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Original post by Grim
Actually, it annoys me in some RTSs that if you build the wrong building in the beginning (e.g. in AoE use all the wood to build houses), you for all practical purposes lose.

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Settlers 3 had this. Unlike Settlers 2, which kept some resources for emergencies - so you''d always have enough to build a woodcutter, quarry and sawmill - you could easily run out of resources with which to build those buildings.

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I think you should be able to chop wood (or whatever resource collecting you wish to do), pile it up temporarily (with no warehouse whatsoever) and would never ever have to build any storage buildings. Of course anyone could steal the resources this way, or they could rot more easily, so it would be a good idea to build warehouses, but you just didn''t have to.

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This is quite true. No hut is logically required for chopping wood. You don''t even need a trained woodcutter. Hell, you don''t even need an axe or saw, you can down trees with fire; although it takes longer, of course, and you probably end up with less usable wood.

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Also, what''s the difference between a woodcutter''s hut and a stonemason''s hut? In reality? Actually there might be no difference (in the architecture, that is), so why not just have generic buildings of different sizes and materials and have the purpose be determined by the occupant. For example, you could have:

- small wooden building with a villager inside: house
- small wooden building with a military training unit inside: light barracks
- medium stone building with a veteran trainer inside: heavy barracks
- medium stone building with a guard inside: prison (for captured enemies, for instance)
- huge stone building with a nobleman inside: castle

Or something like that. You could have a lot of different models for buildings and have a flag or some kind of a guild sign (or tools etc, e.g. a blacksmith might have an anvil outside the building) to graphically show what is the purpose of the building. For special buildings (which look much more different) you could of course have separate models, but most would be pretty much the same. This way you have more choices: the size would determine how many workers/resoucres you could put inside the building, the material would determine how much damage it could take etc.

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I like this one a lot. It has several interesting features. Firstly, and most importantly, it allows you to reuse buildings when the original occupant is redundant. The opposite is what we see in most games: upgraded buildings are built next door to the old buildings. In reality, new soldiers would be trained in the same barracks as old soldiers, because buildings are expensive to build.

It also allows for the possibility of upgrading the materials from which a building is constructed: you might fortify your buildings on the front line, taking stone from buildings on the other side of your teritory.

I had an idea which was rather like this, but at the primitive end of the scale. Instead of having permanent buildings, your army had tents which it would set up near where it was doing battle. Permanent buildings would then be quite rare: stone huts to house the command centre; or if you captured a town you could set up your smithy/armourer/whatever in that town''s buildings.

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However, I personally have a strong dislike to symbolic representation of things in games like RTSs. In a game like the original Civilization, where the whole system is symbolic (it''s turn-based and clearly the units on the screen even look symbolic, since they are represented in simplified symbols) I wouldn''t mind this, but it feels so out-of-context when you have clearly individual soldiers with a bit of personality (they say things like "yes sir" or in scripted scenarios even something more complex) and realistic graphics for the terrain (ok, maybe not that realistic, but still rather non-symbolic). All this is on a very concrete level, but then you are hit in the head with all this symbolism: the gold isn''t gold, it''s generic currency; the berries aren''t berries, they''re generic food; you can''t walk in forests, because "not walking in forests" represents the difficulty of moving through forests etc.

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Symbolism does appear out of place in many games, I agree. I''m cool with Civ, since it isn''t an RTS. However, AoE and the like use symbols which don''t obviously represent the thing they are symbols for.

In the real world, no amount of currency can cause a Hand Of Nod to rise from the ground, no amount of food causes a civilisation to progress to the iron age over night.

Paying for mercenary forces, or to fly in men and equipment, is reasonable. Having berries represent generic gatherable food is reasonable.

Another thing that seems obviously wrong is timescales. We are expected to believe that a castle can be built in the time it takes to walk what looks like a few miles. Using prebuilt structures/tents/advanced technology/magic helps with this, but many games simply choose to imagine that castles were built in hours rather than years.

I like the non-shuttling resource management better. For that matter, I wish there was no resource management, and the player got "paid" (i.e. the government will give you X amount of dollars every 10 minutes). That would actually be more realistic as the army does not go out and gather resources to pay troops, the government gives the army billions of dollars, and the army plans out how to use it.

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Original post by Onemind
I like the non-shuttling resource management better. For that matter, I wish there was no resource management, and the player got "paid" (i.e. the government will give you X amount of dollars every 10 minutes). That would actually be more realistic as the army does not go out and gather resources to pay troops, the government gives the army billions of dollars, and the army plans out how to use it.

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Well, this really depends upon the game.

In the times in which AoE were set, governments simply didn't have the infrastructure to support an army at a distance. The home city would have kitted them up to begin their journey but, at the very least, the army would have to have obtained wood and food for themselves. They wouldn't need to build houses, generally, since they could just use tents or sleep in natural cover. It's also worth nothing that AoE isn't a game about armies waging war; it is a game about villages defending themselves.

In C&C, you are fighting for control over the resource Tiberium, so the fact that you gather it in a warzone is reasonable. The way in which you obtain buildings and men is obviously not realistic. More likely is that you would get such men and equipment at the beginning of the mission as befits the requirements of the mission.

In Homeworld, you are fighting for the resources in the form of dust and asteroids, and then for space superiority. This is similar to Total Annihilation, in which you fight firstly for control over metal deposits, and secondly for domination over your opponents. It makes sense that you would harvest in a warzone, since the presence of the resources is what makes it a warzone. Because of the way that units are constructed in these games, it makes sense that they are built using the resources you harvest.

In games like Outpost and Settlers, you play as the government of a small colony. It is reasonable that you control the resource management, since in a small colony, the government would have to control it.

In larger civilisations, resources are never usually managed directly by the government but via legislation. In such civilisations, it may take months or even years before legislation effects the resources available to the civilisation. Therefore, resource management for large civilisations is not a suitable topic for an RTS, unless you want a really slow game.

EDIT: For resources such as Homeworld's dust and C&C's Tiberium, which are quite easy to harvest to completion, it is reasonable to imagine that they would be harvested in a warzone.

Resources like iron ore, coal and oil are difficult to harvest, and it would be especially difficult to harvest them in a warzone. It would be quite improper to suppose that you'd sneak into enemy territory, set up an oil drilling platform and start pumping it out of there, in the middle of an all out war.

The key note, perhaps, is simplicity and celerity. Because it is simple to harvest space dust quickly, it is reasonable to foray into enemy territory and harvest the space dust. Because it is difficult to mine coal, it is more likely that you would wish to have the site of the mine well under control for an extended period of time before you start mining it.

On the face of it, Tiberium is a good candidate for hit-and-run harvesting, but it doesn't really make sense. The advantage of harvesting space dust in the middle of a Homeworld battle is that you can use the dust right there to construct new units. Although you can construct units with Tiberium, it doesn't make any sense that you are able to do so, since it isn't a construction material. Tiberium is all over the world, so it would make more sense to harvest Tiberium in secure fields, rather than in the middle of a warzone.

[edited by - Mayrel on February 10, 2004 3:15:46 PM]

For campaigns or story games....
A happy medium might be to have resources on the board being harvested by citizins. I.e. you have mines, a foresting company, a windmill, hydorplants, watever on a map. Who ever can get to the resource first has to protect it from the other side. The other side then has the option of running off your forces or destroying the resource (burn down the windmill, collapse the mine, kill all the foresters) which would then take it out of the game permanetly.

You could also take it a step further. If there is some goal other than the complete anilation of the other army, you would not get the harvested resources until after the level was complete. Then between levels you can decide what to do with all the harvested resources, make armor, whatever and start the next level with these items. So you would start a level with a fixed number of resources for that level, but you would also do some form of resource gathering that would affect the next level. This would put the focus on the fighing but you would also have some control over your resources.

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Original post by Kars
You could also take it a step further. If there is some goal other than the complete anilation of the other army, you would not get the harvested resources until after the level was complete. Then between levels you can decide what to do with all the harvested resources, make armor, whatever and start the next level with these items. So you would start a level with a fixed number of resources for that level, but you would also do some form of resource gathering that would affect the next level. This would put the focus on the fighing but you would also have some control over your resources.

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This puts me in mind of Shogun.

In Shogun, one fights for control over a province. Between the fights, you exploit the resources in your provinces, represented as individual buildings. I suppose that the buildings -- an archery dojo, a mine, a tea garden, etc -- are symbols for towns built to support the production of their particular products.

A failing in Shogun, I think, is that you don''t get to fight for individual towns. That removes a possible strategy -- crippling the enemy''s infrastructure within a province -- but also removes some interesting fighting environments.

This is also similar to Imperium Galactica 2. In IG2, you fight in space or on planet''s surfaces. Whilst fighting, you don''t get to build units or harvest resources, but after taking a planet, you get that planet''s resources and manufacturing facilities.