I''ve been working on my RTS (term loosely used here) and have come up with what I thought was an interesting twist on the genre. The more I design the more I''m thinking that this game would be more squad based than I intended... I started to post this in the thread posted by mumboi but decided it really should have it''s own thread and I didn''t want to change the topic on him As I explained in that thread, the player will start off with an initial amount of citizens - based on econimic and social and other AI driven factors new citizens will be "born" for the player to use. When the new citizen is born the player can assing him to a "school" where he will become something else... for example if I need soldiers I can say I want 50% of the citizens that are born to go to soldier school. Simple enough... now if I want the soldier to become a Special Forces soldier I would have to send this soldier to that school as well. Now here is what I am wondering. Let''s say I have just trained a soldier, and I have also created some tanks... what if the player would have to assign a crew to that tank? Or any other weapon that would need soldiers to operate the equipment? Basically the citizens are a resource... and the player has to manange them - since I have done away with resource gathering... I thought this made more sense. What do you think? Dave "Dak Lozar" Loeser

I had a similar idea a year or two ago, and although I abandoned it (it was looking like becoming more of an empire building game than an military strategy game, which was what I was aiming at) you are more than welcome to steal it.

In my version, rather then telling where your citizens what they should be, they decided themselves. Every citizen might have some basic statistics which determine how good they would be in different military roles. They might also have another set of statistics that determine how much interest they have in a particular role. So a citizen might be very interested in archery, but he may not necessarily be all that good at it.

Citizens only sign on to roles they are interested in. However, given limited number of places within each role (dependant on how big an army you can support and how many of each unit type you want) you only take on the best at the relevant skill. So if you already have a large force of excellent archers, your keen but lacklustre archer will not get his desired position in your army. He may go for something else, like his next favourite position, or he might give up altogether and remain a civilian hunter or similar job.

Interest in particular roles can be influenced by the player by two means: payment and glory. If all your archers get paid twice as much as everyone else in the army, everyone will want to be an archer and no one will sign on to the halberdiers brigade. Secondly, if your archers kill twice as many bad guys as the rest of your army combined, then many will want to share that glory.

The player has to trade off unit quotas (the maximum number of a given unit type he wants to recruit) with the amount of money he is paying them, and the quality of troops he wants to recieve. He could try for a large army of archers, but he has to increase their wages in order to promote enough interest in the role to actually get them.

Hey Sandman,
I''m having the same confusing overlap in my design as well. Mine has moved me into a sort of squad based game than a RTS {scratching head} and yet, that isn''t neccessarily true either.

here is an excerpt from the Treatment:


...
----Cities----
Cities are the most important resource on the map. Players cannot recruit soldiers or manufacture weapons without cities; this will surely bring about the end of the game. Players can take-over cities but this is a difficult endeavor if there are limited numbers of units.

----Citizens----
Citizens are, after cities, the resource. The player does not create citizens as they do in other RTS games. In SoW the citizens are born. The AI will create new citizens as economic, political and social climate dictates. That does not mean that there will be a period that citizens are not born, merely that there are peaks and valleys to the birth rate.

I am thinking that two citizens will be picked at random and a new citizen will be born (or created) from their attributes. Therefore a citizen that has smart parents will more than likely be smart – of course some mutations should be implemented maybe based on some other statistic of it’s parents.

Citizens can become scientists; engineers and most importantly citizens become soldiers. The citizens that are not trained are used to form public opinions about the progress of the player, they also provide much needed taxes from the work that they do. Trained citizens’ opinions and taxes count as well.
Scientist and Engineers
Scientist and Engineers have the ability to reduce manufacturing cost or to create new inventions. It is important to have these units for the player to move along the technology tree.

----Soldiers----
The most basic unit or weapon in the game. Soldiers are not built in the traditional RTS sense; they are pulled from the population of the city. To create a soldier you will click on the city and bring up the city control dialog (CCD) and enter the number of soldiers you want to recruit. The speed at which soldiers are recruited is a factor of the current economic situation and the public opinion of the military, or patriotism. If public opinion is low and the economy is doing well it may take longer to recruit the number of soldiers that you want. If public opinion is low and the economy is doing poorly then it may be a bit easier to obtain recruits.

A cost is associated for the training of each citizen that enlists to become a soldier. So, be careful of the number of soldiers you initially recruit. Once a soldier always a soldier. There is not an enlistment period as in the real world. The only way to lose a soldier is for one to die or be killed. Yes, soldiers can die of natural causes such as old age; if the game last that long.

As soldiers gain experience they will also be given rank. This rank is based solely on experience and nothing else. The soldier carries a small rifle and can be grouped with other soldiers to form units.
...

I am having some difficulty in getting the game play set in a more solid mold. But, hey it could be fun anyway.


Thanks for your input,

Dave "Dak Lozar" Loeser

When you start introducing factors like economy and public opinion as resources, the game will tend to become less about warfare and more about empire management.

This is not necessarily a bad thing, in fact it could make a fantastic game. A sort of real time Civilization perhaps, or maybe something like The Settlers.

You basically need to decide where to focus your game. If you want to shift to an empire building game, then go through your design, refine the bits which work with this and remove the ones that don''t. If you want to stick to a more RTS like feel, don''t get too hung up on realism and complexity in troop recruitment, go for something simple.

I eventually settled for a ''reinforcements'' system. In simple terms, players simply call up reinforcements when they need them, and some time later the reinforcements arrive at a designated landing spot. The amount of reinforcements they are allowed to call in is dependent on a timer, and the types of reinforcements they can call in depends on what is available.

We do that in Artifact. You have to "grow" your population before you can recruit for the military.

Our catapult units require 4 men each to man them. When the catapult is built, 4 people are "tapped" from the available population to create the unit. No assigning, though, it''s just part of building the unit.

DavidRM
Samu Games

DavidRM:
I will definately check out Artifact: I feel it necessary to check out every game that you may be reproducing... thanks for the information.

quote:Sandman wrote: When you start introducing factors like economy and public opinion as resources, the game will tend to become less about warfare and more about empire management.

Although these things are AI driven and the player does not really manipulate these factors in a direct fashion I agree to a point. My primary goal of the game was to illiminate the tedious (Strictly an opionion) resource gathering from RTSes. And to have many of the elements that I found to have a coolness factor that I loved about the old game Empire.

I do agree that it could/would be a fun game - real time Civilization would be nice


Anonymous Poster Hey cool, this is the second time I have heard about this game... I will definately check it out!

Dave "Dak Lozar" Loeser