Shifting RTS paradigms -- brainstorming thread

[johndh]

Somewhat inspired by this post, I've been doing some brainstorming. As I've mentioned before, I've been working on a mod for Glest Advanced Engine for quite some time now, and it's nearing a playable state, and I've been thinking of ways to introduce new and interesting elements to the gameplay. Jetrel's post is a perfect example -- make fortified buildings invincible except to siege equipment. This requires no changes to the engine itself (just modifications to the attack/armor types), but makes the gameplay significantly different from "Age of..." and the *arcraft series.

What I'd like to see are some more ideas for the kinds of things that might be interesting to see in an RTS. What are some things that we take for granted when playing games like this? What are some things that bug you about them?

The caveat here is that it can't be anything that requires a huge change to the engine, and some things just aren't practical due to various reasons. For example, drastically enlarging the scale of the units is not really feasible because it would make current maps unusable. The engine can currently do just about anything you'd expect in a modern "Age of Command and Conquercraft"-style game, including stealth units, teleportation, etc.

Essentially, there are a lot of strategy game tropes that I'd like to play with or kick to the curb or play with in some way. Some things I'm considering:

• Make buildings difficult/impossible to destroy without fire/siege -- no knocking down brick walls with a spear
• Increase sight radius -- units should be able to see farther than thirty feet in front of them, right?
• Try to fight unit obsolescence -- units should stay relevant even when more advanced ones are available
• Limited ammo -- a unit might carry only three javelins and then have to reload at an armory

An obvious question would be why I'm not asking this on the Glest forum, and the simple answer is that I want an outside perspective, rather than people who already play Glest and have certain expectations of what it is and should be. Essentially, I feel it's easier to think "outside the box" if you're not standing inside it.

[governor]

My advice is to look at the springrts.com and play some games of balanced annihilation. There are a multitude of elements that the springrts engine does well and most other rts don't do. IMHO the place to start for RTS features that are minimum requirements. I can't stand Starcraft2 because I am used to having so much better control and of more units.

First and foremost: Do not limit the perspectives of the player. In spring I have dozens of zoom levels and can zoom out to see the whole map and engage in tactical 'dot wars'. When thousands of units need to be rendered the engine renders small bitmaps at distance rather than 3d objects. Also I can zoom way in and even go first person perspective - although this is a useless feature for RTS.

Furthermore I love to see thousands of units on the battlefield. A standard balanced annihilation game is usually 8v8 players and this is generally a lot of fun and requires lots of strategy. In a 8v8 game certain players have specific roles (usually determined via starting position) and need to satisfy these roles for team success.

Finally, spring allows players to write lua scripts that allows them to automate certain gameplay elements and also upgrade the ui. This customization is great. Players who aren't fast with the mouse but that can write simple lua code can improve their gameplay. Of course this opens up a can of worms but it is up to the developer to ensure that cheating elements can't be used via this method.

In the end, however, these elements will most likely appeal to a niche market and including them may make the game too complicated for your average person.

[johndh]

I'm looking for things more along the lines of balance, tech-tree, and so on -- things that I can do without touching C++, but that introduce new elements by (perhaps) flying in the face of established RTS conventions. When people play a typical RTS, they expect to have a town hall building, peasants that build and gather resources, a barracks, a research building, etc., and building these structures and researching new technologies will let them build better units and technologies, which they can get to unlock even more units, blah blah blah. That's the kind of thing that I'd like to play with and/or deconstruct. Zooming out really far isn't really the kind of thing I'm going for.

[A-Red]

Myth: The Fallen Lords and its sequel took a completely different approach to the genre by having no construction, resource gathering, or upgrading, and instead focusing entirely on unit balance and tactics. That may be farther from conventions than you're asking for though.

[Jetrel]

I strongly, strongly encourage this kind of exploration.

[*]Make buildings difficult/impossible to destroy without fire/siege -- no knocking down brick walls with a spear

An addendum: this might require some other bits to keep it from being overpowered. For example, it might require making it "possible but tedious" for units to toss a rope+hook onto a wall and scale it; only nullified if the wall is actually manned and some guy is flinging the ropes off.

Likewise, it might be interesting to make towers and castles not be a complete protection against arrows from below - at least, for guys actually on the ramparts, firing back. It should give them "high ground" and "cover", for whatever those are worth in the engine, but that shouldn't be a complete guarantee of safety. Reason being, this allows "cover fire" to be a meaningful tactic during an attack. With complete invulnerability, guys on top of the wall/castle/etc can just spend all their time hacking down ropes and/or attacking ground troops, because they're completely invulnerable to arrows. If they're actually threatened to some degree by arrows, you can bring up a huge mass of archers (especially if they have, like mantlets/portable-cover to protect them), and the guys in the castle have to choose between focusing on killing the guys below, or focusing on removing the immediate archer threat to their lives.

[*]Increase sight radius -- units should be able to see farther than thirty feet in front of them, right?

This is huge. I personally hate the sight radii in most RTS games. I think what would be more interesting would be to leave stuff visible by default ... but make the distant stuff fuzzy and indistinct. Like, you just "know", by default, if your opponent is throwing up buildings somewhere, especially if it's an outright expansion (proxy barracks/et al might be exempt), and past a certain point, you can have some idea that your opponent is massing an army of a certain kind.

Rather than making stuff invisible by default, it'd be nice to make stealth a matter of terrain, speed, and equipment. If a bunch of knights are galloping in a horde; that's audible and you're given sight of them from a much further distance because they're moving fast and making lots of noise. But those same knights could dismount, gently walk their horses through a light stand of trees, and throughout the whole thing, have a much lower "visibility radius".

By the same token, some units would deliberately wear camouflage, and only be visible when they're within "plain sight" radius, and are also out of cover; that is, whereas normal soldiers would eventually become visible even if they're approaching under forest cover, once they get near "plain sight" range, other soldiers, such as rangers, might stay invisible in forest despite being well within the distance of "plain sight".

[*]Try to fight unit obsolescence -- units should stay relevant even when more advanced ones are available

Thankfully, this is one thing that, while WC2 et al failed completely, WC3 and SC (both 1 and 2) really nailed. Especially in starcraft 2, virtually all units stay useful throughout the whole game. The later units are not so much "overpowered game winners which replace early troops", but are instead tactically different things, and are often made especially useful by being a counter to early troops.

For example, zealots remain useful throughout a protoss game, because they're the only protoss military unit that doesn't require gas. Marines remain useful compared to other vaguely similar troops like battlecruisers, because despite being much less flexible (no flight, no YC), marines are just so damn cheap and fast to hire.

The way you destroy this is by having some later replacement that works EXACTLY the same way, but is just all-around better. For example, if terrans could buy a "super marine" with 2.5x stats, and 2x cost, marines would be 100% obsolete the moment this thing entered the game. Unfortunately, this was pretty much exactly what happened in WC1&2, with footmen being replaced by knights. In 3, they had the wisdom to give the footmen a unique strength which the knights didn't have, which kept them useful.

[*]Limited ammo -- a unit might carry only three javelins and then have to reload at an armory

This is a neat idea, but this will nearly mandate "AI automation". This could be great with managing supply lines - like, having a cart follow your guys around so they can reload arrows and such. Mixed bag, really, but investigating it could really unlock some interesting stuff.

[Dixie]

Have you ever played Stronhold? That game is awesome and certainly really different from the Age of Command and Conquercrafts. Basically, you are the lord of a medieval camp/village/city. You have peasants assigned to building to do various tasks: gather ressources, produce food, etc. You use ressources to build buildings, and you produce troops by first having weapon producers, and then recruiting in the unused peasants pool using gold. You can fiddle with a bunch of parameter to keep your poplarity in the higher spheres/fiddle with productivity. This allows you to have taxes, for instance, and a bunch of other stuff. A great out-of-the-box RTS.

[johndh]

Myth: The Fallen Lords and its sequel took a completely different approach to the genre by having no construction, resource gathering, or upgrading, and instead focusing entirely on unit balance and tactics. That may be farther from conventions than you're asking for though.

Being unconventional isn't a problem, but I've already made a lot of the buildings and a ton of upgrade icons. That seems like a good possibility for a special scenario, though. Perhaps each side would start off with some resources and a banner that recruits and researches instantly, just as a mechanism for letting the players customize their armies, and then everybody fights to the death with only those units they bought at the beginning. Using existing factions, someone could probably create an add-on for that with about two files -- one to change the starting units and one to define the banner.

[*]Make buildings difficult/impossible to destroy without fire/siege -- no knocking down brick walls with a spear

An addendum: this might require some other bits to keep it from being overpowered. For example, it might require making it "possible but tedious" for units to toss a rope+hook onto a wall and scale it; only nullified if the wall is actually manned and some guy is flinging the ropes off.

The siege aspect of the game is rather under-developed. There's no standing on top of walls yet, but we can have units garrisoned in a building and capable of firing out, which is a decent enough abstraction.

Likewise, it might be interesting to make towers and castles not be a complete protection against arrows from below - at least, for guys actually on the ramparts, firing back. It should give them "high ground" and "cover", for whatever those are worth in the engine, but that shouldn't be a complete guarantee of safety.

That could be very interesting. Currently, a garrisoned building protects the units inside completely until it's destroyed, but I'd like to see if I can have that changed to allow partial protection. Being able to capture buildings that have been cleared out would be fantastic. It's also possible to starve enemy units by destroying their food production, so that opens up an awesome opportunity for a pretty-darn-close-to-reality siege simulation -- burn their crops and wait for them to starve inside their castle while casually peppering them with arrows and dead cattle. Once they've all died, simply capture the building and fill it with your own units.

Rather than making stuff invisible by default, it'd be nice to make stealth a matter of terrain, speed, and equipment.

I think Warzone 2100 has an awesome visibility system. You can generally see buildings before you see units, and topography has a huge influence on line of sight. A sensor tower on top of a cliff can see quite a bit farther than the guys below who have hills blocking their vision.

By the same token, some units would deliberately wear camouflage, and only be visible when they're within "plain sight" radius, and are also out of cover; that is, whereas normal soldiers would eventually become visible even if they're approaching under forest cover, once they get near "plain sight" range, other soldiers, such as rangers, might stay invisible in forest despite being well within the distance of "plain sight".

Having a "visible from..." distance could actually be possible very soon with some ugly work-arounds, at least to the point of having highly visible vs. lowly visible. It would involve making low-visibility units stealth by default, and making everyone a detector, then setting their detection radius to be lower than their overall sight radius. Thus, units like buildings would be visible at the same distance as terrain, while other units would be visible much closer. Now you've got me thinking... even a "sneak" ability should be possible by allowing a unit to "cast-spell" on itself, conferring stealth and reduced movement speed. Additionally, different stealth/detector types should be definable soon (i.e. unit A can detect stealth type B but not C) so it could potentially have highly visible units (no stealth at all), lowly visible units (stealth, but detectable at close distances), and invisible units (stealth, not detectable, but definable actions can give them away). If it becomes possible to define multiple stealth and detection types per unit, then it should be possible to make a unit visible from various distances depending on what it's doing at the time.

[*]Try to fight unit obsolescence -- units should stay relevant even when more advanced ones are available

Thankfully, this is one thing that, while WC2 et al failed completely, WC3 and SC (both 1 and 2) really nailed.
[...]
Unfortunately, this was pretty much exactly what happened in WC1&2, with footmen being replaced by knights. In 3, they had the wisdom to give the footmen a unique strength which the knights didn't have, which kept them useful.

I was actually thinking of WC3 as one that didn't do it very well. It's an improvement over WC2, but even the official Blizzard site's strategy recommends ditching footmen for knights as soon as you can. Glest's default tech tree does it pretty darn well with the Battle Mage to Archmage promotion. The Archmage is significantly better in some ways (tons of damage, huge splash), and significantly worse in others (slow and frail), so a player will usually want to use a combination. Luckily, RIPLIB does not apply. What I have in mind for the faction I'm currently focusing on is where the basic infantry unit will sorta switch roles when the elite infantry comes along. Since the squire has an ability that boosts the defense of adjacent allies (including other squires), early on they serve as all-purpose melee fighters and make an effective meat shield wall protecting the spear-throwing kerns behind them. Then when the gallowglass (elite heavy infantry) comes along, the squire is mostly just there to serve as a shield bearer, but the squire/kern/gallowglass trifecta should be a more cost-effective ass-kicking squad than pure g'glass human wave.

[*]Limited ammo -- a unit might carry only three javelins and then have to reload at an armory

This is a neat idea, but this will nearly mandate "AI automation". This could be great with managing supply lines - like, having a cart follow your guys around so they can reload arrows and such. Mixed bag, really, but investigating it could really unlock some interesting stuff.

That's kinda what I was thinking too. It could easily be abstracted by using EP (think "mana") for ammo and then giving supply carts an emanation that boosts EP-regen. The intent wouldn't necessarily be for main archer units, but rather the kind that would throw a javelin or two before closing to melee. If it turns out to add a ton of micro to the experience, it's easily reverted.

Have you ever played Stronhold?

Yes, I quite enjoyed Stronghold, but I think the engine doesn't really lend itself to that kind of city-building game per se. However, there are certainly some possibilities to be gleaned from it, such as refining resources. For example, you harvest wood and metal, then your smith turns it into weapons, armor, and/or tools. I know GAE can give units the ability to buy/produce different resources (usually used to increase unit-cap resources), so I think this could be done. The only trick would be to automate it, allow it to be turned off, and allow it to switch between production modes. Automatic repair, attack, and flee are all currently toggleable, so this shouldn't be much of a stretch.

On the other hand, this threatens to turn the focus too much toward construction and harvesting. Stronghold is an enjoyable game, but it seems to me like the fighting takes a back seat to the city-building aspect. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it's not really what I'm interested in creating this time around. Maybe I'll keep it in mind for later.

This also brings the possibility of changing gold production from mining to a taxation system (build houses and they produce gold), and shifting the mining resource to something else (probably iron or generic metal). Adding new harvestable resources is technically possible, but all Glest maps so far have been made with gold, stone, and wood in mind. I might be able to make other tileset objects harvestable for interesting implications, like making water objects harvestable as reeds or something. If I were to make a hardcore Stronghold-esque city simulator, even ferns and bushes could become resources (herbs for medicine, perhaps).

Another possibility would be to go the opposite route -- reducing resources instead of increasing. Warzone 2100 for example only has one resource, as does Homeworld. The resource gathering in Warzone is as simple as building a derrick on an oil spot and letting the power trickle in, thus freeing the player's attention for blowing things apart. I think having a few harvestables and a few producibles is a good balance though. Metal, wood, and stone as harvestable; gold, food, and mana as producible.

I briefly considered going crazy and eliminating the population cap resource (food), but Glest actually handles this in an awesome way. All your resources have a maximum limit, determined by the storage space in your buildings (e.g. a Castle stores 2000 gold, 150 food, plus stone and wood), so having your storage buildings destroyed deprives you of your resources. Thus, an effective tactic is to destroy your enemy's castles and farms, then wait for his troops to starve to death.

[Atz]

If the engine supports it, you could try diverging from the Magical Logistics that govern most RTSs. As in, if you want to build a fort on the frontier, you need to drag several carts of timber and stone from a stockpile to the building site; and maybe once it's built your fort has some storage space and you need to truck food out there every so often, or send workers to collect from the surrounding farms. You already mentioned starvation and storage buildings, so it might be plausible?

Anyway, this would mean that you have to maintain and defend supply lines, and make it so that, for example, you can screw up enemy expansion by attacking their supply convoys. Heck, maybe you can even hijack their supply cart and take the resources for yourself.

[Suira]

I'll discuss a somewhat unrelated aspect of RTS games: units & units promotion.

Imagine this hypothetical game:
- Both players have 20 combat units. You start with 20 and whenever one dies, a new one is automatically made for free at your fortress.
- it takes a lot longer to train an unit: while free, new units take a long time to recruit
- Gold is used both to promote units and to maintain already promoted units. (ie you pay 200 gold to make a soldier a general, which costs 50 gold/minute to main, you don't get gold back when they die)
- Promoted units mostly get leadership bonuses (ie help everyone around them).
- Various niche rules to allow people to switch between units etc & give veteran units bonuses (ie. a veteran unit takes less gold to promote)
- (optional) all resource & strategic buildings are already on the map and take no micromanagement to maintain whatsoever besides preventing the enemy from capturing it with an army. In other words, you can only built defensive structures, all others have to be captured. (again, optional)

Advantages above the old "recruit units and every upgrade you research is given to everyone"
- you no longer have to harvest & gather 5 minutes before you've finally got an army. In fact, the biggest advantage is that you can now make a game with hardly any economy micromanagement: no need to keep spending gold and you have something to do even without an economy.
- much more focus on positioning and focus fire in battle (kill the general, and they'll most likely flee as the "respawn timer" is huge)
- instead of "let's keep withering down their army and take no risk whatsoever" you get "let's quickly push after this victory before his army recovers". It becomes very important to use your number advantage whe you have it (instead of going back and get an even bigger army).
- more incentive
- easier to make a comeback (if you get a lucky kill on their general or your enemy wants to abuse his number advantage too much and overextends)

Disadvantages:
- because there would be so many more options, it'll also be way harder to balance
- some people like to micro and macro manage their economy a lot
- if it's too easy to recover from a loss, the game becomes more of a collection of random fights instead of one long struggle for victory (hard to explain this one)
- things I forget now

Notes: in practice that hypothetical game would be much more complicated than this of course (ie promoting an unit would take a long while and the unit has to stay in the barracks/keep meanwhile)

[Caphriel]

Another game to look at for doing some things differently is RUSE, which to some degree implements the following features I'd like to see more of in RTS games:

• Design away from micromanagement. That means making units behave reasonably under most circumstances (which is a difficult AI problem) and not giving individual units things like limited ammo and special abilities.
• Less of is real-time economics sims with occasional combat masquerading as military strategy games.
• Focus on strategy consisting of unit deployment and maneuver over a larger map.
• In general, reduce the pace of the game so that skill is dominated by mental APM, not physical APM. In other words, implementing your plans should be easier than making plans that will be effective.

This is opposed to many of the suggestions already in this thread, like removing magical logistics, or differentiating different individual units that are the same basic unit.

[Atz]

Another game to look at for doing some things differently is RUSE, which to some degree implements the following features I'd like to see more of in RTS games:

• Design away from micromanagement. That means making units behave reasonably under most circumstances (which is a difficult AI problem) and not giving individual units things like limited ammo and special abilities.
• Less of is real-time economics sims with occasional combat masquerading as military strategy games.
• Focus on strategy consisting of unit deployment and maneuver over a larger map.
• In general, reduce the pace of the game so that skill is dominated by mental APM, not physical APM. In other words, implementing your plans should be easier than making plans that will be effective.

This is opposed to many of the suggestions already in this thread, like removing magical logistics, or differentiating different individual units that are the same basic unit.

I don't think reducing micro is necessarily opposed to removing magic logistics. The reason you don't have to look after logistics in most RTSs is that 1. your subordinates are imbeciles and the interface doesn't give you the tools you need to automate things properly, so you'd have to micro it and 2. you already have to micro everything else (see point 1), so you don't really have time.

If you're already fixing that stuff, then logistics would be easier. Designate a supply route, then just assign X supply wagons and Y soldiers as an escort, and have them do their thing automatically. Maybe your base could even train and assign replacements as they got killed, or you could have a pool of guys designated to automatically reinforce the supply chains as they take losses.

[Caphriel]

Fair enough. Managing logistics is part of the real-time economic sim "problem" (obviously that's entirely subjective.) I wouldn't mind abstracted or automated supply lines, though. For instance, you give orders to build something, and a single supply wagon leaves your resource depot and heads off to that location. Having to manually pull the appropriate amounts of resources out of the the appropriate storage locations and send them individually would be unnecessary micro, though.

Are abstracted logistics and non-magical logistics necessarily mutually exclusive? I hope not.

[johndh]

This is some good stuff. Do continue.

[Shinobody]

My two cents. (ignoring most of things said here already, as you asked for ideas. These ones are more for contrast).
Warrior Kings, and its sequel, Warrior Kings: Battles.
Those games play WAY differently form typical RTS, but for SURE they aren't wargames, they have gathering resources and buildings. They just do it differently.

Races

There are 3 main factions, and 2 mixed. You choose between Renaissance, Imperial and Pagan, by building different buildings at different stages of game. Later, Imperial and Pagan players can choose to invest in science too, and turn into "half-faction" of Imperial Ren/ Pagan Ren.

Buildings

They are divided into two classes, City and Outside. Some, like farms, can be only built in some distance from Town Center, while other, like shops (selling Wood to give you Gold) can inly be built near to it. Later, you can build City Walls at border of town/village. (Which prevents absurd known from Cossacks, where you could've built walls around your farms).

Army

Interesting one. Units are divided into classes of Light Cavalry, Heavy Cavalry, Light Infantry and Heavy Infantry. (where "heavy" means "melee", and "light" means "ranged"), and they are dependent on themselves in a paper-rock-scissors way, where HI (spearmen)easily deals with HC (knights and melee riders) , HC curb-stomps LI (archers), LI outranges and snipes LC (mounted archers), while LC is too quick to be approached by HI, and can shoot them at the same time.
There is also special class of Siege Weapons, which serve as support, and work good against all kinds of infantry, and are only units capable of destroying fortifications, but are usually easily destroyed by Cavalry.
All ranged units need to refill ammo after some time, which can be made via Supply Carts (which also serve as a slow healers)
Ah, and all units get experience, and levelup to increase their efficiency. This can be partially done by assigning them to train with Training Dummies (building).

I suggest getting to know them. They are maybe not very popular, but still good, and original.
As for atypical RTSes, I may also suggest American Conquest, spin-off of "Cossacks" series. It had making formations out of units, realistic musket firepower (in there, unit shot=unit dead) and EVERY building could've been garrisoned with (different) amount of people. In fact, it was ONLY way of preventing enemy to just GO INSIDE building and conquer it (it also strongly boosted attack speed and defence of defenders). Ah, and unless you had artillery or (when playing Indians) archers with flaming arrows, you couldn't destroy building otherwise than conquering it and razing it when it was yours. When using melee units, r-clicking on made units automatically conquer it, while when using shooters, made them start shooting the defenders inside.