Design : RTS - Socoder

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Socoder -> Mini Challenges -> Design : RTS
Mon, 26 Apr 2010, 09:09
JL235	I was chatting to Spare yesterday and he had mentioned he went to a game design workshop where they had to quickly come up with design ideas. So I had the idea, why not do the same here as a design challenge. The challenge is to take an exist genre or design and improve upon it. How would you make the design different? How could you change the genre to increase originality? What new ideas would you add? I had the idea of improving on fog-of-war. Players can see the whole map, however what they see is a delay based on how far away they are. What you see of units and buildings on the other side of the map would be several minutes behind their actual state, whilst units next to you would only be behind by 1 or 2 seconds.
Mon, 26 Apr 2010, 09:53
Jayenkai	I started doing the "enhance" topics early last year, as a way to drum up interesting topics for the newsletter. socoder.net/?topic=1531 Unfortunately, I ran out of ideas by the 2nd or 3rd one! Feel free to ressurect the plan, though. -=-=- ''Load, Next List!''
Mon, 26 Apr 2010, 14:46
Stealth	What about special troops called spotters with binoculars that can see extra far but their location is revealed to the other player. Also since spotters have to "sweep" the field, the map would update like a radar where objects would become out of date until the next pass. -=-=- Quit posting and try Google.
Tue, 27 Apr 2010, 19:47
mindstorm8191	I like the RTS genre, and there's a lot you can add to it. One of the things I find unrealistic about most RTS games is exploration of the map. Like in Command & Conquer, once you have explored an area, its like you always know what's going on there, even in enemy bases. What would be more realistic is to not know what's going on in a certain area unless you have troops there. The game could grey out areas you're not watching, and alert you when you have troops under attack. In order for players to know more about the whole area, they could station troops in different locations. Or, the game could offer sensor type devices that detect troops nearby, that can remain hidden from enemies. -=-=- Vesuvius web game
Tue, 27 Apr 2010, 21:13
JL235	Mindstorm8191 The game could grey out areas you're not watching, and alert you when you have troops under attack. Most RTS games over the last 10 years do this.
Wed, 28 Apr 2010, 03:55
mindstorm8191	oh... umm... umm, I guess I haven't played any new ones in a while! -=-=- Vesuvius web game
Wed, 28 Apr 2010, 08:17
Jayenkai	I haven't enjoyed any since FutureCop:LAPD, and that wasn't really meant to be an RTS. Hella fun!! -=-=- ''Load, Next List!''
Wed, 28 Apr 2010, 08:51
HoboBen	@DD (or JL, I can never know what to call you these days!)..,. interesting idea, but the speed of light is, well, almost instantaneous (though would work incredibly well for a space-based RTS where the delay really makes a lot of sense). I think I'd prefer seeing "blobs", increasingly accurate as distances are closer or enemy numbers are larger, e.g. you can see a big building in the distance, you can see a large army nearing, but a few scouts are very faint dots, or even invisible if hidden by trees or blocked by the line-of-sight unable to pass through hills. I don't know if checking the visibility of each unit would be too CPU intensive though, especially considering each check would be considering the line-of-sight of each scout, which would lead to a for-each-scout, for-each-enemy, LOS-over-terrain, loop - quite demanding! -=-=- blog \| work \| code \| more code
Thu, 29 Apr 2010, 08:24
mindstorm8191	Another thing unrealistic about the RTS's I've played, is units don't ever worry about resources. Like, units should have a food and ammo bar, draining food over time and draining ammo while fighting. Once either runs out, they would have to come home. They could also live off the land, so to speak, to boost their time away, and salvage enemy weapons too, perhaps, but leaving them stationed somewhere, never receiving any supplies doesn't always make sense. Just some thoughts... -=-=- Vesuvius web game
Thu, 29 Apr 2010, 13:21
Mog	Oooo. Mindstorm may be on to something there. I liked the Munitions thing in Advance Wars, though that's turned base. I'm sure people would bitch about it leashing you to a number, but naturally, you can't just have units sitting on some island without some kind of provisions and resources. Would also keep you from blindly attacking or just camping, since you'd need to keep your economy going to feed your troops. I've also always wanted to defend supply lines that feed your front- or cut off the enemies and choke them. A siege in most RTS's now seems a little pointless since all you have to do is have a work camp off to the side, and everything magically pools into one giant pot. Maybe you could extend on the idea and instead of one giant pot, each town or city-thing has resources to purpose towards feeding your infrastructure. Just a thought.... Now for some of my ideas Instead of you just pooping out units at a barracks, why not have whatever citizens join into military service? I'm sure that would be complicated and people would get angry at it, but it bothers me to just see such a cut-and-dry 'this building does this and this does this and this guy will always be a farmer while this other random guy will always be your killing machine' - You could repurpose units you don't need into other job fields just in case you have a shortage, but may not be wise. Also, You should have to man factories- The more employees, the faster things like mechanized units or other buildables are spit out. One thing Empire Earth 2 did that was cool (ergh, horrible game otherwise...) was something called Calculated Attack. You could queue up a battle plan such as Move here, wait, attack this- move here, attack that. Was a pretty fun concept, though may reduce your games to a war of push-button attrition - I just hate micromanagement, which it helped kill off by being like 'Don't just act on impulse, follow a mission' Have a lot of ideas for RTS's since i love them a lot, I should write them down for later... -=-=- I am Busy Mongoose - My Website Dev PC: AMD 8150-FX, 16gb Ram, GeForce GTX 680 2gb Current Project: Pyroxene
Thu, 29 Apr 2010, 14:12
JL235	Mindstorm8191 Another thing unrealistic about the RTS's I've played, is units don't ever worry about resources. Like, units should have a food and ammo bar, draining food over time and draining ammo while fighting. Once either runs out, they would have to come home. They could also live off the land, so to speak, to boost their time away, and salvage enemy weapons too, perhaps, but leaving them stationed somewhere, never receiving any supplies doesn't always make sense. I also really like this idea. I've seen games add upkeep costs, but it's always global and not location specific. Units at my home base should have an advantage over enemy ones just outside. An easy way could be to have values such as ammo which they use up. When they are near a supply vessel or a barracks they are automatically replenished slowly over time. Supply vessles themselves would only have a limited ammo stock, so they would have to return home to pickup more. I think having units automatically be replenished just be being nearby is a good idea because you'd want the replenishment to be as simple as possible to help avoid micro-management. Mog Instead of you just pooping out units at a barracks, why not have whatever citizens join into military service? I'm sure that would be complicated and people would get angry at it, but it bothers me to just see such a cut-and-dry 'this building does this and this does this and this guy will always be a farmer while this other random guy will always be your killing machine' - You could repurpose units you don't need into other job fields just in case you have a shortage, but may not be wise. Also, You should have to man factories- The more employees, the faster things like mechanized units or other buildables are spit out. The Settlers games did something like this, where you had citizens and you allocated them to jobs. But it might be nice if there was some sort of training. So you could switch people between jobs. The issue I can see is that this might lead to ultra-micromanagement. Having to see the indevidual stats of each indevidual unit and making a decision based on this. A solution could be to be able to select a group of units and then automatically keep or remove people from this group based on skill level. For example say I have a selection of soldiers and want to turn some into farmers. I could select them, then select to eliminate all soldiers who are excellent, and finally click to select only those who are at least very good at farming. This could also be compounded to allow that selection to be made in one step: "select those are are not excellent at soldiering and are very good or better at farming". Mog I just hate micromanagement I've always liked the idea of using swarms in an RTS. Where you could give an order to a whole swarm and it will act accordingly. I guess the Total War games are one example but in some ways it's just replacing giving indevidual orders to units with giving order to indevidual groups. So perhaps more like Pikmin where you only gave general orders on where to move and things to do and they acted as a swarm accordingly. Finally I've also really liked the idea of being able to alter the world terrain as a whole, in order to affect the other players. Deformable terrain is one example (which is cool), but also so you could alter the amount of resources that resource wells give out. For example lets say you have enough Vespene Gas in Starcraft, you could maybe build some sort of structure which will then reduce the amount of gas that all players (including yourself) will receive. The idea of making it bad for everyone. Another example could be detonating large nuclear weapons which dish out large amounts of radiation. This could move and dissopate around the map according to pre-added weather patterns. So you could detonate ones next to an enemy base so the radiation will slowly move over them.
Thu, 29 Apr 2010, 14:53
Mog	Another example could be detonating large nuclear weapons which dish out large amounts of radiation. This could move and dissopate around the map according to pre-added weather patterns. So you could detonate ones next to an enemy base so the radiation will slowly move over them. Another EE2 example, they had fallout from nukes but it was nothing more than a slowly expanding (although dissipating) radius from ground zero that would damage units. Would be cool if based on terrain, how much particulate matter you kick up and wind conditions, but now we're getting into weather physics... ...but aww hell, it's the future! We should start thinking about these things. -=-=- I am Busy Mongoose - My Website Dev PC: AMD 8150-FX, 16gb Ram, GeForce GTX 680 2gb Current Project: Pyroxene
Thu, 29 Apr 2010, 16:08
JL235	You could also bring into account the shape of the terrain. For example a valley would block outside fallout, whilst containing any fallout inside (and so slow the dissipation).