i'm working on a strategy game - well, "working" sounds a bit over enthusiatic at current state it is an empire building game - or better a simulation of a civilization with emphasis on economics beginning with a small village you will take care of expanding your territory, building new towns or collonies, discovering new parts of the world (map is divided into small provinces, like the board game risk but much smaller), dealing with neighbouring civilizations (politics, wars, ...) and of course economics i don't want to go into the details here now, because it's too early in the designing process. for now i want to ask you to help me with two major problems: 1) TIME: the game should be in real time, it starts in ancient times - let's say around 3000 bc and ends in the 20th/21st century - you see the problem: if you play a full game of 5000 years at a constant speed of about 1 year in 3 minutes you need 250 hours to complete the game (at 1 year in 5 minutes it would be over 400 hours). One solution might be to change the game speed depending on the epoche: ancient troops move slower than a modern day tank - so game speed could be tweeked so both units need equal amounts of real time to move from one province to another - i'm not really happy with this idea, because this gives you less control in the beginning of the game, since time would elapse faster. So other solutions/opinions are very welcome. 2) LOOSING: i don't like the idea of a constantly growing and prospering empire over a time period of about 5000 years, this would be boring. I mean every empire falls apart some day - for many different reasons. But I don't want to show the player only a nice game over screen and some game statistics if his civlization gets conquered after 2000 years. Should you only become a kind of vassal of your conquerer? Should the player have the option to resume playing as the conquering nation? Or let him resume the game choosing between all civilizations still alive (or maybe randomly choosen)? Other ideas??? I really like to see what you think about these problems. Thanks in advance for constructive comments and suggestions.

1st of all, play the Civ games. You're basically offering an RTS version.

Second - people lose games. They deal with it. At best, allow some system for your conquered people having a revolution.

This actually sounds a lot like Rise of Nations (awesome game). Basically, it's Civilization and Age of Empires combined - makes for a cool game.

But, yes, generally you do have the problem of advancing through the ages too quickly. You can move from BC to 2000 in an hour, tops, and this makes for quick, action-filled gameplay (which pretty much makes up the game).

For the single-player campaigns, however, what they do is restrict the world to an age; the world advances as a whole. Its played basically on a Risk board (exactly like the board game Diplomacy; WW1 game if anyone knows it) and you go around having skirmishes depending on where you move your pieces.

Between every battle, all the researched technology resets to the world's current age, so no one really has that much of a tech edge. Although it sounds like it would make gameplay repetitious, it really doesn't - every 3 or 4 turns the age advances and you have a whole new set of units to weild against your enemies.

Granted, making this into a multi-player game would be really difficult, as you mentioned, because games would be insanely long. I remember I once tried to play out a multiplayer Civ game; that didn't turn out to well even though you could save and load multiplayer games.

So I think your best bet is to have a wide range of ages available, but restict which you can play in. Have scenarios that have specific goals to accomplish, and be accomplishable in that age. That way you don't have to worry about people advancing too quickly, etc.

Oh well. Good luck brainstorming. Don't forget to figure all the important stuff out before starting - otherwise you'll keep finding things you forgot to add! [razz]

Also look up Pax Imperia - an RTS adatpation of Orion. An ugly, ugly game, but unique in that it didnt' really try to simplify the civ-style play, unlike most 4X-RTS conversions. It came out as a real-time 4X.

For a game to be "real time", time has to move at the normal rate, so if you did that it would take 5000 years to complete your game, not 250 hours.

What you really mean is that it isn't turn-based.

Most strategy and simulation games allow the player to adjust the speed at which time passes and actions are completed. This is a very handy feature, as it allows you to tackle important tasks with the game running at a slower speed and "fast forward" the parts where you're doing routine tasks (such as mining) and/or aren't taking an active role.

As for losing, these same games generally give you a complete breakdown of your achievements (number of citizens, land owned, money made etc.) which encourages the player to try to beat that next time they play, even if they don't make it all the way to the end.

A high score table also helps.

Games which might inspire you include Civilization, Colonization, Sim City, Railroad/Transport Tycoon, Warcraft I to III and Theme Park.

You might also want to look at the freeware simulations available at GameHippo.

For the first problem, just set a very low time passing variable, for instance a month per minute, and let the player increase it during the game as he pleases.

Just like the Sims, which gives you like, 3 (I think) speed options. Or you could have a fastfoward button, which fastfowards the time supersuperduperduper fast, or something similar to that.

The Sims is much simpler than most strategy or simulation games though. Most games similar to the one described have a slider speed control to allow fine adjustment.

You could always add campaigns. Campaigns make the game much more fun. And, is this game in our world, or is diffrent. That would make a diffrence, you know.

Quote:

Original post by Wysardry For a game to be "real time", time has to move at the normal rate, so if you did that it would take 5000 years to complete your game, not 250 hours.

So I guess there are a lot of games out there that are falsely classied as RTS, eh?

Quote:

Original post by Wysardry What you really mean is that it isn't turn-based.

So we need to reclassify all of the aforementioned falsely classified RTS games...

I got it!

We'll call them NTBS games! Not Turn-Based Strategy!

:)

No matter your literal definition, I think the working definition of RTS *is* not turn-based. In other words, if it's not turn based strategy, it's "real-time".

Take care.