Hello, I had a quick question to run by some of you game designers. What are your feelings about resource shuttling in RTS games? The RTS community seems to be polarized into two groups: 1) Economics is waste of my time, let me fight! 2) Economics management is fun and realistically to how war is funded Background – the game is set in the classical times with 4 resources (similar to the AoE games) of food, wood, stone, and ore. Each resources is used to purchase specific things that will further your advancement in the game. Right now, we have it slated so that economic units do not shuttle. What I mean by shuttling is that your unit goes to the resource, spends a few seconds there, then transport their accumulated resource back to the storage bin where it then adds to your stockpile of resources. If a unit is attacked in route to the storage center the resources are lost. Units are then gathered by ‘chunks’ per delivery. This is very AoE’ish. We decided to do away with this because it would cut down on path finding calculations and hopefully in-turn allows us to increase the population cap. This saves our processor load for other places in the game were we think it would be more useful. So instead, our units will just sit there in one spot and collect resources incrementally as they acquire the resource that goes directly to your stockpile of resources. The only rules are that you must place a resource center next to the resources you want to collect. This resource center has an ‘area of effect’ that enables you to harvest any resource in that radius. So this stops players from taking a unit clear across the other side of the map to acquire some rare resource, you must first establish a ‘base camp’ of sorts. This is very RoN’ish (Rise of Nations) I was hoping you all could give me some pros and cons of both different types of resource gathering, here is what I have so far: (Assume the AI activates inactive units to another resource when its source has dried up) Non Shuttling: Less pathfinding Less micro management Less clutter Shuttling: More like what our target audience is used to More realistic Is there something here that I’m missing? Please let me know if you have any thoughts one way or the other! I’ll answer any questions or queries about other relevant gameplay aspects (as they are currently spec’d) if needed. Thanks! Wijitmaker™ member of WFG 0 A.D.

I don''t care either way as long as they aren''t stupid about it. I find stupid workers in general annoying. If a worker is standing around doing nothing I think it should find the nearest resource and go gather it. Shuttling is more realistic for me, but it''s incredibly annoying when they get attacked and 1) keep on minin or 2) run in the opposite direction of your army.

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Original post by Wijitmaker
Hello, I had a quick question to run by some of you game designers. What are your feelings about resource shuttling in RTS games? The RTS community seems to be polarized into two groups:

1) Economics is waste of my time, let me fight!
2) Economics management is fun and realistically to how war is funded

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My problem is that generals do not manage economies, and presidents/monarchs/prime ministers do not lead troops in contemporary times. In medieval times the monarch was the supreme general and he levied the people to fund his wars, but he didn''t oversee every detail of production from cutting wood to hauling stone.

I think that what your target audience is used to is not a major concern; it is more important to provide intelligent and enjoyable play. If economics is still a factor but without micromanagement (ie, it''s strategic rather than tactical or monotonic), then you probably have a good balance.

Of course, this is just my personal bias in favor of delegation...

(P.S. You haven''t responded to my email.)

for my RTS im working on the player is allowed to customize how he wishes to gather resources and interact with any particular part of the game , for example city taxes. the player may choose from a hiearchy of control that allows him to alter specific details of any process his population is doing. the player can macro or micro manage his population depending on what he wants to do. micro managment allows details to be optimised bottoms up, say if a player decides to increase taxes he can increase taxes on given items only, or let the AI make the micro decisions for him while he deals with the macro decisions like wars. the level of detail should be adjustable to the players liking. he may also delgate scripted AI lieutenants to do things for him.

Thanks for the insite folks. I''ll comment tomorrow, in the mean time... keep the comments commin''!

Just wanted to give quick shout to Oluseyi. I sent you an email on the 23rd. I hope you got it? I''ll forward it, just in case. Maybe my email glitched?



Wijitmaker™
member of WFG
0 A.D.

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Original post by Wijitmaker
Non Shuttling:
Less pathfinding
Less micro management
Less clutter

Shuttling:
More like what our target audience is used to
More realistic

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You''re right about one thing - resource management is probably one of the more controversial areas of RTS games.

Personally, I don''t have a big problem with resource management, although I''d prefer to be able to concentrate on the combat side of things. I''d also like it to add an interesting dimension to the gameplay.

One of the immediate problems I see with the non-shuttling implementation is that it more or less does away with the concept of supply lines, which will have a negative impact on the strategic relevance of resource management. (although to be fair, in most games where the peons do shuttle, supply lines aren''t really a major issue anyway.)

I''d go with vaneger here - let the player choose.

I don''t agree with classing economic management as being ''inferior'' to combat management. It seems to me that the ruler of a country can take an interest in whatever he wishes to take an interest in.

A ruler that was particularly interested in the economy could control the economy and allow his generals a deal of autonomy in controlling his armies.

Conversely, a military ruler might want to control his armies directly, but leave the economy to advisors/guild of merchants/whatever.

Raloth observed that resource shuttler types with nothing to do should go and find some resources to shuttle. I''d say that soldiers with nothing to do should also follow their standing orders, which may scouting, hit-n-run on the enemy, grouping with other soldiers for coordinated attacks, or just returning to their barracks.

Exactly what kind of things a soldier or shuttler does automatically would depend upon how you''ve managed them in the past. Ideally, the game would start with relatively few units of any kind, and would adjust the level of autonomy of units depending upon how often you interfered with what units were doing.

This would have the interesting side-effect that obsessive micro-management could reduce your troops to mindless robots who couldn''t think for themselves, but lack of management might produce troops who are too autonomous, and have trouble working together.

CoV

In my opinion, if you have to carry your collected resources into a warehouse (shuttling), you should also have to carry them wherever you use them (like in Settlers). It seems a bit silly that if you chop some wood and bring them to your storage pit, you can immediately build a new building a parsec away if you want to (provided of course that the map allows such distances ). If you don''t want to use shuttling, then you could limit the usage of resources to the distances between the usage point and the warehouses/resource collecting locations.

About shuttling... How about a compromise: instead of carrying the resources little by little to the warehouse, have them build a supply wagon for transporting (like the Norse wagon in Age of Mythology), but unlike in AoM you would have to empty it to a warehouse every now and then.

Also, the way resources are currently collected is a bit awkward: i''d say it''s more important which resources are collected than by whom (e.g. you shouldn''t need to tell villagers A and B to chop some wood, but instead tell "these wood must be chopped, with a minimum of 2 villagers" or something like that). This way it would be possible to reduce micromanagement, since you can set jobs with priorities with ease and the computer will worry about the actual assignment of villagers to these jobs (much like in Dungeon Keeper: you tell your imps what to do, but you don''t have to worry about individual imps).

Usually I don''t like villagers seeking new resources on their own, because they often end up in enemy territory and get killed. If the job system briefly described above was used, this wouldn''t be such a problem since they would only seek active jobs with the highest priority. Also, villagers would only stand idle if no jobs at all were assinged.

Of course using a job-system has nothing to do with shuttling, but it would reduce micromanagement and the annoying moments when your villagers chop the wood you wanted to use for cover (e.g. as a wall, since you can''t walk through forests, which is also silly).

What about no resource collectiing?
Instead have all the resource shipped in from off map by transports. Which the player has to defend from enemy raids and attaks enroute to your bases.

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Writer, Programer, Cook, I''m a Jack of all Trades
Current Design project
Chaos Factor Design Document

I don''t see any problems with this idea if your goal is to give the players more units.

Is this a technical problem now? WC3 allows tons of units for several different players in an online setting.

I don''t see why you would need to have grunts shuttle things back and forth, this might make RTS more interesting in a way because the grunts would be protected by a building. One of the best strategies in this type of game is to throw area of effect spells at an enemy player''s resource collectors with a raid and then just build up a superior army to destroy the competition. It sounds like your plan would make this raid strategy an obsolete tactic.