Hi all,

I'm developing ideas for a persistent multiplayer RTS and am coming up with a system similar to chess, in that you have many units - but one is a central king unit. All other unit's primary goals are the preservation of the king, and the consequences for the loss of this unit are dire - perhaps permadeath/disintegration of the empire you control.

What does everyone think to this, and what should the characteristics of this unit be (bearing in mind that instead of a mere 16 chess pieces, this particular regent will hopefully reside in an army of 100+ units)?

Supreme Commander does this I think......

Is there an ultimate badass Queen unit?

This is not much different balance-wise from League of Legends where the users play as hero units amidst a horde of underlings. Also not terribly different from other RTS games that had hero units (The Lord of the Rings RTS games, for instance). If you haven't played those games, you should. It might give you more ideas how to structure your game.

Anyway, that's all to say it seems totally reasonable and potentially fun.

-me

Age of Empires II had a regicide game mode. Everyone had a king unit and lost when the king died. The king itself was about as fast as light cavalry and could not attack. I don't remember how tough it was. They usually spent all their time hiding in a castle.

Yeah this was central to Total Annihilation/Supreme Commander -- your 'commander' unit was a slow-moving hulk who could easily defend himself against small groups of units, but not against an army. He could also be used to support your workers/factories to decrease construction times.

In most game-modes, if he died, you just lost instantly.
In all other modes, when he died, he blew up in a nuclear explosion (that would often take out a large part of your base/army).

The insta-loss mechanic worked well in those games.

I like the idea of the king unit being a real bruiser, but also quick - this would discourage players trying to instantly topple each other with a quick assasination skirmish, since any squad small enough to sneak behind your lines would be too light weight to defeat the king - and anything heavy enough to finish the job would be easy to escape from.

I also think that the 'level' for lack of a better word, of the king should somehow reflect the level of the army as a whole. For example - an army of generally level 5 units might have a level 10 king, but an army of level 20 units would have a level 40 king. Something to that effect. Would this make gameplay unbalanced?

The game is going to be persistent-tickbased, so one option would be to have a 'council' for each army. The head of the council is the king (level10) and he has maybe 5 advisors (each level 9) - in order to permakill the empire - every council member must be killed, including the king. If a council member is killed, they can be replaced by another unit who is promoted into their position - but only after X amount of time. Likewise - the king could only be replaced by a council member.

This would make it easier for an empire to not put all of it's eggs in one basket (that is to say; not put all of it's VIPs in one dangerous area).

-

On the topic of ranks, I was thinking that the players would enjoy the game more if there were a means of letting them assign their own ranks and classifications. This would help them to personalise their own play style (eg: a cruder player might simply deem all level-5-or-below units to be 'minions' and the rest to be 'heavies', while another player might have more sophisticated terms and ranks; level1-5 = grunts, level 6-10 = sergeants, level 11-20 = generals... and so on.

The Warhammer table top games went a long way to perfecting leadership in a strategy game - a unit's proximity to a superior leader unit influenced how confidently the lesser unit fought - a detailed ranking system might have some kind of cool bearning on this mechanic.