quote:Original post by Veovis so you're telling me you've got *nothing*? That's a sad start my friend.
[edited by - Veovis on January 4, 2004 1:00:12 PM]
We got far more than nothing, we have about 58 ships and 12 names
(From Another Thread!)
quote:Original post by Dauntless Instead of worrying about something like gold mines, maybe you can look at other resource modeling systems. Look at the US for example....its money is not based off of gold, simply the faith in US business that it will be worth something. In the end, America became such an industrial giant because America has some of the best agricultural fields, lumber, and mineral deposits. In other words, sometimes the raw materials are more important than precious materials because ultimately a country produces its goods with raw materials instead of money. Money is good in a peacetime economy when you can use it to trade with others...but in wartime, everyone becomes much more self-reliant because the merchant system focuses on war material transportation rather than trade.
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In my game system, I have 3 categories of resources: Raw materials such as lumber, oil, mineral ores and arable farm land, Refineries which take the raw materials and make something useful out of them like gasoline and plastics, semi-conductor chips, farms, and steel mills, and finally People resources which are the actual population as well as its educational capabilities. However, my system is greatly abstracted, and instead of having actual buildings, there are "zones" which include cities for the Refined goods and People resources, as well as the land which includes the raw resources. Capturing or destroying these zones denies the resources to your enemy.
However, you can implement these resources as traditional RTS buildings. Money can be an abstracted system which represents your conglomerate total of these different buildings. For example, you can develop an algorithm, which says that if you have so many Raw Materials, so many Refineries, and so many People Resources then you have X amount of money. However, money is a sort of useless construct in wartime economies. Where it DOES matter is in the morale of the people. If the local populace feels it has worthless money, then this can lower morale. In fact, the Germans during WWII attempted to inundate the English economy with counterfeit money, thereby creating rampant inflation and destroying the faith in the monetary system. Fortunately for the British, they won Battle for Britain, and the Germans were never able to flood England with funny pound notes.
As for unit types, it seems like you are going for tactical level units rather than strategic level units. For example, things like sniper, medic, engineer, etc. are all at the individual level. If you want your game to be at the tactical level, like Commandoes, then there's nothing wrong with this. However, if you want to get the feel of an international conflict, then you should try to evoke a more strategic flavor to your units. For example, instead of the above unit types, go for things like: Motorized Rifle Platoon, Mechanized Platoon, Armored Cavalry, Recce Platoon, Light Infantry, Airborne, Marine, etc etc. You can further define unit types by the role that they play. For example, you can have Anti-tank, Anti-Air, Heavy Weapons, Mortar teams, Forward Observers, Mobile Headquarters, etc etc.
Think of how real world militaries are organized from the very top level, and then work your way down to more and more specific unit types. Right now, you are concentrating on the individual level...which if this is what you are going for, then ignore this advice. However, think about the squad level (about 7-12 people), and think of what their duties are. Even with special operations units, there is a great deal of specializations. For example, the SEAL's specialize in counter-terrorist, demolitions, and surgical precision, while Marine Force Recon specializes in insertion and reconnaissance. For the Soviets, Spetsnaz was just a broad term to cover Special Forces as they don't have different names to cover naval Spetsnaz versus land-based Spetsnaz for example.
I have good feelings aboyt this, but I am think more of a Star Wars "Federation" style.
What kind of RTS game are you going to make? Is it going to be one like Starcraft, which takes place in a game "universe" but you''re always limited to one planetary surface at a time? Or is it going to be a game where you actually go out and colonize planets, manage them, build ships, etc.? Personally, I find the latter far more interesting.
