Is combat an important core element for RTS?

News & General Discussion
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For my next project, I’m thinking of making a 3rd person multiplayer game where the main objective is to build up your village while facing the elements, keeping your villagers fed, healthy, alive and happy. Think Banished but third person and multiplayer.

At first thought I loved the idea, but thinking about it more, would this get boring fast? Would there be any point in it being multiplayer if you can’t attack each other?

The players would be able to interact, trade resources, and even join each others villages if they both agreed.

I have contemplated adding combat but I really don’t want it to be the focus of the game. If I were to implement it, it would only be as a last resort. e.g. This village is hogging a huge source of food and not willing to trade, we need to attack them to either steal their food, convince them to trade, or wipe them out so the food source becomes available.

War would be a huge drain on your economy, you’d have to use resources training troops and feeding them while they contribute nothing to your economy, and replace a valuable worker. Waring with one faction will leave you both down on economy while another faction outside of the war will be growing in peace.

This also raises another question. What are some possible win conditions, if not world domination? My thoughts are “reach this population”, “reach this wealth” and of course, be the sole survivor (If all other factions happen to die off due to starvation, disease or natural disaster).

I will definitely prototype this to iron out the small details, but I’m looking for some Ideas on how to make this fun without turning it into a combat based game.

Looking forward to your thoughts!

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I think that as a dev you need to feel comfortable to try new things and not think of all RTS games as Star/Warcraft or the like.

That said, I think it really depends on the game.

With the craft games, combat really seems to boil down to making a pile of troops then throwing them at the other players. Yes, there are nuances, but largely that’s what you’re doing.

Where as a game like Myth combat is everything and you may need to maneuver a troop individually to distract enemy units while another unit does major damage, and all the other units are moving to better ground. A lot more involved.

For you game, sure that sound’s like it would work, but only so long as there are competitive actions you can take against the other player. Otherwise it would just be a building race.

EDIT: Oh, and this sounds a LOT like Catan. I love Catan. If you’ve never played it you really should to see where the standard is and how you can make it your own without just cloning it.

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I’m definitely comfortable with trying this. The thing is, these games have done very well and combat is a huge part of them. If I do end up adding combat, you would not control troops individually, you’d have very high level commands like “attack this region” or “defend this region” and that’s it, the AI would take it from there.

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The competitive actions would involve securing certain resource points before other players have a chance to, but yes I agree there would need to be more things like that. Thanks I’ll check out Catan too.

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Check this out:

Settlers of Catan

Each turn the dice are rolled and whichever numbers come up that correspond with the numbers on the hex tiles result in paying out that tile’s resource to all cities adjacent to them.

Players may freely trade these resources (sheep, wood, brick, and stone) at any time with any other player in any way they choose.

You then use these resources to build up and expand your city and roads.

As you expand, you occupy more space leaving less for the other players.

The main strategies come from shoving other players out of the way, capitalizing on hex tiles with mid range numbers (that come up more often), monopolizing resources, and negotiating with others.

At the end of the game you add up scores based on a range of scoring: Cities, longest road, and scoring card you collect along the way.

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@Not_Sure Interesting, the dice roll element would add a lot of randomness which could be a good thing. Of course my game would be realtime, but I could still apply randomness to how much ore a mine might produce, or fruit an orchard produces. Trade would become an extremely important part of the game which is kinda where I wanted it to head.

Thanks for that :slight_smile:

btw, did you get your name from Idiocracy? Love that movie xD

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Ha! Yes it is.

The REALLY funny thing though is that Not_Sure was originally my name for Unity Answers, but when all the services were tied to one account there was a bug and it used my Answers name instead of the forums. So the name Not_Sure is from computer error, just like in the movie.

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There are plenty of people that enjoy simulation games. I killed hours on sim city. Just call it a simulation instead of a strategy game and you are good.

One important leaf to take from board game design for victory conditions is the idea of victory points. Certain big tasks in the game give you points. First to a target score wins.

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If you decide to have randomness dictate resource production will you try to tie it into regional events as well e.g. A flood may lower crop production but could also have a minor impact on ore production if the mines are flooded or the roads are blocked etc ? That way regional impacts also flow through to the overall economy.

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Yes I had thought about adding natural disasters which could directly or indirectly impact the economy, but I wouldn’t want them to wipe out a player easily. You can prepare for a flood by building drains, prepare for a fire by building wells, prepare for blizzards and tornadoes by building higher quality (warmer and more stable) buildings.

The only problem I see is that in a multiplayer game this might annoy some people. Perhaps I could make the disaster random, but all players get a disaster at the same time or something. This will also need prototyping!

I hadn’t thought about points for different goals adding to a big total score, interesting concept. It kind of makes sense, the wealthiest country is not always the best, nor is the one with the highest population. It could make a great victory condition to have to meet several different requirements, thanks for the idea!

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I think this form of economic warfare would make a good educational tool as well. Players might pick it up & try it & then manage to make sense of something in the business news when they next hear it. Things like that impact most people more than direct warfare yet very few people understand how. It wouldn’t even need to be a full on realistic simulation, just modelling the higher level impacts & forcing the players to make the decisions & bear the responsibility may be enough to make them question what they see or hear on the news or from business people & politicians. That can only be a good thing.

As you suggested further back, you could have a set of trigger points which when reached puts the players team on a war footing that they have no control over. This could mean that they need to decide how much of the economy to divert to the military & the impact on the rest of the economy & flow on effects from things like rationing would alter the gameplay more.

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Haha yes that’s true. I think I’d have to do a bit more research on natural disasters myself before I implemented them too.

Yeah that’s definitely what I was going for. War would be mostly an act of economic desperation or self defence.

Edit: I know religion is a big cause of wars, but I won’t be tackling that in this game :wink:

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Religion, like freedom and democracy, is more often an excuse for a war then the cause of it. Economic factors always play a part.

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Slightly off topic but I heard a good interview with 2 American academics that each wrote books about how big business redirected the U.S. Towards a Christian leaning in the 50’s by cherry picking scripture for political speeches so things were changed (apparently the oath of allegiance had no reference to one nation under God until the 1950’s when a business campaign funding the big preachers of the time got the change made).

I agree religion is a dangerous area to touch in games as games tend to be so strong in portrayals of most things but it would be a hard yet interesting thing to attempt to show the subtle influencing of decisions (not just religious ones tho) & how you can subtly lead a player logically based on their beliefs into an outcome that they would have been vehemently opposed to if it was presented to them at the start. As an example there was a great one in the Yes Minister series (possibly the Yes Prime Minister ones) where Bernard is given a sample series of poll questions. His answers were consistent both times yet the end result had him agreeing with national service one time & then disagreeing with it in the other.

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Thinking about it, this could make a good victory condition: “Appease the gods!”. But this could easily make an excuse for war as you stated. We must build a giant golden statue of our lord, but that player is hogging all the gold mines! War is the only answer!

If I went that way I wouldn’t want to use real religions, as I am fairly ignorant of this subject and will most likely offend someone :stuck_out_tongue:

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As long as you offend everyone equally you should be ok

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Nah, the trick is to only offend those with big publicity wings. First time I heard of GTA was a front page new paper article saying “Catholic church slams new game”.

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Have tiered commandments that influence what they do & just make war the immutable one no side can ever cross. Weight the decisions against each commandment & a loss condition would be the weighted average falling to a certain point. The economy & political system is a weighted theocracy for your own made up religion (cobble together bits from everywhere + whatever you feel like adding). Also have religious win conditions as you suggested so the player has to balance the win conditions against the subtle erosion of the loss conditions & the happiness of the citizens for their economic situation. Where does the economy work with or conflict with the religious needs? How are they managed? Of course I think this is now probably a completely different game to what you first pitched…you asked for a horse & I gave you a camel.

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Well yeah any publicity is good publicity huh.

It’s still great to hear all these ideas, I probably won’t get to these in depth points for a while but it would make for a very interesting game! I don’t really want to over-complicate it either though, not everyone likes to think when they play games. Ideally I’d take all these complex ideas and try to simplify them so the game is still fun to play. This amount of complexity would probably be more suited to a persistent singleplayer game.

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I think combat is actually the least compelling part of any RTS, so you’re pretty safe using its design scheme for other things. RTSs are about position, troop mix, micromanagement, and the meta build direction/attack moment. The actual “combat” that takes place is about micromagement clicking and is where people who dislike RTSs really find their dislike…

In short, I think you should run with the idea of a multiplayer non-combat RTS. Seems to be working well for Offworld Trading Company anyway :slight_smile:

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