Im planning a modern day rts, somewhat a mix of old dune 2 and total annihilation. Resources, base building, all the old style stuff! But i want a bit more complicated economy. One question is unit upkeep. The classic solution is for example support buildings (farms in warcraft2 or support depots in starcraft) I had another idea. - divide army in groups like infantry, vehicles, air - factories produce 'support'. A global setting determines the rate of which the factories produce support into 3 pools of support-points (inf, veh, air) - all existing units drain from corresponding pool (more expensive units drain faster). When they are fighting, they drain 3 times FASTER. - if no support is available, units of that class can only fire very seldom/take extra damage or something. Now, how would this system effect gameplay? Require planning before attack maybe. Will it slow games down? Would you find it an interesting twist on rts-economy or just an annoyance. Thanks for your input Erik

I think that the resource pools are fine, but I think that draining them 3 times faster while they are fighting will take away from the gameplay. Hardcore RTS players take pride in being able to manage multiple large-scale battles occurring all over the map, and giving players penalties for fighting will make players have to scale back their attack initiative. This could likely lead to long, slow grinds of players sending in only a unit or two for attack, and then withdrawing when things look bad. It could completely remove the all-out 3-pronged attack blitz that gives RTS gamers an adrenaline rush.

Other than that, I think it is a pretty solid plan for a traditional RTS.

Can't say whether it would slow down combat or not, but I think it's an interesting take on the resource pool idea. If you want to see a similar idea in action, take a look at The Space Game. Energy in that game works similarly to how you describe, with the added twist that you have to connect your energy consumers to your energy producers, or else they stop working.

That game you linked to was very nice indeed.

Topic: Yeah my feeling is that making them drain more in combat makes slower pace...

Just to comment on the slower pace thing: You might also be encouraging turtling up until you build enough of the resource to fight as long as you think you need to. On the other hand, you're putting a greater emphasis on strategic resource allocation. Your idea still sounds interesting, but it might benefit from moving away from faster paced click-aholic RTS gaming to a more strategic genre.

yes if im looking for a more slower, complex game it might still work...

I even have a loose idea to make it splitscreen (two players at same computer). But this forces one player to control his forces without mouse, and in that case, too fast gameplay will be devastation to the mouse-less. That idea mainly come from my inability to deal with networking coding, which seem very hard when dealing with rts...

E

What if you treat "Supply" as a unit's ability to rearm and repair. The more units you have to support the slower these things occur. So when a unit runs out of its personal store of ammo, then it has a slower firing rate based on how much spare supply the player has available for it. Also, if it has taken damage, it will slowly repair over time based on how much supply it has.

This way, a player might build up a big army, but as this uses up all their supply they will not be able to sustain a prolonged fight, but be able to steam role over a smaller army.

this way a smaller army might be able to engage in constant battles (skirmish) and withdraw when they bring their main force into the fight and eventually wear them down. But if the lager force can trap the smaller force and bring their number into it, then they can obliterate them.

There would be a "magic" number of units to match your support amount, but if you did it right, there could be more than one magic number for different strategies (blitzkrieg or guerrilla warfare).

You could balance the units like this too. Units that have a long sight range can have a smaller supply requirement but be a powerful combat unit and so would benefit a player who needs cheap units to be able to see the enemy and make the hit and run attacks on them. The more powerful units could require more supply but have a shorter sight range which benefits a player that has lots of units and swarms the enemy.

Quote:

Original post by suliman yes if im looking for a more slower, complex game it might still work... I even have a loose idea to make it splitscreen (two players at same computer). But this forces one player to control his forces without mouse, and in that case, too fast gameplay will be devastation to the mouse-less. That idea mainly come from my inability to deal with networking coding, which seem very hard when dealing with rts...

You might consider slowing it down still further, and making it turn based. Then you can have hotseat-style play on a single computer, and the networking is much simplified for multiplayer.