This sounds more like an ATS (Accelerated Time Strategy). Ok, I admit I made that up.

One thing that would speed up deployment for newbies is to split the window. Then you can select units in one view and destinations in another view. When I play starcraft I always hotkey groups, so I wouldn''t benefit from this feature.

Something to minimize micromanagement is to designate supply lines. The supply lines in your game Pax Solaris are excellent, although I don''t know how you would do that in a Shogun theme.

2 things that slow down RTS games are building forces and developing tech. Having pre-made forces will speed up the game a bunch.

It sounds like for example a game of golf where you have one stroke. You set the target, you click a few times to control back swing and speed and then let it rip and watch how close it gets to the hole.

the comparison to gold is an interesting one.

What about the Challenge, Focus, Strike duelling system used in Legend of the Five rings ? It could be interesting to see if it couldnt be adapted to a RTS.
Rather than controlling the units, you simply control the formations, and you give them general orders (like what attitude to adopt) rather than specific ones (like attacking a particular target in the opposition).
In essence, you would be playing something more of a board game than anything, but this would certainly speed things up.

Oh, if you dont know the Challenge Focus Strike thingie... essentially, the two opponents Challenge each other. Then they get a choice, in turn, to either Strike or Focus their energy (which allows much stronger strike). In the card game, the amount by which your Chi increases when you Focus is variable, so even if you start with lower Chi than your opponent you can still beat them if you play properly. The lowest Chi always get the first choice, so as to give them a chance (otherwise the stronger Chi simply strikes and win). The complexity of the process can of course be increased with various special powers that can be played during the duel.

Anyway, essentially it''s an auction with hidden bids, or a sort of poker where you wanna bluff your opponent, except you cant lie down, only win or die
Now, like I said, imagine the same concept applied to RTS.
You couldnt call it RTS anymore (well, I dont think so anyway), but you certainly could make something exciting out of it, I am sure.

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Sancte Isidore ora pro nobis !

Why would you want to? StarCraft is the final avatar of RTS. There is no other.

well there are some major things that slow down current RTS games, like moving your units across the map, gathering resources, waiting for units/structures to build.

Making this take alot less time, or being instantaneous would help alot. Since everything would take such a short time, time spans like 5 seconds would now become penilizing to the player.

I guess the problem with making a real-time strat game last only one minute is that alot of the "Strategy" goes out the window. It becomes more of a reaction game since everything is happening so fast. There is no room to think, all responses must be pre-though out, and quickly initiated.

I guess the other big problem would be how do the units interract in battle? How long do they take to kill another unit? Is micromanagment even possible, or are other skills more valuable?

Finally having a very simple interface would be very beneficial. Such features like scouting, may need to be eliminated to save time, as well as other things.

Check out the old Japanese game Carnage Heart for the PSX...extreamly deep stratigy game...but really simple to understand (if you know even the basics of programing)

It was a game about fighting robots...only the player had to program the bots and didn''t have direct control over them...battles were real time, sit back and watch affairs...and the programing aspect used a really clever graphical "chip" basied design...place chips on a board so they connect together (each chip represented a basic program command...turn left..etc)...there were about 40 different chip types in all (for actions like movement, for checking variables (if/then), for setting variables...basic stuff)...the cool thing was that as the game went on you could get different boards to program on (larger, held more chip slots...some worked faster processing through the chips quicker, etc..) along with the regular weapon and armor upgrades (but you quickly found out those didn''t matter as much as how well the robot was programmed...a entry level robot could easily take down one with all weapons and armor upgrades, if it was programed well)...the battles consisted of three bots per side (and some of the programming chips allowed you to send messages to fellow bots to coordinate attacks/defense)

Hmm...this gives me an idea or two

fast rts= rpg combat sys

check for a grandia fight sys with the strategie of pokemon

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