I''d like to see an RTS where you start out with all of the units you can have for the rest of the game. Should make for quicker games.

Here are three tenets of RTSes I Would Like, in no particular order:

• Supply and Demand: The War Office™ has only so many resources to allocate to various fronts, and makes decisions based on a combination of the track record of the commander at each front, the strategic importance of the front and the needs of that front. Resource harvesting and management on the macro scale are just lame devices to extend the total amount of "gameplay."
  
  Resource harvesting and management do still have a place though. Sniper missions, deep-cover missions - basically, any scenario that cuts the units off from the supply chain - should allow the gamer to employ the environment not only as cover and strategic/tactical advantage, but also as a source of food, fuel, weapons, etc. These are lofty ambitions, but you did ask...



• Delegation: At every level in the military hierarchy, orders are issued and followed (to varying levels of effectiveness). Event in a squad of peers, a rotating leadership role may be in effect (anti-terror squads come to mind). Not only should the gamer be able to take advantage of this fluidly - issue orders to any units under his command and respond to orders from higher ups - but also be able to move his "focus" up and down the hierarchy, capped by his overall game promotion status. What that means is that if the game starts out from a lieutenant''s perspective, the player can take over any of the soldiers under his command (useful if he orders a group of five or six soldiers to carry out a critical task - disable a tank, take out a sniper, etc). As he gets promoted, he can delve further and further down the hierarchy relative to his current rank; ie, not just immediate subordinates but also subordinates of subordinates.



• Individuals: Current RTSes, relentlessly focused as they are on the Big Picture™, lose the ability to impact the player emotionally. I''d like to see a game where the player is always bound to an avatar (the actual avatar can change from time to time; see Delegation above) and interacts with individual soldiers with names, personalities and histories - families, high school sweethearts, aspirations, etc. This creates the opportunity for complex explorations of the effects of war, and allows the player to experience the loss of units as more than just a statistical hit: "Damn! Pfc. James was a good soldier, good kid..." In essence, Role-Playing RTSes.

Everything else is pretty much a direct consequence of these axioms and what we know about the nature of war. Having an incomplete picture of the war is a given, even at the very highest levels, since interaction and knowledge are bound to individuals. While delving down the hierarchy may allow the player to obtain information more directly, acquiring sufficient information to comprehend the entire global situation would require visiting virtually every company in the army. Any companies that have not been activated and sent into the field would also be outside the hierarchy until they were reactivated and redeployed.

Needing a resource and having HQ deny your request, and then deciding to work around the need in unapproved ways - employing lateral thinking... Perhaps I''m too focused on tactics, though.

quote:Original post by Oluseyi
Individuals: Current RTSes, relentlessly focused as they are on the Big Picture™, lose the ability to impact the player emotionally. I''d like to see a game where the player is always bound to an avatar (the actual avatar can change from time to time; see Delegation above) and interacts with individual soldiers with names, personalities and histories - families, high school sweethearts, aspirations, etc. This creates the opportunity for complex explorations of the effects of war, and allows the player to experience the loss of units as more than just a statistical hit: "Damn! Pfc. James was a good soldier, good kid..." In essence, Role-Playing RTSes.

Interacting with single units on personal level seems overkill, if the game was like a traditional RTS... I could imagine doing this in small scale skirmishes, but otherwise it would make the game so much longer (and not everyone wants to have one game last hundreds of hours...). However, since the word "traditional" here is rather the problem (= rushing with hundreds of cheap units and building tanks in a shed-sized factory in a matter of seconds), it very well could work in a different kind of RTS.

Personally I''m sick''n''tired of the way hero units are implemented in many RTSs... First of all, if they die, you usually lose, and secondly the whole world always seems to revolve around them (meaning that you get these few "heroic" units in every scenario where they do heroic deeds such as saving cats from trees and such, but the rest of the army is anonymous fodder you really don''t want to care about). A much better approach (in my opinion, of course) would be to have the best units (with most kills, longest survival time and such) to become heroes. This wouldn''t really mean anything, since they wouldn''t gain any strength, but you could see their names, they would develop personality etc. The rest of the units (fodder) would be generic, like "swordsman" or "rifleman" as the heroes would have more meaning to their names, such as "Cpt. Smith" or "Archibald the Orcslayer". Obviously, this could go beyond names to personal histories. Still, if it''s an epic scale wargame, character-based role-playing seems a bit out of context.

However, I do find the idea of role-playing RTSs quite interesting if kept on a small scale. For instance, let''s imagine you get a couple of dozen characters (units, that is, but since they aren''t just generic units, the name unit doesn''t seem right...) with personalities. During the game you couldn''t train new units, but you could train the existing characters to do better (in shooting, repairing vehicles, etc). You could also recruit locals from villages, but you''d only have about 20-30 character maximum and the basic training could take long, so it wouldn''t be simple to replace those who have died.

The problem is, at some point it''s no longer a role-playing RTS but a party-based RPG... (which is not necessarily bad, of course). What''s the difference anyway? At what point does this happen?

In Warzone 2100 (which I mentioned the other day), a player built units like in a usual RTS. Those units then were initiated with the rank of a Private. As they gained kills they got higher ranks and experience, which affected their battle performance. Main statistic that was modfied was the aiming accuracy. Needless to say it was fun to have a few elite units with obsolete weapons, to kick the asses of larger amounts of inexperienced enemy units with superior weapons. This system extended the life-time of individual units as they became more valuable the more battles they survived.

quote:Original post by Oluseyi
Here are three tenets of RTSes I Would Like, in no particular order:

• Supply and Demand: The War Office™ has only so many resources to allocate to various fronts, and makes decisions based on a combination of the track record of the commander at each front, the strategic importance of the front and the needs of that front.
  ...
  Needing a resource and having HQ deny your request, and then deciding to work around the need in unapproved ways - employing lateral thinking... Perhaps I''m too focused on tactics, though.

Yes to importance of front. Yes to needs of front.
Absolutely the most unimaginable situation when based on track record. Resources don''t get moved based on ability(though perhaps through office politics so I''ll add that as a feature I might like to see). Commanders get moved based on ability. If you consistently suck, you won''t get less resources, you will be reassigned. Counter to what I said, when office politics gets you less resources it might be because of a commander''s record though. Also, having less resources is possible cause when you do get reassigned it probably will be to some backwater that doesn''t get the good stuff because you will have been moved far from the front. Of course the enemy is planning a surprise attack and once you successfully fend them off with your backwater base, you''ll naturally be put back in more difficult situations so from a gameplay stance it can still work. Go realism.