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A race where you can only have a certain amount of unique "spawner" units, but where each one can almost instantly summon a temporary army? The commanders would be able to summon units instantly at a typical resource cost, but the units disappear after a while, and the units would probably not necessarily be that powerful and rely on surprise and numbers.

 

How about a race, probably a nature race, where almost all units can't be directly controlled? You would have buildings that periodically create units, but the units either wander around, patrol your buildings, or look for fights? That would mean you wouldn't have a lot of micro to deal with as well, but you have to focus on what buildings you create and where you place defenses.

Something tells me that the difference between tactics and strategy is vague and indefinite.

Perhaps someone could make a new thread for race ideas in an rts?

Go ahead. I'm not going to use the idea myself, after all.

You could make it so that instead of getting numeric advantages, you gain more skills and are able to do more things. If you want to improve, then you could add equipment-based improvement so that you could make yourself stronger, but not extremely stronger (i.e. a tier 12 armor set would only give twice or three times as much health as a tier 1 set), and so that your friends could try to help you catch up. This way, your character can get stronger without depowering new players or relying on unreliable twitch-bsed combat.

Personally, I generally only play the custom maps in Starcraft 2, and try to stay away from anything with micromanagement.

I like when not only are there different races, but when the races play completely different. For example, in warcraft 3, one race raises the dead and for another race almost every single building can uproot and attack the enemy or otherwise has a purpose like healing units. There should be completely different gameplay if you decide to have multiple races. Playing a different race should mean an entirely new experience. Otherwise, I wouldn't recommend having different races.

 

I despise micromanaging things. Micromanaging is what keeps me from getting into these games besides playing a bit of the campaign. It sucks when you have to tell all your units to target one unit (not to mention it's unrealistic). It's one of the reasons I like to play MOBAs, as there's plenty of strategy without having to command every single unit on the map.

I think that the point of playing with other people should be about playing with other people, not grinding or just fighting npcs.

Scarcity. There can only be so much resources in a certain group. If you have better/higher level/better geared players then you could have players go on scavenging trips to feed the other players, but even then there's still a limit of how many people you can feed based on efficiency.

DayZ still provides an example of how it's done right. Just make a level system where you get xp for scavenging instead of normal means, and make it so that leveling has as much as an effect as getting better equipment currently does, and several more tweaks, and it'll satisfy the requirement.

However, that doesn't change the fact that an rpg is not defined by its roleplay.

How brilliant of you. You noticed that the acronym was originally for role-playing game, and then you took role-playing for its literal meaning, and thought that despite the fact that everyone else meant something else when they used the term rpg, that an rpg was all about a mechanic vague enough to define pretty much every game out there.

We all know that when the poster referred to an mmorpg, he wasn't talking about the roleplay. You're just trying to "correct" him. Please, lurk moar. We've already been over this.

Nice. I would also suggest doing a wikipedia-style thing where people need accounts to edit so that it's easier to manage griefers by banning. This has the potential if you add the inventory and skills and whatnot.

Nice. Also, hopefully under-powered players will still have stuff they can do to help their friends without feeding or just spending most of their time waiting to respawn.

That is a vague question. How about if you try to do it, and tell us when you reach a specific problem.

Ideally, if sheeps aren't careful, then wolves could kill them and the wolves would get more stuff than the sheep. However, if the sheep are careful, then they don't get killed and get all the stuff.

I would recommend that you add more skills, and that the skills are akin to ones in MOBAs. Also, there is normally at least some sort of snowball mechanic. The other things can be added later if you decide to develop it seriously.

Sounds like a good plan! I've started playing around with adding MOBA-ish skills (currently have something akin to Rammus's kit from LoL) and noticed something interesting: It seems like limited ability usage adds the most to the MOBA feel. Whether through cooldowns or 'mana', forcing the player to decide when to use their skills now appears to be a big part of the MOBA experience.

I'm still on the fence about snowballing, since blood champions (http://www.bloodlinechampions.com/) seems to have a strong MOBA vibe without it. However, perhaps that lack of snowballing is what causes so many of my experiences with that game turn into giant clusterfights; without it I guess there isn't a reason to hang back and only attack strategically.

Snowballing is not essential, but it does help it feel more like a Moba in some ways, even if it can ruin the game for some people. I would recommend that, for now, you make it so that you gain exp passively over time such that players can develop their heroes, but for now don't snowball and have equal footing. You could experiment with minor tweaks later.