Make it more ''survival'' if there is not enough food famine starts and your people slowly dies, you can buy some food if you have anything too sell, but you must protect trade routes or your supplies will never reach you etc. If it is multiplayer ''turtleing'' will be weakness as without trading you will fall behind your enemy that has map control.

Make it more ''survival'' if there is not enough food famine starts and your people slowly dies, you can buy some food if you have anything too sell, but you must protect trade routes or your supplies will never reach you etc. If it is multiplayer ''turtleing'' will be weakness as without trading you will fall behind your enemy that has map control.

I like the idea. Though I like the idea of a perfectly self sustaining fortress. Needless to say, the bigger it is, the more space you'll need to claim/defend in order to make it self-sustaining.

Glad you like the suggestion. I have a question though - is there intended to be a single-player campaign as an important part of the game? If so, you don't want to make the production chains too similar because players would be bored when there's nothing new to learn for the 2nd or 3rd faction. Similarly if you're thinking of an online situation like Evony or Stronghold Kingdoms or something like that, if the factions are too similar there's less replay value. The only situation where direct parallels might be good is if you're focusing strongly on PvP dueling. For both RTSes and CCGs consistent base mechanics for all factions can work as a platform to build faction specialties and expansion content on top of.

My vision would be to emphasize the skirmish/multiplayer aspect of it. Not sure if I would make a single player campaign a priority, if at all. Personally, I get very little enjoyment out of the campaigns in RTSes, compared to the AI skirmish and multiplayer. Am I alone in this sentiment or do more people feel the same? Not sure how RTS players in general feel about this.. Depends on where the project leads us, I suppose. I would start out with more or less similar production chains as a platform to add unique specialties and such, as you put it.

Just some thoughts. I would be careful about mixing genres, especially if you want to include PvP. I've tried something similar and my experiences aren't the best. In fact, you are developing two games in one and the major issue is, that players lost focus really quickly and get confused if they need to play both games simultaneously, including myself as developer. You start playing one part of your game, get involved and ignores the second part. After some time you get negative effects, don't know why certain things happens and lost interest.

In your case it sounds like an eco-simulation and RTS. Similiar games often use separate phases or turns (e.g. XCom: base/strategy phase -> tactical combat phase). On the other hand most competive RTS games have really simple crafting/eco simulations. There are other issues, besides development stress (developing and balancing two games in one is hard), you minimize your player audience (you need to find players who like [slow paced] eco-sims and [fast paced] RTS games).

So, from this point of view idea #2 sounds a lot better, because of having different game parts in different turns.

Thank you for your feedback. I see what you mean, here. I should not make the economy too difficult to not alienate the playerbase. As previously stated, however, military conquest in my idea is just one of the victory conditions. If you have ever played Stronghold/Knights & Merchants, that's the level of complexity we would put in the economy. Seeing how both of these games still allowed for big battles, I don't think that would alienate too many. But I'll still keep an eye out not to overdo it. Thank you.

Stronghold/Knights & Merchants

Never played Stronghold, but K&M. It is based on the idea of settler with an expanded combat system which worked due to the formation system. But combat is really slow paced in this game and not comparable to modern really, fast paced PvP RTS games. I doubt that K&M will work really good in an competive multiplayer scenario, but I'm just guessing here, just played the single player campaign.

A strong focus on the (single) core gameplay is better then to support two "core"-gameplays. Many eco-simulations have a battle component (settler,civ) and many RTS games have a eco-system (star craft=>two resources , etc.), but all have a single core game mechanism, either eco simulation or battle. If you take the concept of e.g. a RTS game and add the "burden" of a eco-sim, then you are suddenly trying to develop two games in one.

Alright, so I'm guessing I would go for the eco-simulator with a combat component here. But how do I make it so that it is this rather than two game?

I understand what you mean, but I do not see the means to achieve it.

You need a game designer, a single person who makes these decisions.

The person whose idea gets voted (Only people who are committed to helping in the project get a vote) gets the role.

Anyway, as I was reading your posts I got this feeling, are you sure you want to make an RTS? Wouldn't you prefer a turn based economy focused game instead? I mean, it feels strange where you are making an RTS and are talking mostly about economy instead of combat.

I know lots of the things talked about would work pretty well in a turn-based game, but we've all sort of "meh'd out" on turn based games.

Next thing, are you making a singleplayer or multiplayer game? If multiplayer how many players online you need at any given time? Note it's not exactly/fully a game design question but more of a technical & financial one.

My idea would be skirmish vs ai/local multiplayer (starting out as direct IP/LAN games, we haven't gotten far enough to consider hosting yet..) with more options coming around as soon as we hit a couple of milestones. We (the developers) 'd like to be able to play simple 1v1 matches against each other for testing purposes as soon as our game is a bit more playable and we've laid the foundations for direct IP connection. We're not looking for financing right now as we find it bad form to ask for money when we have so little to show the world. (That, and we don't want to ruin our nonexistant reputation online just yet :) )

I've taken a look at your game and it looks promising as hell. Therefore I automatically assume you know your stuff. Could you please tell me why you think it's such a bad idea to vote? Our programmer has had concerns about the amount of work the as-of-yet unsigned team members will deliver.

Thanks for the feedback and honesty, I much appreciate it :)