You will have trouble having many battles at once and not having the player swamped with unit creation. To have enough battles to prevent the player from affecting them all means you need to have a few battles going on all the time. If they are spaced out, the player will be able to affect them all. This means you need to continually replace units and if there's any process involved, it will quickly become a chore.

You also need to think about distances. If you want to have multiple battles, the player needs an incentive for splitting his forces. This means the distance between 2 point of interest is far enough that you cannot reinforce it in time when the enemy approaches. What will determine it is the unit movement speed. This is affected by the combat balance. For example a melee can reach a ranged unit in the time it takes that unit to shoot twice. Shooting distance is 400 pixels and fire cooldown is 2 seconds. The melee unit travels 200 pixels/sec. You want reinforcement to take 2 minutes at least. This means the distance between points of interest need to be 24k pixels. That's 20 screens worth of space. Multiply that by all the points of interest and you end up with a huge map. A very huge map.

You will have trouble having many battles at once and not having the player swamped with unit creation. To have enough battles to prevent the player from affecting them all means you need to have a few battles going on all the time. If they are spaced out, the player will be able to affect them all. This means you need to continually replace units and if there's any process involved, it will quickly become a chore.

[color=#ff0000]Well if the player is busy with non battle concerns like research, diplomacy, economy, or planning I wouldn't need a buttload of battles and I certainly wouldn't need them going on all the time. I do get your point though.

[color=#FF0000]This game is more set up for people who play Dominions or Warring Factions or something, so if your only desire is to do APM based twitch combat you probably won't like it.

[color=#FF0000]In Dominions 1,2,3 you had a process of moving your units each turn. You needed to hold a lot of territory to win on big maps and you needed to protect all your borders from invasion. In a way it was like a larger scale game of Diplomacy. Where do I think I will get attack? Given the choice to move to one of 3 provinces, where should I move these units.

[color=#FF0000]Managing unit chains from production centers to the front lines was a very critical part of the game. You also had to deal with unit comp to some degree.

You also need to think about distances. If you want to have multiple battles, the player needs an incentive for splitting his forces. This means the distance between 2 point of interest is far enough that you cannot reinforce it in time when the enemy approaches. What will determine it is the unit movement speed. This is affected by the combat balance. For example a melee can reach a ranged unit in the time it takes that unit to shoot twice. Shooting distance is 400 pixels and fire cooldown is 2 seconds. The melee unit travels 200 pixels/sec. You want reinforcement to take 2 minutes at least. This means the distance between points of interest need to be 24k pixels. That's 20 screens worth of space. Multiply that by all the points of interest and you end up with a huge map. A very huge map.

[color=#ff0000]Well, I am going to use slower movement speeds to make it harder to get around, as well as using a pretty large map. GAE can support some larger maps I think, although various modders and devs have different opinions on how large. The map had better be huge, there are multiple allied, enemy, and neutral "kingdoms" as well as unaligned towns, unaligned wizards towers and guilds, and unaligned factors like blacksmiths.

[color=#FF0000]A maximum size Majesty map would be perfect or maybe even too large for this scenario.

[color=#000000]I do agree that the game is not for everyone.

I understand it's not meant for everyone. It should still be meant for humans ;)

The way you describe it, you want to overload the player with things to do in an effort to make him unable to do it all. What seems fine at the start of the game can quickly grow out of hand later on. Try playing Dominions with a 1 minute turn timer. Early on you have more than enough time to spare. Later on, your success will depend on how fast you can go through the interface to do whatever you want to do. That's the reason why 4X games are turn based. By going real time, you need to make concessions so the required actions remain within a tight range no matter the size of your empire. If it grows linearly, it will soon surpass human capabilities and become unplayable.

You may want to explore an hybrid system between turn based and real-time. The linearly growing decisions would happen in the turn-based part while the combat resolution could be real-time.

I understand it's not meant for everyone. It should still be meant for humans ;)

The way you describe it, you want to overload the player with things to do in an effort to make him unable to do it all. What seems fine at the start of the game can quickly grow out of hand later on. Try playing Dominions with a 1 minute turn timer. Early on you have more than enough time to spare. Later on, your success will depend on how fast you can go through the interface to do whatever you want to do. That's the reason why 4X games are turn based. By going real time, you need to make concessions so the required actions remain within a tight range no matter the size of your empire. If it grows linearly, it will soon surpass human capabilities and become unplayable.

You may want to explore an hybrid system between turn based and real-time. The linearly growing decisions would happen in the turn-based part while the combat resolution could be real-time.

Not all 4x games are turn based, SoaSE isn't. I'm not overloading the player with things to do to fill up his time. Most research takes almost no player action. Click a button wait for research to fill. And its not like you need to follow all the units as they travel to destination either.

I am pretty sure that all RTS games focus on navigating the interface. I mean sure you can set up hotkeys but that just means each player starts clicking hot key just as fast as they did interface buttons before.

For the timer thing, assuming you play a person and not a computer whether you have 30 minutes or 5 doesn't really matter. Whoever can navigate the interface faster will win both in this game and in dominions.

I do agree that that things can get out of hand later on. But consider this, the map doesn't grow larger. The enemy AI isn't going to attack 2x then 4x then 8x as many spots. It will send larger armies. Does the number of actions really explode? Also there would be periods of lull after the enemy attacks while it builds back up. So you would catch your breath.

I do understand your point but I disagree that its a huge issue. In any case GAE doesn't support any sort of turn based capability so I couldn't do what you suggest even if I wanted to.

I think that the alpha testing stage will be critical to determining and optimizing for playability. Its nice for both of us to speculate, but we can't know until we see it in action.

So I have gotten pretty far on this. Weirdly as I go I keep trending towards more simmy gameplay ala Majesty and Emperor; Rise of the Middle Kingdom. I also abstracted weapons from the unit. Each unit requires a weapon, which tends to cost wood and metal or maybe stone, of the proper type instead of having the wood and metal and stone costs directly on the unit. Mostly this is to help me maintain and make changes. Basically I can adjust the res cost of all the units of a given weapon type by editing only a single file, as opposed to gong through several files changing the values.

This is especially important for mages because there are so many kinds even excluding guilds and towers multiplying the number of files I need to edit. Given that the magic system is the most complex part of the game this is really worth a lot to me.

I am however trying to consider how much annoyance it would cause players to build the weapons separately.

So I have been getting really behind on this due to getting into the GAE source code. Man, I have to say my favorite part about GAE is that all I have to do is the fun part of game design. No dealing with graphics or GUIs or any of that stuff. Just pure game mechanics. I have been expanding the capability of the engine with unit capturing, lifesteal and manaburn, allowing units to generate resources on a timer with source instead of doing it in LUA and thus restricting it to Scenarios, and also shield bars, instead of just health. More recently I added optional modifiers to increase the cost of a building, or a non building unit, based on how many you have constructed.

I am currently in the process of implementing a hero system, which entails some new classes and functions and also drastic modifications to the upgrade system. Currently you can only use an upgrade once which I dislike.

I honestly enjoy this aspect of game design more than making mods. Primarily because mods/games/scenarios involve that damnable art requirement. Modelling is not my favorite activity.

I am also learning a lot about working with source code not purely designed by me, and boy is it a pain. Functions are not documented and confusing and its hard to figure out what I actually need to deal with to add a given feature. I used to think documentation was boring to do and unnecessary but I was so, so wrong. This was way more effective than a CS teacher just reminding the class over and over to remember to document.

You have to beware of overspecialization, and obsolescence. These are the two main limiting factors that a designer needs to keep in mind when trying to manage the complexity and scope of their game almost regardless of genre.

They are in fact the main difficulty for all customization-style designs like this one appears to be, especially for RTS games. You have to have a very very tight design if you want to provide very specific customization options.