I was posting here because I wanted to get some food for thought from the game dev community on an idea I had going around in my brain. I won't bore you with back story unless you ask, so here is my idea/question/thought/etc:

Say you have 4 races in an RTS game.

Two spell casters. One is tactical and one is a debuffer.

One ballistic race.

One melee race.

To put that into perspective Starcraft 2 has three out of four of those:

Tactical spell caster - Protoss

Ballistic race - Terran

Melee race - Zerg

A debuffing race would be similar to protoss but instead of using abilites to turn a fight more favorable (ie forcefields, collosi, etc) you would use deduffing spells that would decrease range, dmg, attack speed, etc.

Say these races work in similar was econ wise as starcraft does:

Melee race expands quickly and really focuses on unit macro to makes its army size larger than enemy as well as allowing the army to be made quickly.

Ballistic race is middle econ and uses its ranged, dps units to control the battle field

Finally, the tactical/debuff spell casters expands a few times and has expensive units.

My question is would it be possible to make one of the spell casters have the strongest units/abilites in the game and not allow them to "expand". Having some sort of system where perhapes the "mineral" field regenerates and provides unlimited or increased resource amounts?

My answer to this was that this races defensive buildings would build quickly but units would have a massive increase in build time?

I am not asking really if this idea is possible but say it was implemented into SC2 right now on protoss how could the other races or this race be altered to help balance this. I was also thinking this race could expand to decrease build time. Addtional expansions would not be unlimited resources.

Thanks in advanced to anyone who provides their input. I am just trying to humor the idea of different RTS econs. Also please post any econ/resource management ideas you may have about RTS games.

Not a huge RTS person myself, so take this with a grain of salt as it may not quite 1:1 apply... but there is a turn based game named Dominions (not the card game) which has a LOT of races (like 100 of them). Many are very similar to eachother, but a few are radically different... including one that kind of has your thought for a non-expanding race.

Eremor I think is the race I have in mind: It's basically the undead kingdom who literally kills off the population of everything it touches, every turn, and turns some of those that die into a legion of weak (but incredibly numerous) troops. The end result is you have extremely diminishing returns if you are not constantly pushing your boundaries forward and once you've held an area for a while it becomes literally worthless to your enemies to take.

I don't quite think this translates into an RTS so much as it is a kind of different way to look at expansion: Turn a race into a plague on the battlefield, which if left unchecked will prevent anyone from getting the critical mass they need to overcome. Strong early game, weak late game. Though you can offset that weakness by giving it some late game advantages. Won't be easy to balance if your goal is multiplayer though :)

My question is would it be possible to...

My suggestion is to see if you can't come up with some kind of quick prototype to get a handle on what sort of results you might find. Not an actual game but just something to input some calculations and see how offensive / defensive capabilities might change over time or under certain conditions.

Tactical spell caster - Protoss

What about the Archon?

Ballistic race - Terran

Hellbat?

Melee race - Zerg

Hydralisk?

decrease range, dmg, attack speed, etc.

I think the Zerg spellcasters are pretty much doing this?

My question is would it be possible to make one of the spell casters have the strongest units/abilites in the game and not allow them to "expand". Having some sort of system where perhapes the "mineral" field regenerates and provides unlimited or increased resource amounts?

It has been theorecized before that having a 'turtle' race would kill the Starcraft pacing. It could work for an RTS along the vein of Age of Empires II, but it would lead to a gameplay more focused on citybuilding than aggressive expansion.

In addition, if such a faction exists along others, they would be left expanding freely and this would not cause the strife that RTS are currently built around.

A good example of an RTS currently supporting turtling would be Ground Control II (in which it is almost favorable to retain control of the LZ and never expand and buy long ranged tanks given how the economy works).

The Starcraft 2 designers focus a lot on keeping the game active, requiring players to expand, favoring bold strategies. Sure, a game could have a turtle race, but would that really make the game funner? It sounds like you might be limiting their strategic options.

However, I do like having a good variety of races, with different abilities. One game I loved for it's group variety was Command & Conquer Generals. In that game, USA and China had some differences, like a stronger airforce for the USA, and Chinas focus on bigger armies and powerful tanks. The terrorist group, though, had no airforce (aside from a special ability). Instead they had stealth, and tunnels that worked like a Zerg Nydus canal to send their soldiers quickly across the map. I don't know if I've seen that sort of thing in other RTS games, where one group has a whole category of unit completely left out of their arsenal. But I felt like it worked well!

So the kind of race differences you're talking about seems like a fun thing to explore. I don't know how well it would fit into Starcraft, but i'm sure it could be made to work in a game.