But maybe you could have everyone with their core capital region of the empire, where all the trade and recruitment and research is carried out, then there are 'no man's land' in between each other. Players claim different territories and where they collide they are instanced into a more tactical zoomed in view of battle deployment.
That could work. Yeah but I agree with you - I think the OP needs to step back in with more clarification now that he has some feedback to help finetune for answers.
These have been pretty nice suggestions, my original vision for the game had three focuses;
1) The player starts out with very little and grow as they naturally progressed, as is common in strategy gaming. They then use the resources at their disposal (originally, I envisaged a mining/foraging mechanic) to build their empire.
2) The worlds in which this took place would be persistent, and would allow access to other players.
3) Battles, building and troop movement would have a very hands on (as was mentioned before, "spacially represented") control dynamic, similar to that of table top gaming.
Anything beyond these parameters is really up in the air, as the idea is still very much in its infancy. The MMO model was just a quick way of describing how to fit all of this into a connected, persistent game universe.
Also, I would like to point out that Warhammer 40K was just a popular example of the type and depth of table top game that I keep making reference to, as the genre in and of itself is hugely varied.
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One idea I have been considering is this:
The game could hybridise a typical MMO and a typical table top wargame
In most Warhammer 40K games (even the super battles mentioned in my original post), individual's army sizes were limited by practicality. The armies would generally consist of around forty units, infantry and artillery.
What if the game played out exactly like an MMO, with the exception of the player taking control of , say, twenty characters instead of one. The game would start you with twenty sparsly armed guys who's level and arsenal could be increased but ultimately you were capped to twenty units.
The game as would be tick based for the benefit of managing twenty units at a time. Perhaps minutely ticks?
This itself could go a number of ways:
> Are the twenty man armies persistent (i.e. Still present in the game world when the player logs off) or not?
> Should the players be left to build their own alliances, or should they be put into large factions (Like the Good Vs. Evil mechanics employed by games like WoW)? The advantage of the former is that there would be a more varied spectrum of factions, the advantage of the latter is that player evolution could see them climbing the chain of command on their given side, allowing them to issue missions to lower ranked players and take on missions offered by those higher up players.
I kind of see your vision and where you'd like to take it, and to be honest, I can't see any reason to write it off.
"An MMO where you control a small squad or two instead of a single character"... why not? Making it turn, or tick based... I guess, seems doable.
As in a MMORPG, there could be "safe zones" (faction specific) where you are safe, but as a turn/tick based system you may also end up logged out in the middle of a warzone... adds a little more strategy, a bit more risk... I kinda like it.
As you say, the idea is in it's infancy, but "An MMO where you control a small squad or two instead of a single character"... the more I read it, the more I like the idea.
It works well in tick/turn+time/turn based strategy games.
Tick based games have a set timer where you collect resources(raw iron, taxes and similar), from there you issue as many commands as you can before you run out of resources. Free actions tending to be few and far between, or the cost of using them expensive to start(IE portals for free travel). This is what you will normally see in something like a web strategy/RTS game. The advantage of this is that play tends to be far more free form than other games(typically web games), but rewards highly active play very very heavily(IE logging in on the hour every hour). (ala astrowars)
Turn+time based games you as a commander are given the ability to issue so many orders in a day. Collecting new ones at a set point, or every other hour, and having rules for taking orders and "saving" them. The disadvantage is that you as a designer have to find ways to compromise "time travel" since some people will ending taking "future" actions the moment turns reset and similar, however a great advantage is that you force a limit on player size(they may have 40 armies/units but can only change the state of 12 of them a day, if they don't work on economy). (utopia and hobowars probably the closest)
Turn based games is that all players log in once a day issue all their actions, then at "midnight" all actions happen at the same time. The disadvantage is that you need to figure out a rule set that takes into account what initiative style rules are meant to simulate(did this unit account for future movement, was it aware, and similar) without player input(obviously requires daily log in), advantage you can simulate some very complex rules much more easily and fairly since the former two rule sets are pretty much required to have competitive actions be simplified to account for all players not being here. (very few games do this. Neveron achieves something similar but at 60 second intervals for it's combat, and based on battletech universe).
