I'm more or less looking at a theory or ideas and hoping for some feedback. Most RTS games allow you to build your base, then you need to start thinking about expanding to increase the income, however now you have to defend two bases. What I'm thinking is more of a building up a single base. Fortifying a single position, upgrading basic income buildings such as farms to improve income. In a sense creating a siege type attack force to topple the other player. These matches would be aimed around an hour long match. Where the defending player would rely on the walls and towers to hold of the enemy. It seems there are a lot of mods out there for games that gear towards expansion to change the game so that the player doesn't have to spend the time in expanding. Does this type of RTS appeal to you guys or may find it interesting? -Chris

Meh. It really depends on the style of the RTS. a battlefield, third person game (like Warcraft 3) would likely not do well in this context. You would ultimately need some kind of spot system, and end up with a more battle oriented, fast paced version of Icarium. How enjoyable this would be to play would ultimately depend on how you can improve your base. If the upgrades and buildings are all linear, and theres a pretty clear path to follow, this would be inanely boring.

One of the chief advantages of multi-base games is the addition of a new level of strategy added by needing to either split up your forces or increase mobility to defend more than one area.
It also adds tactical importance to specific locations, making them more valuable.

Advantages of one base, however: in games that need a lot of micro, the decrease in macro can be useful.
(usually) less of a learning curve.

It will ultimately depend a lot on the other gameplay choices you make. I would say you shouldn't start with the basis of a one-base game; try just making a fun sounding RTS. Only having one base isn't enough of a gimmick to make a large audience be interested, anyway/

Thinking about the idea a little more...


My initial reasoning of the one base idea is more along the lines of not being required to expand the base to find more resources to be able to build your army. Though I like the idea of expanding for strategic purpose.

So keeping with the initial idea, you will want expand to occupy choke points and high points, but not to harvest more.

As for the seige type on the base, im not thinking as large a scale that total war has. Just a base setup that would require the attacker to put some thought in an attack. Where a zerg type attack would get utterly destroyed with little success even if the defending army wasnt around, but a fight where if you took the time to use catapults to take out towers before sending in the troops. As far as expanding creating forts in prime places that have some defense bonus over just keeping a number of units in place to hold the location.

As doomhascome says, a lot depends on the details.

In general, RTS games encourage expansion for good reason: the quicker players expand, the quicker they bump into each other and start fighting - and that is after all, the whole point of the genre.

My preferred approach is to reduce the investment to expand. Dawn of War and Supreme Commander both take this approach - to take advantage of resource points, you just need to capture and/or build a relatively inexpensive building, rather than having to invest a massive amount of resources in building a new 'town centre' structure. This results in a much more dynamic battlefield, and the choice of whether to expand to multiple bases becomes a trade-off between defensibility, redundancy, convenience and cost.

The main thing you want to avoid is a game in which players are encouraged to just sit in their bases massing tanks and turrets until they get bored enough to attack move their overwhelming blob of units into the middle of the enemy base. And if you balance towards defensive play, then that is very likely what you will get.

What would be kinda cool is setting up a type of game where you have two players, one that defends and one that attacks. So the one that defends is primarily interested in using their resources and limitations to develop massive defences. The one that attacks is more interested in developing to attack and expand.

Axis and Allies the board game is un-even. Both sides have to play according to a different strategy. The Axis want to expand as quickly as they can, and the allies want to hold on to what they can and hope for the Axis to petter out.

Ah just an idea.

What if you did away with bases all together?

In gameplay, what is the use of a base? It is essentially a place where players can construct units and select research. But all of those are actually handled by the interface, not the actual buildings in the base. So it would be possible to remove the buildings and still give the player the capabilities.

This would lead to a more dynamic battle as players move their troops around the battle field and have more of a skirmish type play.

They would have to send out scouts to locate the enemy forces. Once located they would have to keep track of them and bring their main force into combat.

I did a mod of Darkreign (an old RTS - but a good one) where you have "base" using able to construct other units, do research, etc but they were actual troops that could move around and fight as well. However, I kept the need to harvest resources.

This led to skirmish type encounters as each player tried to locate and misdirect the enemy from their main force. They would not stay in one location too long and even harvesting resource was done quickly and then move on. It was quite a different feel of RTS than having a single base. Mobility and scouting were extremely valuable.