A few friends and i are currently developing a real time strategy game. We are not currently too far into development, but have a good idea of what we want: 3 sides: Humans - C&C style units, with snipers, troops, rpg's etc. Predators - highly trained, elite units - stealth, knife combat. Orcs - noisy, high in numbers - crude machinery. Units are created in DoW style squads, and from there can be upgraded - so you create a squad of three predators, form which each unit can be upgraded into an assassin, seeker etc... 2-D Isometric (poss. 3d models) What we need to know is what people like and dislike about the following games: Total War Series Rise Of Nations Command & Conquer Series If people have any other questions/comments/ideas, we would love to hear them. Regards Hackin', Bunghole, Xpyder The Team: RTX Xpy

I don't know if this will help you, but my biggest complaint with these kinds of games has been the lack of control over multiple units. Any convention you can come up with that will help command and control multiple units at once will go a long ways to winning bonus points from me. I'm imagining keyed or shortcut commands for things like "Damaged units fall back." Or even more complex orders like, "Wait for snipers to open fire, then roll into position *here* and attack" or "As soon as this turret has been destroyed by the air support, move into range and attack *here.*"

Don't ask me how you'd do this exactly, especially in a real-time game, but that's what's on my wish list: The ability to issue a series of orders and commands to allow a more strategic use of your units, rather than a whole heckuva lot of hunting and clicking. Especially when you have to deal with group A and while your busy, group B stands around stupidly getting blown up.

This is just my opinion, but I like to control massive amounts of units, like in Rome Total War. I still like the "old" 2D RTS's, but I really really like the massive battles in RTW. The 3D is just an extra bonus, but not a requirement at all. The RTS genre is still the key feature I like.
You could then discuss the stupidity of the units in RTW (the vector, or whatever other, movement can be quite anoying when enemies and allies are running along side each other without attacking).

AoE combined with RTW (which I really hope AoE III will be like) would the greatest RTS game I can imagine.

tao, that idea is brilliant - you mean like a raven shield/full spectrum warrior sort of thing - it would be hard, but that would be amazing - and neife, you are right - we are going to have small squad based battle snear the beginnning and large battles towards the later stages of the game - thank you very much for youre ideas, both of you - and keep em coming!!

Xpy

Quote:

Original post by Taolung I don't know if this will help you, but my biggest complaint with these kinds of games has been the lack of control over multiple units. Any convention you can come up with that will help command and control multiple units at once will go a long ways to winning bonus points from me. I'm imagining keyed or shortcut commands for things like "Damaged units fall back." Or even more complex orders like, "Wait for snipers to open fire, then roll into position *here* and attack" or "As soon as this turret has been destroyed by the air support, move into range and attack *here.*"

It would be interesting to be able to create a "battle plan" using a simple scripting language that would govern your units' actions in battle. You could make it event driven with responses for events like: "unit x is at 25% hp" or "enemy aircraft in range", etc. Each event could also be assigned a priority, so more important events would be responded to over less important ones. Each group or type of unit could be assigned a seperate script.

Possibly you could limit the player's control over their units durring battle to make the creation of good scripts more important. In the middle of battle a general might have a hard time micro managing their units anyway. Perhaps they can only fire off events like "retreat" or "begin phase 2", which the scripts would respond to. Or perhaps the player could normally control their units fully, unless a "radio jammer" was in use.

This sort of game play would probably be too complex for many gamers, but I'd find it a lot of fun if done well. Maybe if it were optional then advanced players could use it to gain an advantage while others could play in a more conventional rts style. It's not really the sort of thing you would expect to see in a standard comercial game, but that's what the inde scene is for after all.

My idea for the RTS that I'm making, is to have a simple easy-to-use waypoint system. Homeworld 2 style, but more importantly, they have manual go-codes or timers. As in, you have a unit that the waypoint shows you will take 37 seconds to get from point a to b. You can then set it key press G, for example, and move them out. You wouldn't need a complex scripting system, you'd just need a simple linked list of nodes and start keys.

Something I'd like to see in this kind of games is an "order editor" .
There you could create your own order macros with some script of some kind.
You would create a trigger and then a list of orders to be executed.

Observe this pseudo-Starcraft-script:

Trigger:
Press D and then click on the map.

All Dropships: Move to Waypoint(clicked).
All Dropships: Drop all tanks, ghosts and marines.
When Dropped:
{
Marines: Hold position and defend tanks.
Tanks: Go into Siege mode.
Ghosts: Lock down any possible target.
}

Creating your own squad compositions would be nice to.

I havent seen this kind of customization in an rts yet.

yea, were going to be aiming it at hardcore gameers anyway, not youre average sims bunch - waypoints and or go codes are good ideas, and the scripting language to send them would be invaluable - how would the user initiate these? buttons?

Xpy

Original post by Solias

Possibly you could limit the player's control over their units durring battle to make the creation of good scripts more important.

quote]

I think this wouldn't matter, if they are using a script anyway, they would just carry on doing what you wanted. I don't think games should really limit you (artificially) on things.

The idea of scripts is good, my idea would be to have a priority leval where a mission or objective would have a priority, starting a new objective would mean gathering some men together, and only those with a less enough priority (on there current objective) could come and join, you would set the mission importance, the higher, the more men would come off other missions to join. This could be good as you would then have to decide how important your new mission is, and remember the ones you already have going on. - Also this way you might not have to be clicking on each man to join, if they were available they'd automaticaly come over.

I for exmpale love all 3 of them.
Rome Total War for its very nice army graphics and the very big army capacity (and though i wouldnt say this about any other game, the audio really made the gameplay time even more fun).

Rise of nations and C&C i like for the basic RTS game.

Although your game sounds a lot like war hammer which i also like (what can i do, im addicted to gaming) but i think that if you were to put the same kind of featurs like WH and had an order sequnce editor (not like a script, for exmpale you can start another sequnce by pressing a key then pressing the buttons for some orders and then saving it and when you pushed a diffrent button your list of sequnces would come and you can choose one) that game would be very succesfull.