I am quite bored at the basic economy system that we see in most RTS games. You build buildings that product resources continuously. In most games these buildings last till the end of the game. Once there is enough of these resource buildings, economy plays nearly no role. I was thinking of an economy system more based on scavenging for materials. Most basic resources like food and such could be produced by your base, but for more advanced and strategic resources you'd have to make expeditions to harvest the goods. A succeeded expedition would provide you a strategic advantage like you could upgrade your units and build more advanced units. The strategic resources could be hidden well and possibly guarded as well so scavenging these resources would not be so easy. Then military would also play a role in economy. Also when two teams share an intrest for resource they would have to fight for it. This might not be a new idea, but personally I have never played an RTS with this kind of economic system. I'd like to hear comments how this would work and ways to improve it.

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Original post by skgstrm I am quite bored at the basic economy system that we see in most RTS games. You build buildings that product resources continuously. In most games these buildings last till the end of the game. Once there is enough of these resource buildings, economy plays nearly no role.

The only RTS I can think of off the top of my head that seems to come close to fitting that description is Total Annihilation, and even then I still think that economy plays an important part; defending your resource production and closing down your enemy's is a good way of screwing up their economy and thus giving you the upper hand.

Besides, I've always treated TA more like a sandbox for creating total mayhem than a proper RTS game.

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I was thinking of an economy system more based on scavenging for materials.

This seems to describe the vast majority of resource systems in RTS games; Resources are a finite and must be gathered at specific sites, e.g Vespene Geysers and Mineral Deposits in Starcraft, Gold Mines and Forests in Warcraft etc.

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Most basic resources like food and such could be produced by your base, but for more advanced and strategic resources you'd have to make expeditions to harvest the goods. A succeeded expedition would provide you a strategic advantage like you could upgrade your units and build more advanced units.The strategic resources could be hidden well and possibly guarded as well so scavenging these resources would not be so easy. Then military would also play a role in economy. Also when two teams share an intrest for resource they would have to fight for it.

You could argue that Warcraft 3 comes pretty close to this; as you often have to clear out 'creeps' before you can expand to a new gold mine, or to gather treasure.

Personally, I'm not a big fan of WC3, because faffing about with heroes and creeps and all the other 'RPG' elements distract me from doing what I want to do, which involves blowing up my opponent, although obviously not everyone agrees with me since it's a very popular game.

I understand what you are getting at - in general RTS games are designed so you setup resource gathering operations and then go off to do the unit building/battle bit, coming back once and a while to move units on to a new patch. In Starcraft for instance, you setup your workers in the first 5 minutes of the game, then basically ignore them until you want to grab another resource pocket or need to pull one for building.

The problem is that humans have a finite level of attention. One of the CPUs main advantages in real time strategy games (since they are horrible at abstract strategy) is their ability to juggle many tasks, allowing them to develop super economies while doing battle at the same time. Players typically can't do this (though the system in Total Annhilation came close, as you could queue up many actions, including worker actions).

In order to have a more economy centric game you'd need to lessen the focus on unit building and battle. Age of Empires did this to a degree - resource "pockets" ran out more quickly, requiring you to be frequently reassigning labor and setting up shop near new resources. It also had more resource types then most games (most have 1 or 2, AOE had 4), meaning players would often want to shift their economies to gather more of one resource to support whatever their current action was (the progression through the ages helped this, as new units became available that required different resources)

In Starcraft, resources are scarce, valuable, and run dry fairly quickly, so there are several strategies based around resources. Unless you take your opponent out early, you usually have to expand to several different resource nodes ("expansions").

Resources play such an important role in Starcraft that it is often a good idea to spend the resources and supply/psi/food to constantly produce workers until the late-game so you will have enough to immediately transfer them to a newly-created expansion.

Trivia: This over-production of workers wasn't though to be a smart move until a player named Manyard came around and showed how effective it can be. Now, even the pros in Korea do it, and the act of transferring the extra workers to a new expansion is known as a Manyard Tranfer. :P

I think an RTS with more scavenging would be rather interesting, especially if you added this feel of being desperate for resources to the combat too. It's strange that every vehicle you destroy in a traditional RTS just vanishes (except TA where you can reclaim the resources). I think different levels of damage would add a lot to the gameplay, for example, repeatedly shelling a tank could completely trash it to a point where it's totally destroyed, or you could get lucky and have a single shell hit a vulnerable spot, killing the crew but leaving the machine mostly intact.

In this way not only could scrap units be used for resources, but engineers or similar types of unit could get fairly intact machines running again. This might also allow you to use/steal some of the technologies of a superior enemy. I guess if you wanted to really push the boat out and create a truely flexible system, you could patch together parts of different destroyed vehicles, creating your own ragtag junk army (some units would have pretty strange capabilities though). A plot set in far future Earth, where countless wars have used all of the planets useful minerals, would seem suitable for such a concept.