I think another way would be to team up different players on different sides of a strategic map. Command & Conquer: Renegade does this with great success. 2 teams try to destroy the others base by 'buying' soldiers and vehicles purchased with credits that are harvested by an NPC vehicle. Its FPS in interface, but completely tactical in gameplay, complete with base rushes and troop vs troop attacks. You could say this game was the predecessor to the Onslaught games of UT2K4 and the Battlegrounds of WOW.

The thing is, this works so far on a simple 'online' level. The biggest maps hold 64 players and have a time limit, so its hard telling how well it would translate into the MMO genre. It might work if you add more bases for players to destroy. Or if there were more 'sides', but that would require an added amount of diplomacy that can always go bad. But if you simply split the sides up into good vs evil, you can potentially have as many bases or countries that you want.

It could work. :D

Hmmm, once you start going into that realm of FPS it somewhat bends the rules, its very difficult to guide a players actions so the strategy kindof flies out the window unless your fighting with veteran players who know how to get things done. C&C: Renegade is more like Planetside on a smaller scale when you think about it.

When i think of MMORTS, i think of me controlling a small band of units from an overhead or isometric view. Something like Conquest: Frontier Wars, or Eve Online comes to mind, with Sectors that you can warp to in a tree network.

Although I'm not (yet?) an MMO fan, I'd drool over the prospect of a game where you're character is the town or city. It could involve hundreds of communities creating dozens of alliances, but to keep things interesting I'd make it heavily PvE in the form of the land spawning constant squads and battalions of beasties (undead/robots/whatever). I'd limit the PvP to fuedal like "honorable tournament combat," though (where you have to agree upon time, terms and place of battle). This would keep you from logging in to discover your entire township in flames.

I think it'd be really cool to be able to send armies and agents anywhere throughout the world map. You might have spies in one town, advisors helping train your allies troops, skirmishers messing up an enemies supply lines, and a few battalions heading off the closest AI horde (or stalling just long enough to betray an ally).

Of course I think an Alpha Centauri sci-fi scenario would rock: Hundreds of shipwrecked communities on a deadly alien planet that could become interconnected and advanced over time would be very fun. Maybe the servers could play out rounds and reset the world, or players could level their communities up to colonize other "planets" (servers).

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Original post by Wavinator Although I'm not (yet?) an MMO fan, I'd drool over the prospect of a game where you're character is the town or city. It could involve hundreds of communities creating dozens of alliances, but to keep things interesting I'd make it heavily PvE in the form of the land spawning constant squads and battalions of beasties (undead/robots/whatever). I'd limit the PvP to fuedal like "honorable tournament combat," though (where you have to agree upon time, terms and place of battle). This would keep you from logging in to discover your entire township in flames.

This sounds a bit like my ambitious game design, "Project Hamlet", the village sim! Except it isn't MMO (isn't even multiplayer), and as of yet I haven't included any other villages in the design. But the squads of beasties will be in it (I'm using Majesty as a bit of a template here).

But your bit about "honourable tournament combat" is the thing I'm not sure how to work around in a theoretical MMORTS. Although I'm not much of a multiplayer gamer, I've read how you have to deal with people logging out of a multiplayer battle prematurely. How can a MMORTS deal with players logging in and out all the time?

The design I was thinking of with "pocket dimensions" would fit into your idea, Wavinator. The idea was to have a city in your little dimension, which you could work on off-line. Then you could log on-line and deal with other pocket dimension cities as you wished. I guess you could add a pocket battlefield for your armies to fight in. But the scope of such a game is way beyond my abilities and time, and would be very hard to keep balanced.