Just off of the top of my head I could see it working (design wise anyways). It would work well for a setting such as Pioneer america, where thousands of people are fighting for land and resources. I believe that would constitute as massive

EDIT: that being said I have never actualy heard the term.

If you take a RPG (Role Playing Game) and remove your direct attachment to a player or players, you often times have a strategy game. (although occasionaly you could have a beat-em-up in the case of a hack-n-slash, or an FPS in the case of RE. MMORPGs often in fact have a RTS aspect of it with their inbread economys and player ownership or such. MRTS's such as Artifact have been developed by your own board members. Who says you can not expand that? It would be an MMORPG without an attachment to a charactor. So instead, make it a family, an empire, a civilization, etc.

A MMORTS could work if you have more than one player on a team. You could have many "generals" leading different batallions in a massive army, for example.

The only MMORTS design I've mused upon was a sort of 4X game, where every player controls their own pocket dimension. But that was just me trying to think how you get around the problem of having players dropping in and out of a game in progress; my idea probably wouldn't have worked.

There are some UMS ("Use Map Settings", which allow for custom player-defined rulesets) maps for Starcraft that allow a player to control just a handful of units in a competitive arena. You can choose five marines, or three marines and two medics, or a siege tank, or two goliaths, or a goliath and two SCVs, or two lurkers, or whatever.

If you let each player command a small squad of units or a specialized unit, then dozens of players can compete in an RTS match. It would probably lead to hardcore micro and some awkward situations, but I think it could work. It would, of course, preserve RTS controls.

I think that would be a lot of fun, and not just PvP. I think a little team, akin to the units in Ogre Battle, provides a dynamic vessel for levelling, upgrading and developing.

2 things depending on your definition of MMO

1. If you define it as number of concurrent players in a game: Then it is simply something that has been described in previous posts. Similar races/side/factions in alliance fighting against the opponents.

2. If you define it as the relationship of players in a game: Then it is something that is persistant in terms of the overall goals.

Now to explain #2 in depth. One of the Command and Conquer games, I'm thinking Red Alert 2 or Generals has this multiplayer option to where you play online in a "World Domination" type of scenario. So for example, you start by joining a side, you then battle each other side for territory. The map is of the world, so as you battle in various locations, whoever wins those individual battles, wins that location for the world for their team.

Another example is in War of the Worlds, an older turn based RTS game. You compete with the martins to control all of Earth (well just a mini part of it more or less for the game). The main point in the whole MMORTS is that you have that element of persistance. In typical RTS games, each player is more or less just an individual with a record. In a MMORTS, that is not there, it's a 'team' thing.

Just my opinion on what Iron Chef Carnage has mentioned, that would be a MMORTT (real time tactical). The whole thing that makes RTT different from RTS is the element of "Resource Gathering" (well the general accepted ideology of it more or less [wink])

I think it's just part of a trend of people adding "MMO" to their other favorite 3-letter acronym, and then letting their ideas stop there. "It's an MMOFPS!!! What could possibly be bad about that? I'm a genius!"

Well, more seriously, I would like to see one if a project ever gets completed, but the ones I've heard of either fall apart when they realize they don't have any actual plans for gameplay past the original thought of "So many people playing Starcraft at once", especially when they realize Starcraft would fall apart with that many people. The ones that are on the horizon that let you control one or two units as aprt of an army aren't really RTS to me; they are MMORPGs under a different name. RTS's are supposed to be about the big picture, commanding the army and harvesting resources and building buildings. If the game ends up saying "Yeah, all that is happening where you can't see it, but you get to control this one guy and shoot things," then it's not really an RTS anymore. Some games try to get around this by saying that one person can be a commander and a hundred other people will be his soldiers, but I can't really see thousands of RTS fans buying an MMORTS and only 1% of them wanting to do the RTS part of it.

Quote:Original post by Andrew Russell
I've heard the term "MMORTS" used here and there a few times.

Question: What is an MMORTS? How do you make an RTS work MMO?

To me, I think Savage in a much bigger scale.