Hey guys. I’ve recently decided all RTS games aren’t very good and none have done anything interesting for about 15 years.
I know the Planetary Annihilation is in the works, I’m a backer, but I simply cannot wait for that game so I’m going to build my own to pass the time.
Just wondering if anyone else has attempted an RTS and if you have any tips or tricks or things to warn me about.
wish me luck.
Cheers,
Antony.
P.S. This probably won’t amount to anything as I’ll probably lose interest when it gets hard as I’m doing it in my spare time and not for commercial purposes, but we’ll see.
I’ll keep this up to date on what i’m currently thinking about and exploring so you don’t have to trall the thread to figure out what the current topic of conversation is.
Current ideas worth exploring:
Line of sight - view cones and elevation.
Sound generation and detection of units and buildings (kind of like radar in supreme commander i guess but possibly only applies to infantry detecting sound and vehicles making sound).
Day/Night visibility - Units in the dark are harder to see and harder to shoot
No grid, freedom to rotate things - more freeform base building.
Active resource collection - Not sitting in your base camping on resource spots, you have to leave and go get retrieve the resources.
Strong buildings - Make buildings so strong that destroying them is difficult and a more cost effective and faster way of winning if capturing or clearing a building out.
I always wanted to see a RTS that takes from turn based strategies like Civ and AoW. I think Endless space tried something like that but it failed hard.
I never played Populous, before my time. Great sound effects… Haha!
My favourites are C&C + C&C Red Alert (Resource collection), Supreme Commander (for the camera and some cool UI advances), Civ IV (So many different strategies!), Company of Heroes (Directional combat). I’ll try mash in the best bits and eliminate the annoying bits…
…But first I need to build some basics.
Here’s a quick scale test. Currently i’m liking this, it’s sitting somewhere in between Company of Heroes and Red Alert.
I think i’m going to go for a reasonably small scale in terms of map size, unit counts and such as I want to keep scope small and don’t want to have to deal with a lot of optimising for hundreds of units etc.
the two technically difficult things i have encountered are networking and enemy high level ai. only few documents can be found about these. also rendering hundreds of animated units can be a hard task if your game needs it.
Paradox Interactive kinda makes games like this but they aren’t really RTSs(RTSes, RTSi? Whats the plural?). You can pause and resume, and order armies around, but they are grand strategy games, and very complex. More complex then Civ even. Check out Crusader Kings 2, Europa Universalis, Victora etc.
Definitely a lot of cool stuff to draw ideas from. I really need to flesh out the design before I start delving to far into the tech side of things. I really need to keep things basic as I am only 1 guy and I’m building this in my spare time.
I’m not going to focus on graphics at all. Units and buildings will stay largely grey boxed like in the screenshot above. The only colour or texture will be added to aid readability and communicate game state, like damage etc.
did you ever play the 3D version of Populous? one of my favorites… then there is Age of Empire my first RTS, Shogun Total War was pretty awesome to with Massive Armies!
As much as I want to keep this simple… I’m getting some cool ideas around line of sight, sound, and time of day mechanics.
Basically I don’t like how infantry are quite useless in most RTS games and I think this is because a lot of their advantages aren’t modled in the games I’ve played. They have less visibility or the same amount of vision, are slower, weaker, can often be crushed by vehicles, are just as visible to radar and don’t get any terrain movement bonuses. I think these things can be things to play with to make infantry a real tactical unit. The heavy units also need weaknesses, like direction armour and decreased manoeuvrability in some situations.
I think company of heroes did a good job of touching on some of these aspects but I don’t think they pushed it far enough. I also think their implementation got bogged down with micro management. I think I can simplify it a bit and still get all the gameplay bonuses that resulted from their system.
Edit:
Also some other advantages infantry have is they can be extremely quiet and stealthy. Tanks cannot. So, provided I implement line of sight and unit view cones I could also introduce a concept of sound (omg sound??!??!). Yeah so your units can gather intel based on if they can hear an enemy even if they can’t see it. An icon of the enemy could appear at its approximate location. This means vehicles could be heard even if they are out of the line of sight of your units, where as infantry could remain undetected. Also the amount of sound generated could be based on if a unit is in motion. A moving unit would be harder to keep hidden than one waiting in ambush.
Definitely want to do some cool stuff with lights now! Who needs textures when lighting can add so much depth and such a dynamic look (when it’s in motion).
Looking good Anthony !
I’m also designing a rts game (although it’s more tactical than strategy) , and the focus on my game is the infantry, as you said infantry has been made as an easily disposable unit without much value.
Something that I believe hasn’t been used much, is interactivity of the units with the scenario (opening doors, accessing consoles, disabling turrets, etc), making the gameplay a bit different than just build build, attack attack.
Keep posting
Yeah, the more I think about it the more I’m heading towards Z Soldiers. In that game infantry were everything because vehicles had to have infantry to drive them. Infantry captured flag points and the zones you captured had factories rather than you having to build them. think Battlefield 1942 but in RTS form… and 15 years ago.
Sorry don’t wish to offend the OP with Hijacking the thread,
I skipped over the 3D version but at some date afterwards played Populous II, Which it seemed to have lost the Innocent beginning’s, certainly did not favor the greek classical period.
I would like to see some asymmetrical warfare for example maybe there was a race that wouldnt actually build anything but would instead steal everything from the enemy. So instead of controlling a whole army you control a group of heroes.
Dawn of War tried this a little bit, not as extreme as you’re suggesting though. Yeah it definitely would be cool to see how far you could go with this. Supreme Commander 2 also has a similar Hero theme as a valid but controversial tactic of Commander rushing works pretty well… but it does create a boring match though.
