A MMORTS game in theory Lately I'e been looking for a massively multiplayer online real time strategy game (MMORTS) to play that is not a browser game, and I see there is a lack of them in the market, and those that exist don't seem that interesting to me :(. What would you include/exclude in a MMORTS game if you had the money and the means to make ones? I think my perfect MMORTS game would be set in a persistent ancient times/medieval world that was not directly based on real countries of this world. The game play would be much slower than a normal RTS, making a game round taking around 1-2 years to finish. General game play: Each player would start with a nobleman and some villagers. You begin with exploring your surroundings and deciding where you are going to establish your first village. After the village is built you have to make the population grow and save up money to train an army. It should be impossible to conquer the whole continent by yourself though, thus giving every player the options to establish a realm or join an existing realm (realm/kingdom/tribe, the name doesn't matter that much but you get the idea). The objective of the game is simple, carry out the the plans and strategies of your realm with your teammates and conquer the continent with them, or die trying (well the third option would be to betray your realm and join the enemies :p). Some players will always be selfish, but the heart and focus of the game would be the realm and not on single players. Each realm would have an in-game chat and forum to make planing, organization and bonding within the realm easier. Everyone would want to win, naturally, but ideally players would make friends in their realm and have fun playing with them even if their team eventually loses. 1) The game would have tactical aspects, because battles would be fought. You're only in direct control of your nobleman, your other units will follow your orders but you can't micromanage them. You can only lead the battles your nobleman takes part of, the rest of the battles your generals (AI) will lead for you and you'll get a report of the result of these battles. 2) The game would have economical aspects, you'll have to feed your people and armies and make weapons for your recruits, and you'll need resources to do that. It would be interesting if some resources only exist in the north, some only in the south etc, so each realm will have to trade with other realms to get access to every resource they need, which would also make it possible to effectively boycott your enemies in war, or kill their caravans in attempt to destroy their economy. 3) The game would have political aspects, leaders have to be charismatic to attract members to their realms and to retain them. It would be up to each realm how they would want to organize themselves, some would be democratic, some would have a dictator. The leader won't be able to "force" anyone to carry out his orders, but he can kick out anyone who doesn't. Organization and bonding within the realms would be vital for the realm's survival, and power struggles and fights within the realm would weaken it. Realms would also be able to make diplomatic contacts to with realms and make allies with them, and propaganda would become a natural part of the game. 4) Building the infrastructure (bridges and roads to facilitate transportation within the realm), founding new villages, establishing safe trade routes would also be important. New players would get some beginners protection, where they can't be attacked the first days. If a newbie joins a realm he'll probably get some protection from them too. The soldiers of big players attacking much smaller newbies wouldn't fight with full capacity because of bad moral (if a smaller player attacks a bigger player though the bigger player won't get any penalties). Major problems: 1) What will protect a player when he logs out? I don't like the idea of having your empire disappear while you're logged off, and reappear only when you're online, or that enemies can only attack you when you're online. If you have built a big empire the game play should be slow enough to make it impossible to conquer all your land over just a night or something like that, but slow game play isn't enough I think, so these additions are the only things I can think of: A) AI takes control of your empire while you're not online. Perhaps you can give your "right hand" (computer AI which takes over when you're not online) basic orders of how you want him take care of things while you're gone (in various situations). B) The realm could have some built-in system where the whole realm will be notified when enemy armies are approaching the borders of the realm, and of the basic movements of enemies within the territories of the realm. This way other players of your realm may help and stop the invasion of your villages even if you aren't online to see this yourself. C) The realm should be able to build fortifications and walls that are properties of the realm and not of a specific player, buildings that are there to protect the realm as a whole. D) There may also be some built-in system where you can agree to letting the realm/teammate temporary give orders to your armies while you're offline, if they find it necessary (there would have to be some rules, restrictions and limitations about that though so the method doesn't get abused). 2) How do you make casual players stand a chance against nolifers? I think it's a pretty given that a casual player won't be the best realm leaders of a MMORTS game like this, as more activity would be required of them, but I would like if a casual player could still make a meaningful contribution to his realm, as long he's not totally inactive. A) I think having some sort of a cap of how much you can do each week could make the advantage of nolifers smaller. Perhaps the citizens of your towns are only up to building perhaps 10 buildings a week in every town. Armies will take time to move around and will also need to rest once in awhile, so there is only so much they can move around and fight, and the nolifer can only directly control the battles his nobleman personally takes part of. B) The player should be able to give the computer some basic orders to carry out while he's not there, so being online to set your workers to build things won't be as vital (there must be some good balance though so being "offline" won't get more effective than being online :p). You should also be able to rank different priorities to your different armies, and give them situational orders so the generals will know how to react to different situations even if you're not online to tell them, like setting an army to fleeing mode if it's outnumbered, or letting them hunt down nearby enemies, protect a castle, follow another army etc. A problem for players with less time are that they would be more likely to miss out their chances to directly control the battles their nobleman participates in as they don't have the time to "wait" until the army has reached it's target. I don't know any good solution for this. Perhaps they can ask the computer to time the attacks to reach the target at a specific time (if nothing unexpected happens), a time they know they can be online. Or if they don't know when specifically they'll be online they can point out a place close to the target where they want their army to set a camp, and when they get online again their army will hopefully already be at place for the attack. Another problem is that a slow game play will leave more active players not much to do after they have set their building orders and their armies to march. It'll leave them with plenty of time to make up strategies and talk and discuss plans with their teammates though, but there should probably be some mini-games to play with friends or alone if you get really bored. ___ Questions: What would your ideas be to protect offline players? And how would you do to help casual players to stand a chance in a MMORTS game? Other thoughts? Thanks everyone who took their time to read my wall of text :p :) And sorry for any grammatical or spelling mistakes I may have made, English not being my native language. [Edited by - Rodia on April 22, 2010 1:36:06 AM]

I think you've got the right idea with the realm direction, just push it a little further. If the realms are geographically contiguous the player doesn't exactly have a lot of freedom about which to join, potentially one or two. And you've currently got the problem of what if a player is defeated? If there land is conquered, you're going to be losing players as there hard work is destroyed; if they just lose some resources how can anyone conquer the world?

So require the player to always be part of a realm: assign them randomly or give them a choice when they join. This means you can focus fairly exclusively on realm v. realm combat. In feudal days a vassal would receive protection from his lord, and in return he'd provide soldiers for battle.

Basically the king would order an attack on another realm. He'd have set some chain of command among his lords, the army would be spread about to the online lords according to this. You could even have a hierarchy, so the realm is broken into regions, each with its own army: The king is 'in charge' of say 5 barons, who are each in charge of 5 lords. If the baron is offline, he'd have set about his own ordering of his lords so one or more of them would control his cut of the army. This way, as long as each realm is big enough there should always be someone online to control the army.

If a player's castle is conquered, he's now part of the conquering realm. Initially he'd probably be forbidden from controlling any of the new realm's army: he'll just be contributing wealth to it. If he gains the realms trust he can start participating more seriously. Or he can agitate and try to get his old realm to save him.

Regarding giving casual players a chance, a queue goes a long way towards that. A lot of social games let you, say construct one building at a time. This might take 4 hours, so if you login every four hours you can construct 6 buildings, if you login daily, just one. By giving the game a list of actions to take, you can still compete playing daily or less. But logging in more lets you run armies, and lets you react more quickly to changes (e.g., your farms were destroyed in an attack, so you can push a farm to the top of your queue).

Quote:Did you try Evony? Personally I hated it because of the slow pace and I don't like games where other players can destroy your stuff, but it sounds kind of like what you are describing. It's based on the Heroes of Might and Magic series as far as I can tell.

I've never tried Evony, I didn't like their advertising and I heard that rich kids got a lot of in-game advantages there. But I've played Tribal Wars, kinda like Travian. I thought Tribal Wars was really slow in the beginning, but I later got addicted to the game :/. I liked many aspects of Tribal Wars, because it's the most social game I've ever played (I've played WoW too), you have rely on the tribe a lot. I would very much like to play a game like that with animations and more complexity and a better system to help people who can't always be online. I like Heroes of Might and Magic too :p. I like many of the old turn based and RTS games.

Quote:Basically the king would order an attack on another realm. He'd have set some chain of command among his lords, the army would be spread about to the online lords according to this. You could even have a hierarchy, so the realm is broken into regions, each with its own army: The king is 'in charge' of say 5 barons, who are each in charge of 5 lords. If the baron is offline, he'd have set about his own ordering of his lords so one or more of them would control his cut of the army. This way, as long as each realm is big enough there should always be someone online to control the army.

That sounds interesting :)

Quote:If the realms are geographically contiguous the player doesn't exactly have a lot of freedom about which to join, potentially one or two.

There would be as many options as there would be realms, but some realms will probably focus on specific territories. There should be some abilty to choose where you start so you can play with your friends, or move.

Quote:And you've currently got the problem of what if a player is defeated? If there land is conquered, you're going to be losing players as there hard work is destroyed; if they just lose some resources how can anyone conquer the world?

The game shouldn't necessarily be lost just because you lost all your land. When your realm conquer land, they should be able to assign the new land to whoever they want, if a member has recently lost all his land they should be able to help him up on his feet again that way. Ideally you'll win and lose together with your realm, not alone, if your realm was outmatched on one server your realm can try again on another server. Losing sucks, but with the ability to lose it also makes winning more rewarding because of the stake. Losing can also in it's own way be a rewarding and bonding experience, like a watching a tragic movie, happy endings makes you happier but a tragic ending can also be emotionally rewarding but in the sad way.

New question:

Are there ways to make losing more rewarding?

William Wallace dies for Scotland in the movie Braveheart, he lost, but he was still a hero, not just some "noob". If you could make the defeated feel like heroes when they die for their realm perhaps they wouldn't be as against losing? But I've no idea how one would do that :/.

The best defense for an offline player is having mechanics that slow down attackers.

You can do this several ways(logically): Have attacks take several hours to happen, Have a limited number of actions in a day, have travel mechanics, or have army weariness.

I personally hold the view that attacks should last several hours(around 12) in web games. Mainly because it opens up the greatest amount of 'potential' player interaction. Essentially by having attacks last a long period of time that gives the most number of people time to respond. Either by having allies aid your defense, having third parties realize the attackers reduced defenses, and giving the defender time to manage their other aspects(building the counter attack, liquidating savings, mobilizing mothballed units, or similar).

I would also throw in a few other kinks in a long battle type game. Essentially being that armies performing a siege are attackable, but have no defenses bonuses against 3rd parties(and research modifiers from the defender that could give them negative modifiers).

_________________

Games I would recomend looking at are neveron. They have a battle-commander system where you can give allies log ins to manage parts of your empire(usually defense stuff).

Astro-empires might be worth a look. Instead of the normal method of you win the battle you own the planet, you instead "occupy" it halving it's production and giving it to you.

I think geographically contiguous realms would be more interesting. A checkerboard of independent nations across the world is more of an alliance than a self-contained political unit. And it makes realm v realm warfare much more complicated: What if my realm goes to war with another realm who doesn't have any territory near me? Do I send my army marching for weeks to pick up a piece of territory I now need to rule from afar? It could be interesting in a sort of colonial era game of world domination, but ruling a fragmented empire has its own challenges. Additionally, your realm is less likely to be able to provide any support in time if you aren't very close. It also provides more inter-realm political necessity if an important trade root goes through a single realm, rather than any number of different lands.

I like the idea of being able to share land within a realm to avoid the problem of losing your own land. It also gives a way for leadership to reward/punish member states. And it becomes a political dynamic: if you don't feel you're being adequately rewarded for your play, would another realm pay you well enough for a defection?

Regarding making losing rewarding: Give some sort of reward for performance, apart from the end result. If you defeat 2 enemy units for every 1 you lose, but were vastly outnumbered, let the game praise that. Trophies, or a message, or even a production boost as your people are inspired by the brave soldiers. And by calling attention to what the player did, the rest of the realm can reward him (verbally or with land). Your castle was taken, but because you held the enemy off for so long, we were able to mobilize our own team before they could get any deeper into our land.

I submit that the actual challenge here is not entertaining this or that specific group of players, but making the game any good in the first place.

Imagine a group of good strategy game players sit down and play the game against each other speeded up by 600x or whatever makes it playable in one weekend session. They all try to win. Is the game any good or does it just break? I'm sceptical of pretty much any MMO's ability to balance when the game has alliances, especially of RTSs.

What is being gained by the game being a MMO instead of smaller multiplayer, and what is being gained by the game being realtime instead of - say - simultaneous turn-based with two ticks per day?


[Edited by - Stroppy Katamari on April 22, 2010 10:59:24 PM]

Quote:Imagine a group of good strategy game players sit down and play the game against each other speeded up by 600x or whatever makes it playable in one weekend session. They all try to win. Is the game any good or does it just break?

The gameplay would be more like Age of Empires in a speedy shorter session, still playable but with different dynamics. There wouldn't be much time for diplomacy, most would opt for premade realms because finding good players to recruit in-game would divert their attentions too much. If it's a fast real-time game some players would feel stressed to make strategic decisions without much time to think, every second not used for building things, killing things would be a wasted second, an advantage for your enemies to take advantage of. I love Age of Empires in it's own merit, but I would want a game with more time to think, more time to get into the game world, more time to make friends and allies in-game.

Quote:What is being gained by the game being a MMO instead of smaller multiplayer,

100 players in a WoW server can still raid, but the world would still feel pretty dead if they only had 100 players on each server. I want the game to be a strategic game social game, where making connections with people really matters as part of the gameplay. What a MMORTS can give more effectively than a normal turn based or real time strategy game is the politics, the drama, the psychological aspects.

Examples of drama that could happen in a MMORTS:

* Your king is a selfish and takes every land the realm conquers for himself. You convince your friends within the realm to make a new realm with you as new leader, some see you as a savior, some as a traitor.

* A teammate extracts information about the realm from you, as an unsuspecting naive player you give him all the information he asks for. Later he changes sides to your enemies, making it obvious he was a spy.

* Your big bad enemy sends a message to you, telling you he'll spare your town in exchange for information. Will you betray your realm to save yourself, or sacrifice your town for honor?

___

The dynamics between realms and players should stand for the most of the content of the game. Real people can be unpredictable and sneaky, it's a challenge to convince a real player to team up with you, and not your enemies. The game should give the tools and the purpose for meaningful and strategic interactions between players.

Quote:and what is being gained by the game being realtime instead of - say - simultaneous turn-based with two ticks per day?

I like turn based games, like Lords of the realm II, it gives the player time to plan. I think real time battles are more exciting though, but it's possible to have both. There should be many things/decisions to do each day if one wants, just that it should have some regulations so those who play 8 hours a day don't get too far ahead of those who can only play let's say 1-2 hours. Making it real time would make it more exciting for those who are more active, as things and situations will have had time to change between morning and night, and the gameplay will already be so slow that making it turn-based isn't very necessary.

Quote:I'm sceptical of pretty much any MMO's ability to balance when the game has alliances, especially of RTSs.

I understand your concern. Many times the game won't be fair to you, you might get owned even if you're the better player because your enemies teamed up against you. I want it to be a sort of a sandbox play, everything is fair as long there is a realistic counterpart. The realms should run like simple simulated medieval/ancient times empires. It's hard to balance a game with political dynamics, but then politics can be very fun part of the gameplay, making the unfairness worth it, depending on the player.

Quote:I think geographically contiguous realms would be more interesting. A checkerboard of independent nations across the world is more of an alliance than a self-contained political unit. And it makes realm v realm warfare much more complicated: What if my realm goes to war with another realm who doesn't have any territory near me? Do I send my army marching for weeks to pick up a piece of territory I now need to rule from afar? It could be interesting in a sort of colonial era game of world domination, but ruling a fragmented empire has its own challenges.

I think the realms should be able to choose if they want to try a more colonial look to their realm (the old Greeks had colonial cities too), or focus all attention to take control of one big territory. With all probability they'll find going at war with a realm far way isn't very effective and make peace with them, but if they want to try they can. In the browser based MMORTS Tribal Wars, you can have tribe-member all over the world, but those tribes are almost never effective and die out, they get eaten up or their members join more united tribes with a base closer to them. Often there are several hundreds of tribes in the beginning of each server and many tribes share space, but as the gameplay progresses one by one of these tribes get eaten/merged up until there is just one big tribe in each territory.

Quote:I like the idea of being able to share land within a realm to avoid the problem of losing your own land. It also gives a way for leadership to reward/punish member states. And it becomes a political dynamic: if you don't feel you're being adequately rewarded for your play, would another realm pay you well enough for a defection?

Exactly :), if the king doesn't reward his members many will leave him. It'll also make it possible for the enemies to promise land for those who change sides to them. Trust will be a strategic factor, will your teammates/members be loyal to your realm even if tempted by the enemies?

Quote:Regarding making losing rewarding: Give some sort of reward for performance, apart from the end result. If you defeat 2 enemy units for every 1 you lose, but were vastly outnumbered, let the game praise that. Trophies, or a message, or even a production boost as your people are inspired by the brave soldiers. And by calling attention to what the player did, the rest of the realm can reward him (verbally or with land). Your castle was taken, but because you held the enemy off for so long, we were able to mobilize our own team before they could get any deeper into our land.

Those are good ideas, production boost, trophies etc :). Each realm could get some fancy history book where they can document the history and day to day events of their realm, they should mention the heroic efforts/sacrifices of their members there, as a way to reward them and record it for later times.

Quote:Games I would recomend looking at are neveron. They have a battle-commander system where you can give allies log ins to manage parts of your empire(usually defense stuff).

I'll take a look on it :). I know other games too where you can give another player a log in to manage your empire while you're gone. It's better than nothing, but it requires that specific person to be online, and they often have restriction that the one who manages your empire can't help in with his own troops. In times of war there are often a few players that the rest of the players all give log ins to :/, and these players get overwhelmed by the amount of work.

Quote:I personally hold the view that attacks should last several hours(around 12) in web games. Mainly because it opens up the greatest amount of 'potential' player interaction. Essentially by having attacks last a long period of time that gives the most number of people time to respond. Either by having allies aid your defense, having third parties realize the attackers reduced defenses, and giving the defender time to manage their other aspects(building the counter attack, liquidating savings, mobilizing mothballed units, or similar).

I would also throw in a few other kinks in a long battle type game. Essentially being that armies performing a siege are attackable, but have no defenses bonuses against 3rd parties(and research modifiers from the defender that could give them negative modifiers).

Yes :), there should be a large window of time for 'potential' player interaction, and letting marching armies be attack-able. There should be many possible solutions to each problem with different advantages and disadvantages.

Quote:Original post by Rodia

Quote:Imagine a group of good strategy game players sit down and play the game against each other speeded up by 600x or whatever makes it playable in one weekend session. They all try to win. Is the game any good or does it just break?

The gameplay would be more like Age of Empires in a speedy shorter session, still playable but with different dynamics. There wouldn't be much time for diplomacy, most would opt for premade realms because finding good players to recruit in-game would divert their attentions too much. If it's a fast real-time game some players would feel stressed to make strategic decisions without much time to think, every second not used for building things, killing things would be a wasted second, an advantage for your enemies to take advantage of. I love Age of Empires in it's own merit, but I would want a game with more time to think, more time to get into the game world, more time to make friends and allies in-game.

What I meant by the question was how would you set up the mechanics so the game's actual strategy isn't shallow as a puddle. Stretching out a game of certain strategic depth from a weekend to a year doesn't make the game any deeper when the weekend was already enough to think through a tough match.

Execution-heavy games like AoE have nothing to do with the discussion.