Multi-layered empire building game

Questions & Answers
1

I'm interested in building a multi-layered game with MMO characteristics. I'm wondering if this is possible with unity, and what the best way to achieve it would be. I'm an entry level programmer, and this would be a long-term project while I finish school. I plan on creating small and simple games to help learn the concepts needed for a game of this scale. Thanks in advance for taking the time to read this.

The top layer would be an empire-building game similar to Civilization. Although rather than turn-based, it would be time based. The construction of buildings and units would each take a different amount of time and resources. This is essentially the main MMO aspect to the game. As players conquer and upgrade territory, it would update a master map stored centrally on my server. As I said, I'm an entry level programmer, but it seems like the information needed to update a master map with who controls a region and what upgrades exist there wouldn't require much more than a powerful linux server.

The second layer of the game would be the actual battles. Players would use the units they acquired in the top layer in the battles, and they would take place in a peer-to-peer game hosted by the player with the better connection. The server would only be notified of who won the battle, and update the master map's variable of who controls that region.

The only other MMO-type aspect I would be interested in would be a marketplace where players could sell goods and resources.

So my two questions are: Is this possible with Unity3D? What concepts should I focus on learning to achieve it as I finish my degree?

Thanks again.

2

Any game genre is possible and, to some degree, fairly well supported by Unity.

Sounds like you're making something like Evony Online. I see no reason this wouldn't be possible.

The only real hurdles you'll face are saving all that data; all save functions will need to be designed from scratch (which actually shouldn't be as hard to do for an online game as an offline game). I think this is why most people make zippy arcade games using Unity rather than story-driven linear ones, just programming a save system for a linear plot-based game in Unity is a potential nightmare depending on the complexity of the data that needs to be saved.

In fact, in practice (minus the networking bits) an empire building game is hardly what I would consider an advanced project as the one you're describing sounds like it won't even require visible units running about with pathfinding and all that. This should be a big advantage, making almost all the cogs of the game mathematical in nature (how much of this resource do I have, how fast am I generating it, how many troops do I have, what is their combined power/defense, etc). Number crunching games are the easiest ones to make, in my experience.

Still, you should definitely make a few similar projects to play with before you tackle your final project. I would recommend maybe making a totally GUI-driven project where you can click around and look at/manipulate various statistics, and perhaps a separate project based on learning how to place buildings on a terrain and figuring out basic networking.

Anyways, good luck.