@fzambetta

I have actually attempted something similar in Neverwinter Nights myself. It was a kind of RTS game where you could "buy" henchmen that would follow you around and fight alongside you (you could also give them orders and even tell them to assume a formation). But as players conquered locations, they would gain extra resources for their faction (which they would buy their henchmen with)

Players could also "mine" resource nodes for different types of resource (like food that would allow their henchmen to recover from injury and regenerate their special abilities - like spells). They could equip their henchmen (and themselves) with equipment they bought with the resources they have acquired.

It was extremely buggy, but it basically worked (I had trouble with some of the more complex formations, and made some changes that broke it quite badly - causing it to crash, but was never able to track down why or fix it).

Hmm, I might see if I have it still and see if I can fix the bugs at all.

I used a moderately simple algorithm to determine if a faction had control over an area. Basically certain events/situations would cause the loyalty of an area to rise or fall for a particular faction and, although these were fairly complex situation, they were not that difficult to detect, and then at the point there were detected, I would just raise or lower the loyalty value of the area or change the faction allegiance directly.

I used a Loyalty meter. An area would remain loyal to a faction as long as they kept the loyalty above a certain level. If the loyalty dipped below this level the area when neutral. For another faction to gain control over the area, they would have to reduce the loyalty to 0 and then build up loyalty for their faction (with the faction having the highest loyalty increase level being the faction it would go to).

Building up loyalty was relatively simple. If you had more troops (players + henchmen) in an area, then you increased the loyalty. If anyone mined from the area, it would reduce the loyalty (so if you did too much mining you would cause the area to revert to neutrality), and any action that would normally raise the loyalty for your faction, if in an enemy controlled area would reduce the loyalty of that area towards the enemy faction. An enemy faction could sneak in an mine your areas and reduce them to neutrality which would stop your faction from collecting income form the area. I played around with other actions (like donations to the NPCs in the area or doing quests for the NPCs in the area) as ways to increase loyalty as well.

This meant that "raiding" other areas was a good strategy, as it increased your special resources, and reduce the resource the other faction could get, and even could help you take over the area. In other words, the player were rewarded for invading their opponents areas (which encourages the conflict).

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Original post by Morbid Addiction An Online (not going to say MMO) RPG where after all goals are met by a certain race the game is finished, reset and begun again.

Check out ATITD (A Tale in the Desert). It is on its 4th "telling", which means they have totally reset the world 3 times already.

Anarchy Online was supposed to end or reset after 4 years, but a rocky launch and nearly going out of business made them a little too nervous to try such a thing.