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Original post by Talroth Get around the "Maxed out Army" by having maximums (and Minimums) on points you can keep with you as you go. If you start producing a large number of first rate soldiers, then the higher ups draft them into other units. If you keep struggling, then the game will kick you a few good specialists if you don't have the required points to complete the mission.

There's ways around it, certainly, but any failsafe method is going to be harder to design and balance than non-persistence. It's a trade-off about whether keeping an attachment to units is worth the extra design issues.

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Original post by Sandman It doesn't really work for me. I generally find that it is enough to manage blobs of different unit types, without having to worry about differences on the individual level. If I drag-select a blob of soldiers to send off on a suicide mission, I don't want to have to start worrying about whether one of them has survived three battles and has earned some kind of special upgrade. The only way to make it work is to reduce the overall scale of the game down to just a handful of units.

Generally I tend to see unit persistence in the more tactical games, especially the turn-based ones. Typically your troop sizes are lower - a couple of dozen, max.

For me, the best way to get me attached to my troops is to give them names. If I've got a unique identifier for all my troops and they hang around after battles, I start getting very protective of the ones that have been around long enough for me to recognise.

The other way is to have the units slowly level up through experience, and make the top tiers hard or impossible to recruit. While a fully maxed out unit in most games is usually quite adept at staying alive, it's also a severe blow if it falls.

But I agree that the downside is that players like me get very protective of their units. That's one reason why I preferred to play Starcraft as the Zerg; it felt in character to just throw wave after wave of those guys at the enemy. Doing the same with the Terrans or the Protos just felt wrong, so I had the need to micromanage them and keep them alive at all costs.

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Original post by Orymus I kinda like this actually... Stacraft's campaign was interesting regardless, but it was honestly 'a tutorial' Real gaming starting in skirmish (either vs ai, but most notably against players). I still play a game versus a few computers once in a while, and I still think its fun.

It's fine if the multiplayer is the prime focus of the game, but less so if there's a strong emphasis on single player. It's a problem with game design in general - many games like to give new powers to the player as they play the game right up until the end. But if the coolest toys come at the very end of the game, then there's no time to fully enjoy them.

ya, i dont think perma-tutorial is the way to go with most games... it just feels intuitive to rts because campaign = tutorial...

and yes, I have played majesty, it is definately a good twist. There is a lot to expand from there in terms of gameplay...

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Original post by Talroth An example from StarCraft: Loading a Reaver into a Shuttle, dropping him near the opponent's harvesting and then rushing it back into the shuttle to run away after a shot or two. A seemingly valid tactic, but honestly it does little except piss off your opponent because he has no solid mechanics to defend against such an attack. A squad of marines strong enough to take down the shuttle does not have the range to guard against such an attack if placed in any single spot, and thus requires the defender to pull his focus away from the real battle to swat a fly and command the marines himself.

Indeed, marines are ineffective against reaver drops. That would be what missile turrets, photon cannons, and spore colonies are for. [grin] Of course, by the time reavers come into play, you should have tanks anyway, and it's generally a good idea to post a tank near your resource gatherers just to shoot at anything (be it reavers, tanks, hell even lurkers) that gets dropped near your mineral patches. This is necessary because reavers can do a tremendous amount of damage to your economy with only a few shots. Hooray for upgraded, splash damage- inducing scarab drones. It's hardly "swatting a fly" unless your opponent screws it up.

I think all I can say with regards to story is to try to make it unique somehow. One reason I don't play many modern RTSs (in fact, the only RTS games I play nowadays are StarCraft and Age of Empires) is that the stories all seem very bland to me. StarCraft got around that by having an interesting story in a very well-fleshed-out sci-fi world. That's what really got me interested in the story - the game universe felt like it had some depth while not taking place on Earth. I don't want to play yet another AoE clone, or any other game that has purely historic elements in it. StarCraft did this well enough that I actually bothered to read novels that take place in the game universe.

I feel that the sorts of games that are based around, say, WWII, tend to be among the more bland and uninspired games out there, because there isn't really much creativity. It's simply an imitation of reality, albeit with the player cast as one of the characters. But that's probably just me - I tend to avoid historical fiction and film as well. That said, a good cast of characters and interesting unit design can and will pull me into a historical game. If you're going to actually have a story, it's a good idea to have some characters that aren't just masks, be they overacted (WarCraft III, in my opinion) or underacted (most other RTSs).

[Edited by - Oberon_Command on February 25, 2010 7:28:07 PM]

careful there. Tank isn't an optimal ground defense for your workers. If you play against a skilled player, he will get his reaver next to the scvs, and it is the tank's splash damage that will kill off the scvs. In other words, he will use your tank against yourself.
That's what I like about this game. You can even use units' normal advantages and turn them into drawbacks for your opponent. Just how GREAT is that.

Lots of the things that appeared in the multiplayer games totally surprised the designers. A very common use of the supply depot now is to block choke points, hoping to add some armor to your ranged marines against melee units. This, chocked starcraft's design!!! But, of course, they could do nothing but applaud player creativity. The truth, is that they created mechanics that the players could "abuse" but mostly, expand upon. These were ingenious ways to employ gameplay mechanics, but it required some extensive game mechanics in the first place.

in fact more than likely the reaver will be proceeded be a couple probes that will set off the tanks first followed by a reaver. In fact if there are two tanks, the probes will be dropped by one, likely killing a tank with splash before the reaver is dropped inside the range of the other and left to blow up everything else. All this just goes to show that play testing is of incredible importance in making a RTS game.

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If you play against a skilled player, he will get his reaver next to the scvs, and it is the tank's splash damage that will kill off the scvs. In other words, he will use your tank against yourself.

If the reaver gets out of the shuttle in the first place it means some workers are going to die unless your opponent screws up and drops them in a bad spot, hence the tank to kill the reaver if they do that. Besides that, in my experience, they tend to drop the reaver next to the tank so that the tank can't shoot at them. In the time that the reaver is killing the tank, the turrets kill the shuttle and the reaver is stranded. Then you notice that something's happening, run your workers out of the base, and your main base defense takes care of the reaver. Then you run the workers back and keep going.

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Original post by Oberon_Command Quote: Original post by Talroth An example from StarCraft: Loading a Reaver into a Shuttle, dropping him near the opponent's harvesting and then rushing it back into the shuttle to run away after a shot or two. A seemingly valid tactic, but honestly it does little except piss off your opponent because he has no solid mechanics to defend against such an attack. A squad of marines strong enough to take down the shuttle does not have the range to guard against such an attack if placed in any single spot, and thus requires the defender to pull his focus away from the real battle to swat a fly and command the marines himself. Indeed, marines are ineffective against reaver drops. That would be what missile turrets, photon cannons, and spore colonies are for. [grin] Of course, by the time reavers come into play, you should have tanks anyway, and it's generally a good idea to post a tank near your resource gatherers just to shoot at anything (be it reavers, tanks, hell even lurkers) that gets dropped near your mineral patches. This is necessary because reavers can do a tremendous amount of damage to your economy with only a few shots. Hooray for upgraded, splash damage- inducing scarab drones. It's hardly "swatting a fly" unless your opponent screws it up.

True, but proper defense of your workers against such a tactic means either spending a LOT to defend them by building enough units/towers (A single tower doesn't have the range to be effective, you'll need several), or you get screwed over because you might not have been watching closely enough to see the attack and order an interception.

My point on the mechanics point was that I should be able to take a squad of marines and tell them "Defend this point at all costs!" and have them smartly react to intercept threats. That is the whole group of them doesn't move to intercept a single zergling loping by to draw them all out of position when sensors can clearly see a pack of hydralisks moving in from the other side.


Another option that I'm really a fan of is the split game system where you manage building and resources on one level of the game, and then 'zoom in' to the real combat levels. However the key to such designs, especially for multiplayer, is fast transition periods between battle map mode and campaign map mode.

Well, if we admit how ridiculous some of the standards of the genre are, maybe we can come up with a more interesting system? For instance, no matter what your resources are, power to run the buildings is about the only concern on the front. You are not building an economy to run the war machine by digging up crystals on the battle field. It's ridiculous! What we do need though is bases built. Now what if there was simply a budget to start with, including the units. Your buildings don't build more units but instead serve support functions. Then you have a phase before the battle where you plan the base out, assign build priorities, and basic battle plans. Then when you get there, you are on the field, the units start carrying out your battle plan while the workers set up your base layout, and you can tweak all these things as they are done while also taking direct part in the fight. Heck have persistent units and through a little RPG style unit leveling in there too.

If you don't want to mix FPS into it, you can go with turn based combat with no POV character instead. Hows that sound? Scout an area, set a battle plan and base layout. Select your troops and workers for the mission. Fly in, level the area and drop off your units and materials. It would involve more strategy and less tactics than typical RTS games.

imo, base building has always been a problem of its own...
If the battle is scaled appropriately, it means the battle lasts about an hour. How the hell do you muster the forces to build an entire base in one hour? If I could, I would take all the construction manpower and give them a gun instead. We would not have needed a base in the first place!

I kinda like how you think base should serve logistics, etc. Personally, I'd try to stay clear from base building, but no base building doesn't mean no bases.

1 - A pre-existing base with usable components

2 - These components can be improved

The core idea here is that your logistics management can be messed with (not your... technology?!) We assume there are scientific labs back where you come from, the real purpose is not to invent technology, it is to muster the means to replicate a home technology in this environment. Logistics.

Then again, I really liked how Dune 2 and tiberian sun (nod) used the order units system. Instead of training in the middle of the battlefield (who does that?! from what I know, the canadian and american armies train at home a long time before they are sent on a mission) the units are henceforth BROUGHT to the battlefield, already trained. The time it takes to happen is logistics again.
It assumes shuttles will arrive with already trained units, not rookies. But it takes a while to happen too.

I think dawn of war did kinda well with this system. Acquisition led to unit creation, but I think they erred in keeping different units creation times. That didn't reflect their mechanic well. I agree however that, without a time variant, something ELSE than currency should be manageable to balance unit costs.

Base building is kind of the fun part though. I enjoy being the ruler of all I survey and watching a city grow and thrive under my hand. There's no reason to have a war if you don't need territory because you're outgrowing your own, or someone's trying to exterminate you to steal your territory. Yeah combat is an exciting text of skill, but philosophically it's not interesting because it's not constructive. On the other hand building and evolving your tech and multiplying your citizens and harvesting your land are all constructive. I believe that the ability to build a bigger more complicated base every mission is one of the main rewards that keeps people playing through a single-player campaign.