Doolwind-
Good question. I envision the game spanning at the least several months, and at the most about 5-6 years. As for allowing the conquering side to build up his own factories, while it''s possible, I''m not sure if that''s feasible. When you look at history''s examples, the conqueror did not turn around and use the subjugated nation''s manufacturing centers to produce goods for his own army. Indeed, even things like food was taken sparingly, again, for fear of making the people rise up.

Part of the problem is logistics. If manufacturing plants build a certain kind of vehicle, you would have to retool the machinery to produce your own equipment. Also, there''s the problem of sabotage...would you really trust equipment made at the hands of a vanquished opponent? Related to that, how do you get a conquered people to build things for you? While it is possible to ship your workers to the plants, think of the logistics involved in doing that and also considering the possibility that the territory might be recaptured. Would the workers be familiar with foreign equipment in another language? So that idea really isn''t feasible either.

There is the third problem of building new factories, processing plants, etc. The problem is that it takes time to both build the infrastructure for the buildings and the skilled workers to man them. I''ve often thought that the time scale in RTS games were all wrong. Troops moved across the board way too quickly, buildings could be built in too short of a time span, units were built too quickly and units killed themselves way too quickly as well. In my game, while the initial placement of troops is very quick (in my game world, a division worth of troops can be orbitally inserted virtually anywhere on a planet in a matter of less than an hour) once the troops are deployed, going from one end of the map to the opposite should take half an hour of real time. Partially because the units move slower, and also because the maps will be bigger. Because of the time scale problems in RTS games, the strategy is you control a piece of territory, send some troops to defend it, then build your manufacturing center. In real life, it would literally take at least several months to do this. In game time, you can do this in a few minutes, which when scaled into game time would probably be a few weeks.

The best bet is not in utilizing the manufacturing centers but in the raw materials, the main exception being food. But things like oil, and mineral ore are definitely things that can be taken by the victor fairly easily. Food is an exception because if the people start starving or even have less, they will get unruly, and guerrila warfare and partisan activity will increase. If you put the civilians to the thumb screws, if there are any neutral parties in the game world, they may go against you for being "evil". It''s one thing to take things like oil or minerals which are unnecessary for human life, quite another to take life giving food to feed your own army.

As for how abstract the materials and manufacturing capabilities will be I haven''t fully thought out yet. I was thinking more along the lines of what you thought...that the system is more abstracted, so if the territory is lost with the "armored plant facilities", then the player needs to capture it back or rebuild new plants. I''m still working on that part....what do you think would be better? So far I''m leaning towards a more abstract system where you essentially have a table that reads off your capabilities. When you need more troops you put in your request from a central point rather than click on each building to ask what you want from it. The only non-abstract thing will be the actual physical locations of the various manufacturing centers. This needs to be concretely known so the enemy can attack it (assuming of course he''s done the intelligence work to find out where it is).

What about when you research a new technology and you really want more of it. Say when you start, tanks are the big thing, so you have heaps of tank factories, but few infantry weapon factories (I am assuming both infantry weapons and tank''s aren''t built in the same factory). Then all of a sudden you research the mortar (my personal favourite weapon of all time). What happens if you want to start building a lot of these. If the game spans serveral months or more wouldn''t you either build a new factory to pump out more mortars or at least send your workers from the tank factory to the mortar factory to increase the number you can build there. Abstracting all this away seems like it would work well for most of the game, except for a few small cases that are vital, such as this one.

And realistically, if you lost all of your tank factories, wouldn''t you start building a new one just in case you can''t take back that territory you just lost?

Doolwind