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Original post by Captain P Basically, you don't build any new units. You compose your army before the mission starts based on information about the mission (sattelite maps, intelligence reports, things like that).

This will probably work reasonably well for a single player, mission based campaign, but what about multiplayer/skirmish? Bear in mind that the vast majority of RTS games are sold on the strength of their multiplayer and skirmish gameplay; many players don't even bother with the single player campaign at all.

Usually, base building is little more than a ball juggling experience. A good example are übermicro games, such as Warcraft III and StarCrap. A notable exception was Total Annihilation, which encouraged neither porc'ing up in a corner (you could get busted with long range artillery... I mean really long range, firing across a dozen screenwidths) nor rushing (defense units were somewhat toughter than offensive ones). At some point, building a bridgehead in enemy territory and managing this very bridgehead while it's under siege is became an epic experience in its own right. This is the kind of base building I want - no "I have a base back home" feeling, but instead a "my base is the location I choose to base my operations on. I can place it anywhere, depending solely on my strategy."

I'm honestly looking forward to Supreme Commander, the inofficial Total Annihilation sequel. Where the "S" really stands for Strategy, where being unseen is as important as deciding whether you want to cluster buildings or spread them out for safety at the cost of efficiency.

You could try deploying those reinforcements as a one-time Paratrooper drop that the player can select on the fly. This way no matter his loadout, he can always count on at least one group of units that he can adapt to the situation at hand. Or you could have resident commanders call in Off-Shore bombardments or Air-Strikes.

Alot of what your suggesting also reminds me alot of Close Combat 2: A Bridge To Far. You should consider checking it out if you haven't seen it already.

I don't particularly mind base building generally, but i perfer games that have a greater emphasis on the units rather than the buildings. As it is the value of a unit on the battlefield is relatively small compared to the buildings that produced them, a single marine in Starcraft won't save you worth a damn, but a barracks will only because it can produce more marines. I kindof liked aspects of WarWinds 2 dispite its other flaws because my buildings were ultimately expendable and couldn't produce units, only upgrade them into different types.

Ok, system for multiplayer without 'base building':

What if you can have 'bases' like they are in real life? Combat bases I mean, not a large base like found in the USA, more like what you would make when you enter a combat zone.

Before the game starts players 'set up' the war zone, and victory conditions. The war zone determins who has what in the area, and that in turn will change how many of what, and how often, you have ready to send into your battlefield.

Maybe you want both teams to be 'assulting' meaning they're moving foreward, and meet somewhere in the middle of the map. They could have limited reinforcements, but makes for a quick game.

You could have one team defending, and the other attacking. They agree how reinforcements can work before the battle starts, each unit can cost so many 'points' or something, so players could agree who gets how many points. They could be even, or one side could get a lot more. Have factors like "Reinforcement Wave Time" factor, or Wave Size factor. Changing these might mean it is more effective to have a few units entering the field close together, or with a cheap Wave size, and very costly Wave Time, all your reinforcements are going to be comming onto the field in one shot.


Now, as I was saying about bases. Bases could be limited to things like defensive bunkers, weapon/ammo stores, watch towers, stationary gun enplacements, medical centers (in single player, having and protecting your med center will mean you get a small portion of your 'killed' troops back later in the game if you can get hurt soldiers there)
Foxholes, trenches, and other things any soldier can build on the fly just before battle. Dragon's Teeth to stop tanks, barbed/razor wire to slow soldiers, land mines to both sides up, :P


In multiplayer (and single player even) you could earn more 'points' by killing the opponets troops, giving you access to more stuff from the 'higherups' in your army.
Also capturing stuff should allow you to increase your firepower. Why blow up that large ammo/fuel dump when you can capture it for yourself? (Fuel dumps also give you a 'fun' tatic of if you can spare the fuel, build a poorly protected dump, that would allow them to swing around your flank to take it, then blow it up yourself and watch the fire works!)
Group of tanks somewhere? Get some infantry units in the area, kill the drivers, and look, :) you have a new tank unit backed up with a partial infantry unit :P

Also, for reinforcements, when you go to call in reinforcements, on the screen you pick what you want and give orders for where they enter or whatever, you could have access to view the progress of the battles around yours. Calling in reinforcements means while YOUR battle might go well, you could lose many others around yours. You win the battle, and lose the war. That would keep people from just flooding their battle with EVERY unit they can get their hands on. Not only do you have to worry about YOUR fight, but the war in general.
The game then becomes, "who can win more effeciently?" If you FORCE your oppenet to call in more reinforcements, you might still lose on that field, but other fronts collapse and then the 'winner' finds he is out of reinfocements, and has enemies entering the field all around them.

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Original post by Thygrrr Usually, base building is little more than a ball juggling experience. A good example are übermicro games, such as Warcraft III and StarCrap. A notable exception was Total Annihilation, which encouraged neither porc'ing up in a corner (you could get busted with long range artillery... I mean really long range, firing across a dozen screenwidths) nor rushing (defense units were somewhat toughter than offensive ones). At some point, building a bridgehead in enemy territory and managing this very bridgehead while it's under siege is became an epic experience in its own right. This is the kind of base building I want - no "I have a base back home" feeling, but instead a "my base is the location I choose to base my operations on. I can place it anywhere, depending solely on my strategy." I'm honestly looking forward to Supreme Commander, the inofficial Total Annihilation sequel. Where the "S" really stands for Strategy, where being unseen is as important as deciding whether you want to cluster buildings or spread them out for safety at the cost of efficiency.

Considering the rest of your post, I don't see why you call Starcraft "StarCrap". Base layout and location are hugely important. Plus, there isn't simply a "home" base once the game has been going on for a while, because you have two or three equally-sized bases.

I rather like RTSs without base-building. To be precise, I rather like RTSs where you can't assemble a large concrete building, or grow and train a soldier, in a few minutes.

I like the ideal of ammunition conveys very much indeed. I would think that the effect of running out of ammo should depend upon the unit. A tank could still run over infantry, for example, and infantry could still engage in melee combat. But an unarmed tank vs. an artillery gun or unarmed infantry vs. armed infantry should be a forgone conclusion.

Presumably, more powerful units have more expensive and therefore scarcer ammo. I'd expect it to make for a style of play where the powerful units will be near the ammo store whilst the weaker units (or at least the units which are not as dependent upon ammo) can safely roam at a considerable distance.

You say no machine-gun turrets and suchlike, which I feel is unlikely: lots of combat takes place near heavily-defended strongly-built bases, simply because they are of strategic value. Unless you have a particular reason why it wouldn't happen, I would expect at least some missions to feature previously-constructed permanent installations.

Ammo drops are likely, if the circumstances merit it. Depending upon the nature of your military force, you might be able to buy ammo drops at will, given enough currency. If you have multiple human-playable sides in the game, this kind of thing might be a distinction between the two.

Infantry units should be able to take guns and ammo from defeated units, both your own and your enemy's.

Some well-trained units should be able to commandeer enemy vehicles. Failing that, they should be able to sabotage vehicles and their ammo.

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Original post by Daniel Miller Considering the rest of your post, I don't see why you call Starcraft "StarCrap". Base layout and location are hugely important. Plus, there isn't simply a "home" base once the game has been going on for a while, because you have two or three equally-sized bases.

Admittedly, I don't like SC for the weak UI (right click controls, very limited squad size), poor command queueing (at least in the initial release version - I never touched it afterwards, save for two mediocre games of Brood Wars).

I think SC lacks a lot. Units need to stop to fire, and if they do, they always hit. This nullifies a lot of the battle dynamics I love so much about the TA or C&C Series.

WarCraft and StarCraft rarely encourage you to build more than one base, and usually, there's a particular build of "defense towers, producion buildings, crucial buildings" from the edge towards the center". Since there are only two defense tower varieties (maybe three? anyway, Total Annihilation has well over a dozen different ones per faction, most of which have many uses), base defense is merely a density problem.

The game introduces "artificial" strategies through Templar Drops & whatnot, mostly because it fails to have a combat/ballistics system allowing to crack open a walled-up base or fend off an enemy charge in the open by using just the right units.

Yes, it's true, I'm siding for Total Annihilation in the epic TA vs. SC discussion :) But I'm not dumb, and StarCra(p/ft)'s success is certainly justified and it's a VERY good game. Still, TA is better (IMHO!), but it didn't become the grand success SC became because Cavedog did not have a cash cow like Diablo to fuel their advertising machinery like Blizzard did. Also, TA is more complex and has a much longer learning curve (with well over 150 different units with the expansion sets). TA's weakness was the absence of a good campaign, which was still an important feature back then (I think the success/failure of a game is solely decided by the popularity of its multi player part).

I didn't play it much, but weren't the old Cannon Fodder games basically an RTS without base-building? Or possibly even X-com 3?

Personally I think the game would need to be very different than just having a big army and no base. An attack in an RTS is norammly just something you do and then build up for another, or expand your base etc. Just having the attack optionmeans you need to make the units a lot more engaging to the player, so they are happy just to do unit-management the whole time.

To pilfer part of Thygrrr's post:

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Admittedly, I don't like SC for the weak UI (right click controls, very limited squad size), poor command queueing (at least in the initial release version - I never touched it afterwards, save for two mediocre games of Brood Wars). I think SC lacks a lot. Units need to stop to fire, and if they do, they always hit. This nullifies a lot of the battle dynamics I love so much about the TA or C&C Series. WarCraft and StarCraft rarely encourage you to build more than one base, and usually, there's a particular build of "defense towers, producion buildings, crucial buildings" from the edge towards the center". Since there are only two defense tower varieties (maybe three? anyway, Total Annihilation has well over a dozen different ones per faction, most of which have many uses), base defense is merely a density problem. ...

I like the UI a lot on BW. I can understand the frustration with 12-unit-selection rule (I bet every player feels that every game!), but it does make it more difficult to move incredible-sized armies arount the map. I'm 99% sure this wasn't the intended reason, but it's helped balance the game.

However, what's wrong with the right-click-to-move scheme? The earlier C&C games did the horribly, with the same button for selecting units and for moving them. It was impossible to play that game quickly, becuase your hand would slip, and instead of moving your units, you would deselect everything.

On your "stop to fire" point, this adds a lot to the game, in my opinion. It means that you can't quickly retreat while dealing damage, you can't easily dodge shots/spells while attacking, and you can't attack while setting up a stronger formation for your units.

Also, building other bases is absolutely needed. Many games end up with 3, 4 or 5 bases for each side. The major exception is when one player succumbs to a rush, but from my experience this isn't the norm.

[Edited by - Daniel Miller on November 25, 2005 3:48:57 PM]

I love this idea, but you can't simply make your game a standard RTS without any buildings.

Ultimately, the base building determines the quantity and the quality of the units you have available to fight. You destroy your enemy's base to cripple his access to these units. It might be a bit flawed and unrealistic, but it's reasonably good at its job! So you have to find a way to replace these mechanics.

The supply lines intrigue me. It's much better than the omni-present resources in most RTSs -- I always found it hard to believe that resources gathered in a distant base can be instantly used to build something in my main base.

Another flaw with this simplistic method is that it eliminates the strategy of surrounding the enemies until their resources are so limited that you can crush them easily (the exact word eludes me right now) -- a very useful strategy in real war, but not in RTSs.

Slowing down the rate of fire when low on ammo seems like an excellent option to me. You could explain it like they're not out of ammo, but rather using their emergency reserves of ammo.

But you can't just throw in supply units. Micro-managing supply lines could be very annoying. You need to streamline this feature. There could be a system of waypoints that the suppliers use to go to the battlefronts. They should also start moving around without you ordering them, and there could be the option to escort them, and do things like choosing a faster but more dangerous route, and stuff like that.