer, more urgent order, and when to just wait until the old order is done...

quote: Original post by Dak Lozar
First off, your idea is fairly close to the game that my friend and I have been working on in our spare time and this only proves that an idea is original for a very short period of time – then someone else has the same thought (the light bulb being patented by Edison).

I have had this idea for a long time...

HTTP 500 occurs just so often that I am tired of reentering password. I am alnite.