I have always liked the idea of customizing units in RTS games and plan to include it if I ever make one. The balancing issue is not one I'm overally converned about since it can be done. If anything RTS games have become over balanced to the point of enforcing unit specialization and simplistic damage systems. I'm personally tired of all the RTS games these days using the same formula of 3 As beat 10 Cs, 3 Bs beat 10 As, and 3 Cs beat 10 Bs, it reduce RTS games to nothing more is my horde of units is bigger then my opponents horde of units.

I've found that all the games i've played that had cusotmizable units, that the act of designing the units to be pretty boring and tedious and having to update them all the time when new technology came out wasn't too much fun either.
You're going to have to have a pretty slick and easy to use interface to make it worthwhile.

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Original post by Vanke I've found that all the games i've played that had cusotmizable units, that the act of designing the units to be pretty boring and tedious and having to update them all the time when new technology came out wasn't too much fun either. You're going to have to have a pretty slick and easy to use interface to make it worthwhile.

I'd probably agree, but taking the unit design outside of the realtime part of the game would alleviate this I think.

However, I do think you have to be very careful what options you offer, and take some pains to ensure that they're truly different. When I played the Warzone 2100 demo, it seemed that the difference between weapons was rather trivial, more a matter of slightly different damage numbers and special effects when they fire. The available options just didn't seem all that interesting. Compare with the starship customization in Masters of Orion II (OK, it's not an RTS, but it's a good example of a build-it-yourself unit implementation) the different weapons and equipment could really make a significant difference to the your ship's performance in combat, and you could tailor ships to a particular combat style. It did lack a bit of balance in that you could make a super unit, but this wasn't particularly game breaking because by the time you had the tech to do so, you'd probably won anyway.

There one major area I feel need to change in RTS games and that is the a move away from single units and into clusters. Consider Starcraft there could be three types of clusers:
Squads - 1 or more units
Companies - 1 or more squads
Battalions - 1 or more companies

The user would be allow define their own clusters and have as many as they wanted so, I could have:

Squad A - 4 marines, 1 medic
Squad B - 2 Seige Tanks
Squad C - 1 Ghost
Squad D - 1 Battle Cruiser

Bravo Company = 5 Squad A's, 2 Squad B's, 4 Squad C's, and 1 Squad D

So that rather then building and controlling indiviual units and occasionally grouping them together under the same group selection button. I can simply issue a build "bravo company" order and the rest takes care of itself. Like wise I can use an army disrubution panel to select and control an entire cluster. So if I have a bravo company I named "Die Zerg Die" I can simply select this cluster and tell it to attack the zerg base.

Ideally I would like to see it take a step further then that by allowing the player to define troop formations and placement within a cluster as well as unit behavior for diffrent states.

So I could set it up so that squad A always has the 4 marines placed around the medic, and activate their stim packs whenever an enemy enters firing range.

The next detail that would be ideal is the ability reform and reinforce a cluster with mouse click. So if after heavy fighting "Die Zerg Die" is reduced to 8 marines and 2 medics across a number of diffrent squads I can simply click on the reform button and they will automatically organize themselves into 2 full Squad A's. Like wise I could next press the reinforce button and replacement troops would be built to replace the missing ones.

If you plat Axis and Allies you would see that building pre built squads is not all it's cracked up to be. While more efficient in terms of organization, it's not really that cool.

You should try "Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War", by Relic then. Unit creation is in the form of squads and I think it was a fantastic idea which is handled very well in that game.

As for clusters, that would be an interesting approach. The time it would take to make a cluster though should be proportinal to the time it takes to make the units individually (something which the players should probably still have the option of making, as clusters could possibly take a long time)

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Original post by TechnoGoth There one major area I feel need to change in RTS games and that is the a move away from single units and into clusters. Consider Starcraft there could be three types of clusers: Squads - 1 or more units Companies - 1 or more squads Battalions - 1 or more companies The user would be allow define their own clusters and have as many as they wanted so, I could have: Squad A - 4 marines, 1 medic Squad B - 2 Seige Tanks Squad C - 1 Ghost Squad D - 1 Battle Cruiser Bravo Company = 5 Squad A's, 2 Squad B's, 4 Squad C's, and 1 Squad D

I'm still not convinced myself, it seems to me you're just trading one interface hassle for another - you might be losing the micromanagement hassles inherent in dealing with large numbers of disparate units, but you're taking on new hassles in terms of requiring the player to set all this up - composing unit groups, scripting or otherwise defining complex unit behaviour, etc. I also suspect that these new tasks will be less fun (and less flexible) than simply micromanaging everything. It sounds a bit like bottom up design.

I could of course, be wrong, but that's my basic feeling about it. I think there's a sweet spot somewhere between the 'manage every unit individually, by hand' and 'complex hierachical grouping with customizable scripting'. DoW's unit grouping worked nicely, but I don't think it's quite hit that sweet spot yet.

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Original post by Sandman I'm still not convinced myself, it seems to me you're just trading one interface hassle for another - you might be losing the micromanagement hassles inherent in dealing with large numbers of disparate units, but you're taking on new hassles in terms of requiring the player to set all this up - composing unit groups, scripting or otherwise defining complex unit behaviour, etc. I also suspect that these new tasks will be less fun (and less flexible) than simply micromanaging everything. It sounds a bit like bottom up design. I could of course, be wrong, but that's my basic feeling about it. I think there's a sweet spot somewhere between the 'manage every unit individually, by hand' and 'complex hierachical grouping with customizable scripting'. DoW's unit grouping worked nicely, but I don't think it's quite hit that sweet spot yet.

Agreed it is one of those ideas that could very easily go to far in the wrong direction. The key is usage time do you spend more time micromanging unit construction and organization or designing a cluster? Ask yourself these questions:
How often do you use the same group of units? In a given play? Over multiple plays?
How often do you micromangement unit movements? formations? Abilites?

Cluster design would more then likly and should be savable, exportable, and importable, from play to play.

So if you regularly construct groups of 20 zerglings and send them on suicide runs against enemey buildings. Wouldn't you prefer to be able build that force with a single button, see its status with a glance at panel no matter where they are, and issue an orders to that group with a single button?

A cluster aproach could in theory add a great amount of strategy and tactics to RTS games. But it does run the risk of trading one form of micromangement for another.

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Original post by Sandman [...] Isn't there enough micromanagement in RTS games already, without the need for players to spend time designing his units?

The problem here is not the possibility to design the units, but the micromanagement. Personally I'd like to be able to design my own units, but this doesn't have to mean that there were no default unit designs to choose from, right?

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TechnoGoth There one major area I feel need to change in RTS games and that is the a move away from single units and into clusters. [...]

Well, on one hand I agree with Sandman here, as taking away the ability to command individual units will make fine-tuning your tactics less possible. I think you should still be able to control individuals — after all, automation is nice, but not if you can't do things manually any more.

On the other hand, I do agree with the idea of moving on to a higher level of abstraction in command. A general shouldn't have to issue commands to individual soldiers — that's what the subordinates are for. If you have to do everything yourself, you'll just end up having your villagers standing around without jobs or moving by themselves into enemy territory in search of resources. If enemies start to approach your base, you'll have to alert the base and command every unit to defend it one by one. And so on. The player is not omnipresent, and as such he can't be expected to be able to do everything himself. I think yet another quote is appropriate here:

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From The Art of War by Sun Tzu When the general is weak and without authority; when his orders are not clear and distinct; when there are no fixes duties assigned to officers and men, and the ranks are formed in a slovenly haphazard manner, the result is utter disorganization.

The fundamental problem in micromanagement is the fact that the game addresses giving orders from a backwards point of view. If I want my villagers to chop wood from one certain forest and only from there, I have to baby-sit them through it, because the game will put them in some sort of "search for more wood"-mode if the forest they were working on runs out, usually even before that. The problem is that I can't give clear and distinct orders.

I have suggested one way to reduce the micromanagement and raise the level of abstraction and distinctness of orders in another thread, but even with this suggestion you should still allow personal control for fine-tuning.

As for the original subject of unit design and personalized tech trees, how about the possibility for industrial espionage and gaining new technology from the spoils of war? One thing I dislike in games with different tech trees for different civilizations is the fact that you are limited to those techs only that your particular civilization had.

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Original post by Grim The fundamental problem in micromanagement is the fact that the game addresses giving orders from a backwards point of view. If I want my villagers to chop wood from one certain forest and only from there, I have to baby-sit them through it, because the game will put them in some sort of "search for more wood"-mode if the forest they were working on runs out, usually even before that. The problem is that I can't give clear and distinct orders.

This could probably be resolved if RTS moved from the "orders are assigned to specific units" to "units are (auto)assigned to specific orders" model of command.

To use the wood chopping as example, the game with this model of command would allow the player to click on forest 'object' and issue "gather wood here" order. Then perhaps click on another forest and also assign the "gather wood" order to it. Then click on a suitable plain and order to "plain crops here". And so on.

Then the player could open the "Issued orders" window which holds the list of you guessed it, all issued orders. From here, it'd be possible to tell the game where the people expected to carry out these orders are supposed to come from. E.g. "from the nearest village" "from village X" "from the nearest rallying point" "anyone with nothing to do" and so on. The window would also allow to assign the priority to the task, so the game knows how to divide people resources if you ordered people from the same village to chop the wood in near forest, plant the crops and go steal the neighbours' horses, all at the same time.

The same model could be applied to the warfare part of game. The player would then simply issue orders to 'capture this' 'destroy this' 'defend that' and link these goals to selected rallying points/weapon factories of choice. It'd allow for very precise, coordinated strikes at multiple points... just issue orders to destroy number of targets, gather troops at the rallying points in the configurations you find most suitable for their tasks, then activate the tasks and watch your armies roll out all at once trying their best to do what you told them to...