Hi

Im doing a fantasy RTS where you train armies, control cities and fight other lords and monsters. Sort of mix between masters of magic and total war medieval.

The basic resource is gold: This buys armies and develop your cities. But the second ("advanced") resource is undecided. I have two ideas:

Mana/Magic

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Gain mainly by letting workers pray in temples AND by having wizard towers etc.

Use this to cast combat spells, terraforming spells, summon units to bolster your armies (like in masters of magic)

Honour

----------------

Gain by having workers work in religious buildings AND by having monuments AND by killing enemies.

Gives less fantasy feel and more medieval touch to the game.

Use for some abilities like "morale boost", "reinforcements" etc. But mainly for mapwide upgrades/bonuses like better forges (unit damage upgrade) and architechture (bonus to towers) etc.

I feel honour work better in a empire building scenario, but if missions are shorter this will be repetative since you "research" again and again. (I dont want upgrades to be persistant). The magic option is more conventional but gives greater freedom for gameplay options for me as a designer.

Your thoughts?
Erik

I dont want upgrades to be persistant

Then maybe upgrades don't make much sense, and intrinsically temporary ways to spend resources like magical buffing or single-use war machines or bonus volunteer troops are a better fit for your game.

Instead of upgrading your army progressively, you might have a fixed set of potential troop types, for example infantry ranging from untrained peasants with machetes to high elf veterans with exotic armour and enchanted swords, and recruit different numbers of different troop types depending on various factors. The general trend will be the same as with permanent upgrades: increasing the size and the average unit cost and quality of troops as resource income increases, Improving the quality and quantity of single-battle bonuses as the player accumulates resources would be a parallel trend.

I think population should be treated as a resource: renown might attract individual heroes, but population (possibly split between different races) is the source of recruits. The quality of the rectruits, i.e. what troop type they become, can depend on other resources like magic and money. Are you sure you need only a few resources? Exotic materials and magical resources can be both fun to manage for the player (e.g. I need dragon blood, who can I send to kill a dragon? And which dragon?) and a good game balance tool (e.g. the player won't be able to use dragon blood for dragon spells until he's able to beat a dragon, which is going to require about N turns, which is going to be the point of the game when dragon spells are relevant).

Why not use both Mana and Honor? This can then allow difference between races where one makes more use of one resource and another race the other resource (possibly even doesn't use on resource at all). I don't see why Honor would need to be map wide upgrades where as magic isn't, I would see both being capable of being used for both one off spells/skills and mapwide upgrades.

Hi

Im doing a fantasy RTS where you train armies, control cities and fight other lords and monsters. Sort of mix between masters of magic and total war medieval.

The basic resource is gold: This buys armies and develop your cities. But the second ("advanced") resource is undecided. I have two ideas:

Mana/Magic

----------------

Gain mainly by letting workers pray in temples AND by having wizard towers etc.

Use this to cast combat spells, terraforming spells, summon units to bolster your armies (like in masters of magic)

Honour

----------------

Gain by having workers work in religious buildings AND by having monuments AND by killing enemies.

Gives less fantasy feel and more medieval touch to the game.

Use for some abilities like "morale boost", "reinforcements" etc. But mainly for mapwide upgrades/bonuses like better forges (unit damage upgrade) and architechture (bonus to towers) etc.

I feel honour work better in a empire building scenario, but if missions are shorter this will be repetative since you "research" again and again. (I dont want upgrades to be persistant). The magic option is more conventional but gives greater freedom for gameplay options for me as a designer.

Your thoughts?
Erik

The most important questions to ask yourself before we can assist you with this decision:

1 - What is your theme? Which mechanic best fits your theme?

2 - From a mechanical standpoint, do you want resources to be an optional tier 1 resource that forces you to make decisions, or a tier 2 resource used for stronger/more complex units (wizards or ballistae for example)? This is paramount to how your economy will work and required before any decent suggestion can be brought up.

If there are different factions, they might use/need different resources; aka they would all use gold + a secondary resource,

and they could have slightly different ways of gathering and using their secondary resource.

I feel honour work better in a empire building scenario, but if missions are shorter this will be repetative since you "research" again and again. (I dont want upgrades to be persistant). The magic option is more conventional but gives greater freedom for gameplay options for me as a designer.

I never enjoyed campaigns, since they're usually nothing more but a pretty tutorial.

Empire-games especially, since either the normal PvP-experience becomes too short, or the campaign becomes too long.

(i suspect most empire games use "some kind of" persistance upgrades, for example by making the (re-)research-costs lower.)