Hi all, I would like to discuss unit design in games.(similar to a thread Is Unit Design Fun?) I am developing a mutliplayer persistent online strategy game named Galacticus . So basically i will have many players in a very vast space building and fighting with spaceships homeworld style. But if i only keep a handful of units around the play will become monotones building the same units to attack a player with same units only to find out that whoever has more units wins. So i guess i have 2 paths before me. I can either make units customizable building ships from predefined parts such as engines, reactors, weapons and command modules like sid's Alpha Century. Or have the units customized like Total Annihilation or Homeworld. This is what i see: Player Designed: far more variety (if balance is right and there is no maximal design) much harder to balance have to add designer window and tools More parts to manage and draw Player contributed content is much better for a mmog like this larger learning curve (but can provide “stock units” for newbie layers) most MMOG do it this way with aviators Me Created could look better (well not with me doing 3d models) easier for player to match looks with how it preforms easier to balance less variety more RTS do it this way I guess it all comes down which will get me more fun/time ratio. So what do you think? What did you find more fun? What is easier to implement right do you think? Do you see more pro/con options?

It's hard enough balancing pre-made units; balancing user-created units would be an absolute nightmare. However, not all games need to be played on a professional/competitive level. If you think that the fun gained from making your own units could make up for the game being purpetually unfair for one side (and that could easily be the case), then run with it. Games are all about fun, anyway.

You may also run the risk of every player using the same units if they are found to be the best.

Right now i am leaning more to making fixed set of units for player to play with. Because it seams easier to balance ... and it looks as if good balance brings grate game play. The other option that i just though of is having premade stats for units but have the player be able to draw/modify using legolike parts how they are to look like. For instance a player can make a fighter looks however the player wants but it must be small and always will deal 12damage and cost 23,000 credits... this might be the best of both worlds. Do you know of any games that do it this way? What is your though on this?

Something I've been toying with for my current main project is (for independent academic study) is a MMO that revolves around player designed ships.

However, designing a ship from the keel up is going to cost a fair bit of ingame time and huge sums of ingame money, improving an existing design will be easier, but slightly less flexible.

Everything on ships is based off of predefined components that players can then spend money to 'improve' some stats by a little bit, 5-20% or so, and then produce more of them for sale, which can then be taken, and either improved again by the player over time, or reversed engineered and improved by other players.

So, you will start with the engine room, you have so much space in which you can try to shoehorn engines and other things you need, then you add fuel reserves to somewhere else on the ship, and a command bridge. This gives you your basic ship. From there you can use connecters to expand the ship, adding your choice of predefinded cargo bays types (or maybe you choose the size based on set guidelines to customize your box, they're all just boxes after all, so it wouldn't be hard to scale them), and then weapons.


The beauty is, even if someone developes a 'totally killer' ship, as long as you make wars take long enough, and new ship production take long enough (and require a single prototype to be finished before fullscale production) then you should have a player designed counter ship produced before the game can become totally screwed up. Put in place some system so that the dev/admins can change something in game that will give other groups advantages should the player run counters fail to appear and someone is managing to ruin the game. Start throwing more road blocks in their path. You won't want to beat them down completely, but still give them a good challenge and some great reward for taking down this, while giving others time to fight back.