RTS with a longer, more permanent timeframe?

News & General Discussion
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Back in the day, it was frequently heard that “Warcraft is not SimCity.” And it was very true; though both games involved growing a little economy and buildings and whatnot (thus causing frequent comparisons), Warcraft was not really about making a town; it was about going out to battle.

I loved both games, but personally, I was always a bit sad that it wasn’t a little more like SimCity. Primarily, I’m one of those players that really enjoys building things, and it was always a let-down when I’d made this delightful little human town or orc village or whatever, and then the mission ended, and poof! It was gone.

Since we’ve been talking about RTS games here recently, and (by sheer coincidence) my younger son now has an interest in making one just for fun, I’ve been dredging up these old thoughts. So enough preamble:

What do you all think of the idea of an RTS-like game, with a stronger focus on building a thriving community, and instead of missions, you have one big, persistent world that you play in for an entire game?

Assume for the moment that we don’t care about multiplayer (I never much liked multiplayer RTS anyway). We could have occasional bands or waves of invading hordes you have to defend against. As your community gets bigger and richer, it becomes a more attractive target, meaning the attacks would naturally get stronger.

Also, since it’s a big world, there’s lots to explore — and this might include other kingdoms (or whatever) that you could try to take over, if you like going on the offensive. Maybe there could even be clear spawn points for certain types of enemies, as in Gauntlet, and you could choose to clear these out one by one. (But I’m thinking that the heavy emphasis on development tends to lead to a more defensive game.)

I’d guess something like this would appeal to the sort of folks who enjoy SimCity, farming games, Dwarf Fortress, etc… but I dunno, maybe it’s a lousy idea. Any thoughts?

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Conceptually, it’s there. I think you could convince players of both genres that the hybrid is worthwhile. You’d have to soften the battles and present the simulation aspect in a very effective, simplistic way. Bust out your green and red rectangle artwork and give it a try.

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Whom, I? I haven’t got time for any new projects at the moment. I just thought it’d be a fun idea to kick around.

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Oh, ok.

Well, you’d have to discourage outright warfare, from the beginning. Make it clear that peace is the goal. Otherwise, the game will disintegrate in a span of minutes or hours. Mutual assured destruction is a good way. Yeah, when your kingdom is wealthier its more attractive to bandits. But also say that when your defenses are low (after a battle) you’re more likely to be sacked by raiders. Therefore, the best way to go is a conservative strategy that is not provocative, has great defenses but can also muster some offense if need be.

Try to prevent this:
Warcraft players are going to go full offensive and try and play Warcraft. Harvest Moon players are going to turtle and try to play Harvest Moon. Tower Defense players are going to play Tower Defense. It’s really just a matter of injecting a little harsh reality, I think, like the Warcraft player’s army starving or the village being attacked when they go on a scouting run.

I always liked the idea that you’re presenting. A single-player, open world kingdom building game with RTS battle mechanics, extensive upgrade system, etc.

Achievements, perhaps, for population marks and societal accomplishments.

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So, Civilization?

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…I was thinking of something different.

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Me too. Civilization, for starters, is not a real-time game. Secondly, you don’t build buildings in Civ. (Well, you build lists of buildings within your cities, but on the map, the whole collection is just a square with a city name on it… not the same thing at all.)

What I’m picturing is much more similar to Warcraft, but with more building types and a longer tech tree (OK, that part is similar to Civ).

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Personally, I think that the most enjoyable option would be to make it a normal multiplayer game. You can have settings that the user can change to improve his experience. He knows the people that he is playing with and they get along even if they end up disagreeing in the game :wink:

I personally think that large, online games are overrated because you end up with too many people with different motivations, you cannot even communicate with some of them. Its like trying to make a tomato soup and a Sushi chef, German Bretzel baker and Swedish meatball chef comes to help… and your sister appear from the blue and empties a bottle of french mustard into the mess … yay!

It is also possible to think outside the box :wink: There are other ways to make people play together online but on their own terms with a percistant world and all…

I was thinking along the same lines… tried a few similar games and noticed one problem. One reason why fights got out of hand was because units could travel as far as they wanted from their city/nation borders without penalties and they could even normally ignore neighboring borders as well. This often leads to random players from the game world ganging up on weak players on the other side of the globe and other crazy stuff.

Civilization solves the border issue in a simple way, you have to declare your intent when crossing the border. War, peace, trade, alliance etc… This would quickly make players more careful when sending out units because they don’t want to offend all their neighbors while their army is away on a war.

The range of an army in history was always limited by its supplies. An interesting mechanic could be that the range of your armies is limited by your total food production. With other words, this represents the efficiency of your supply-line. A few methods to extend this range could be to ask nations that you got an alliance with to support your army with supplies or raid neighbors that you pass through. Both examples cases would in the end strain relationships with neighbors so you would probably be careful with using this method. Also, sending that much food to your army should have a negative effect on population growth and an army that is out of range and cannot find more supplies at the moment should start take a bit of damage every “turn” to simulate them starving.

The closest thing that I can think of at the moment is good old Age of Empires 2 :slight_smile: but I think that there are some lessons that we can take from Civilization among other games to improve the overall concept.

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Yup.

Don’t send soldier units across the border, only traders, envoys. Stealthy units like rogues and rangers wouldn’t constitute any declaration of war… making them extra special.

Well, if it’s real time… lol… there’s no turns. But, a rather elegant solution is steps consume a certain amount of food. Actions like combat would also consume food. I mean, just standing still consumes food but big picture… you need food. Food is just as important as an army.

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Another way to simulate supply lines would be to require actual supply lines. In other words, you have some sort of cargo units, which (much like mining or lumber-cutting workers) are either “full” or “empty”. They fill up at farms, which can only fill these things at some limited rate; and then they trundle out to wherever your combat units are, which empty them, and are good to for a certain amount of time.

Basically, a lunch truck.

If the combat units don’t visit either a farm or a lunch truck for a while, then they start to weaken.

This would all be fairly realistic, and would greatly limit how far you can extend yourself. When you capture a new area, you’d want to take the time to set up (and defend) farms so the supply chain isn’t so long. And if you DO want to fight far from your home base, then you’d have to protect your supply trucks from ambush, possibly by sending them in tight convoys with military protection.

Sounds like fun… though sometimes, I confess that I just want to build pretty villages!

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Build pretty towns and have there be a challenge to it. The town then becomes a thing of marvel, how can it exist in such a harsh world? It’s got to be designed just so.

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Yes, I agree, there does need to be some challenge to it. But here is where I think a single-player game, or multiplayer co-op game, might be preferable (to certain gamer types, at least) to a multiplayer PvP game. In a PvP game, somebody loses. In a single-player or coop game, everybody can win. Except the poor AIs, who get dumped on, but hey, that’s their job.

Yes, you could make the same argument about any game… but I think this design leads to more strongly favoring builder-type players, who want to spend weeks creating a thing of beauty, and enjoying and admiring what they’ve created. You don’t want somebody coming in and smashing all that to pieces. So, you want AI enemies who are a persistent but low-level threat you have to defend against, but who, unless you are a complete boob, are not going to completely wreck all your hard work. (Note that these enemies don’t actually have to be axe-wielding barbarians; they could be natural threats: weather, tsunamis, Earthquakes, giant sand worms, whatever.)

Elements that would make such a design work even better:

  • A big development curve, as in the clicker games. You start off generating 0.1 economic tokens per second, and after a few weeks of play, you’re generating millions of tokens per second. This requires (1) a rather long upgrade curve to work towards, and (2) big economic sinks — which means high-end stuff that’s not only expensive to produce, but expensive to maintain, too.
  • Some way to show off your work, i.e. a social component — inviting friends to come visit your world, or at the very least ways to post images of your world online, with weekly contests or some such for added prestige.

All right, I hate posting a list without at least three items in it, but I’m drawing a blank at this point. What else would help make such a game attractive to the builder/achiever class?

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YouTube man.

Build-in replays, cut and edit replays, then you can easily export to avi. Hell, build in export to avi for replays.

Add a fly by wire and walkthrough view. Make the game so damn YouTube let’s play friendly that people have no choice but to play it for their channel.

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What about games like Caesar and similar games? I think that they’re more or less exactly what you’re talking about, and very much what Misterselmo’s description brings to my mind. They’re like Sim City, but you place individual buildings, there’s loads of different buildings, and both economy and military are important. Military is important for exactly the reason you described - as your city grows and becomes more prosperous it becomes a more inviting target. Additionally, every so often you’re asked to contribute to a war effort, or to send troops to conquer/suppress a nearby settlement, or whatever.

There’s also stuff like Age of Empires, Rise of Nations, etc, which are very much Warcraft with more focus on and detail in the economy. When it comes to multiplayer, though, it just ends up being a more detailed Warcraft.

I’ve also always liked this kind of idea. I don’t like that RTSs are always rushes. I don’t mind the rush factor, but I don’t think it should be the only way that (good) RTSs come.

For what it’s worth, I get this kind of fix from board games. I know they’re not real time, but that doesn’t bother me.

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I’ve often wondered what a group of serious programmers could do with Minecraft, to this end. Not that anyone would, but it could be very interesting to see a mod of the game that does exactly this, fully destructible castles and towns. A persistent world on a server. Siege engines, economy, etcetera. One day there’ll be a game like that, everybody plays a peasant.

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That does sound like what I had in mind. I wasn’t aware of that one… because, apparently, it only runs on Windows (doh!). Looks quite nifty though; thanks for pointing it out!

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No problem. There’s a bunch like it, I’m not sure if it’s the first/best, it’s just the one I happen to have played a few times.

Of note is that I don’t think you control the military yourself. You develop it by investing into/building stuff, but when it’s time to attack/defend I think it’s all AI. Military power is essentially a resource, I think, which might be a point if difference from your concept.

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Sadly, this whole “persistent RTS” has had a lot of tries, in the form of the many browser-based games.

A lot of those game have a very basic base building, and raiding mechanisms.

I know it doesn’t sound much like a proper RTS, but the major flaw of a persistent world is the same, meaning that only people able to be online nearly at any time will be able to keep their bases somewhat safe, and the game can’t attract anyone that doesn’t plan on playing consistently for hours every day.

An other potential problem is that it tends to heavily favour players that play a lot, even if you put timers everywhere (yay, facebook games…), making it even harder for more casual players to play without the frustration of being destroyed multiple times between connections.

It also makes is somewhat difficult to have fights that are based solely on decision making and skills, when time and infrastructure can be so different.

I certainly understand the appeal of an RTS-style game where you don’t have to do everything from scratch, but so far, none of the implementations were even remotely satisfying to me, and they certainly could not compare in any way to more standard RTS on the controls and player skill required.

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I am one of the fans of building cities in RTS games.
The most enjoyable game so far for me is the classic Empire Earth game.

But there’s none yet, a game like Sim City, that able to control military might or conquering another cities through diplomacy or full scale war. I would love to play that.

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To be clear, I wasn’t proposing an online multiplayer game. I think that idea is inherently flawed, for the reasons @slay_mithos mentions above.

As a single-player game, though, it could be a lot of fun.

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