A spore-like RTS/RTT game?

[ray245]

I was thinking, will we ever see a game that combine aspect of spore and total war?

Meaning you can actually customise your army, from changing the size of the spear, how to form formations, what kind of weapons to use?

It will be very interesting, and actually give up the flexibility available in real life. Like how the greeks change their fighting tactics, to the roman empire changing their army from a maniple system to a cohort based legion, it will be very fun and interesting for people to play such as game.

It won't be that historic of course, however, you can have lots of flexibility and have a open-ended total war game.

Hell, you can even upload your army orgainsation and equipment into the internet and challenge others with your custom build army!

The specs of the weapons you use matters as well. For example, you could choose between a slashing or stabbing sword, and at the same time, choose the length of the sword.

A longer sword means longer reach and a weaker grip for example.

What about the phalanx formation available? You can literally build the phalanx formation yourself.

How about the special formation that generals like Alexander and Scipo used? Opening up a gap, let the enemy elephants or chariots run into those gaps in your formation?


You can literally recreate them and create new formations!

[The Romulan Republic]

Cool idea, but as some one with next to no knowledge of game design, I'm not sure how feasible it would be.

[Koolaidkirby]

I would imagine unit/group customization wouldn't be terribly difficult, but I would think that custom strategy's/actions for different units (like letting chariots ride into your formation for easy pickings) would be very difficult to do.

[Samuel]

Unit Balance would be a nightmare and easily broken.

[DaveJB]

I can see this being something that military affectionados would like, but it'd probably result in normal users creating messed-up units that totally implode in combat scenarios. It'd be a lot of effort for what's essentially a niche market.

[Duckie]

Customizing one's units always sounds good until it becomes a multiplayer game where within 10 days of release someone with a spreadsheet has discovered the optimal strategy. It would take absurd balance for units to not look exactly alike.

[Samuel]

I can see this being something that military affectionados would like, but it'd probably result in normal users creating messed-up units that totally implode in combat scenarios. It'd be a lot of effort for what's essentially a niche market.

Not necessarily. We could have the AI churn out basic stuff. After all, the AI has to be good enough to design your opponents, otherwise the game quickly becomes a cakewalk when you discover that you can simply use really long spears and walk your opponent off the field.

Customizing one's units always sounds good until it becomes a multiplayer game where within 10 days of release someone with a spreadsheet has discovered the optimal strategy. It would take absurd balance for units to not look exactly alike.

Well, they were historically all used- it might be due to different resource options available for different players. But it is likely to crash and burn, especially if they go the RTW route for cool units.

[Covenant]

This sounds like an astoundingly horrible game design idea.

Wait, where's the SPORE elements? None of that shit was in Spore. I didn't get to choose a goddamn thing other than what he wore, and a bazillion games already let me choose between armored infantry and unarmored infantry. I'm not sure what value it is to allow me to create unarmored infantry who use hand-axes when any form of balance or realism will skew the game towards incredibly obvious forms of optimization. If you mean "a game where you build your units" though, it's been done before, but with less nitpicky details, and not with swords. Fantasy is far less suitable for this than Sci-Fi, but I suppose the answer is still yes, it's possible. But it's usually not very fun at all because of the Optimal Choice Metric that is always run through the game and inevitably finds the best kind of army.

Honestly, it has no focus. What makes you win? Is it your strategy, or your superior choice of arms from a list and a zillion sliders defining their function? It should be the strategy. So make the customizable parts impact more of the strategy and less the unit combat performance. These are related, but I'm sure you know what I mean.

For example--think of a basic combination. Long, high-damage melee weapons and armor combined with fast-moving long-range weapons. Sure, it's a realistic combination of phalanx and horse archer, but it's also gamebreaking, like you see in a lot of other customizable games--where the three best units are always a) the unit so fast it can't be hit, but can do damage b) the unit so durable it cannot be killed, but can do damage and c) the unit so cost effective that it can be traded at a profit for nearly anything on the field. In games where A and B aren't available, there's nearly always a C.

A real SPORE/RTS might be interesting because I'd have an opportunity to pit my tribe of rhino-horned buffalomen versus someone's pudgy pigfolk, and watch the carnage as differences in unit size, intelligence level, social interactiveness and so forth play out in strategic terms to compliment the weapons. But I can tell you right now that any game that made the length of the sword a major point of gameplay has serious concept issues. No player is going to see the sword length or the grip come into play, and unless it's obvious all you'll have is one side losing (or winning) and not giving feedback to the players why. That right there is a game-killer, people have to know why they lost, or else they get real frustrated.

Plus, it gets into huge debates about balance. How good will you make shortbows versus slings? Will you go with bow-wank or historical usage? How about katanas--fanwank or historical reality? Will you make two-handed swords combat weapons, or more strictly used for slicing the ends of spears? Will you even model spear-slicing at all? What about breeds of horses? Elephants? The more realism you use, the less 'interesting' the game because it'll boil down to strategy between optimal empires, something similar to R:TW already. The less you use the more increasingly absurd you'll make the game, to the point that your Elephant Knights using pikes will become clearly the most powerful unit, except against the guy who fields 100,000 unarmored peasents wielding lead hammers due to the cost effectiveness of deploying such a unit. Even individual swords will become flashpoints. Will an iron Spatha be counted as slashing, stabbing, and crushing weapons all at once because they had a strong tip, heavy blade, and sharp edge? Will a katana, despite the fact that it's tip could break quite easily? Does that make an axe with a point on it also could as slashing, stabbing and crushing too? And so on.

Basically, you're asking for the most number-intensive clusterfuck of whining armchair military historians ever while excluding the vast majority of the market who just wants to see units kill each other and occasionally cast a spell of "Summon Nuclear Device" on the enemy. It makes no sense even as a niche game, since half the niche would argue about the balance with the other half. And no matter who wins, it'll generally either be because they avoided the issue altogether by out-strategizing the enemy (thus 'breaking' the equipment portion of the game) or because their units were better (thus 'breaking' the strategy portion of the game).

[DaveJB]

A real SPORE/RTS might be interesting because I'd have an opportunity to pit my tribe of rhino-horned buffalomen versus someone's pudgy pigfolk, and watch the carnage as differences in unit size, intelligence level, social interactiveness and so forth play out in strategic terms to compliment the weapons.

Didn't Impossible Creatures offer something similar to that? I remember thinking a few times that it looked like a kind of cool game, but I never got round to playing it.

[Covenant]

A real SPORE/RTS might be interesting because I'd have an opportunity to pit my tribe of rhino-horned buffalomen versus someone's pudgy pigfolk, and watch the carnage as differences in unit size, intelligence level, social interactiveness and so forth play out in strategic terms to compliment the weapons.

Didn't Impossible Creatures offer something similar to that? I remember thinking a few times that it looked like a kind of cool game, but I never got round to playing it.

Well, in a broad sense, but that's not what I mean. In Impossible creatures you could make a Sharkuar and send out your gilled, cat-pawed abominations out in search of prey. The Tiger/Gorilla hybrids were pretty hideous too. But what I mean is a game where my creatuer and flavor is character made like in Spore, so I could send my wizened four-armed blue goblinmen out to the field of battle against the purple crab-handed feral tribes of an entirely different species in an R:TW style context.

The Buffaloman I was talking about was just a way of saying "It would be more interesting for me to create a creature the size of a truck, have the game model some advantages and disadvantages for that, and then apply those to the units along with a choice of normal military equipment." You'd still be using spears, axes, and bows, just with the game modifying some base attributes due to player-chosen differences in biology and tech. The bigger you are, the stronger you are, but eat more, costing more to deploy and maintain. Creatures that like to live in small, isoloated groups would perform badly in a phalanx and herd critters that spook easily wouldn't do well went deployed in small squads. Biology would define many characteristics, including the most important one: intelligence. The smarter you are the more items you automatically have available, and the more special kinds of advanced weapons and tactics you can get. My Blue bearded dudes could afford to purchase some advanced formations, Ironworking to upgrade all the weapons their IQ grants them and Siege Engines. The Purple crabhand guys would have been built to maximize a low-intelligence yield, having just enough brains to get some basic advancements, but the points they saved from not buying a big brain makes them fast and deadly in combat with natural weapons. If you added a very basic "city" aspect like in Age of Empires, these choices could have an influence on how your city/base works as well as how your military fights.

And such. That, to me, seems the value of a Spore-like game. People who simply want military tactics have such options available to them. They could create basic critters, deck them out in basic armor, and give them good weapons. They would play similarly to the Romans and be a pleasent, normal experience. People who want to play at the extremes could modify the biology more. But most importantly, none of it interferes directly with the gameplay, so it still remains as a strategy game and everything is very obvious in what it does. When you see a massive Buffaloman in full plate wielding an Axe the size of a tree come stomping towards you, you know he's going to be a high damage unit. Mr. Normal Romanman would understand how to deal with such a unit automatically, so his gameplay experience is not disrupted. If he wins or loses, it will be due to the way he handles his tactics, and not some arcane, opaque mixture of sword length and formation. And the guys who wants to play as the absurd creatures get automatic advantages in a few areas but no alternative to the standard game. No matter how many legs, arms or faces you add, the game will still be played as an RTS, so nobody will win just by exploiting the system. People like customization, and they like it when it does something cool too, but their demands are very small. People get real excited when they can add custom flags, names, and uniform colors. Being able to make little critters, and possibly also giving them a basic "human" model too for the boring folks, would make the game have a huge draw while also letting it remain within the realm of understandable strategy games, which seems like the best way to exploit SPORE's style of customization within an RTS context.

[Stark]

Didn't Impossible Creatures offer something similar to that? I remember thinking a few times that it looked like a kind of cool game, but I never got round to playing it.

Impossible Creatures was also an impossibly terrible RTS with an interesting and sophisticated unit editor attached; not a good example to follow.

I question the logic behind statements like 'like how the greeks change their fighting tactics, to the roman empire changing their army from a maniple system to a cohort based legion, it will be very fun and interesting for people to play such as game'. These developments happened due to changes in technology, society and such, and not LOL MAKE SPEAR BIGGAR NOW I WINTRONS. I hate to say this, but things like army formation and shit are ALREADY used in RTSs - making them some sort of technology you have to unlock is both absurd and impossible (what, you're going to make it impossible to have the cavalry forward on the wings? How?). Like Covenant says, it's going to boil down to 'spear length' sliders and 'has armour' checkboxes, and after maybe twelve seconds the 'best path' will be identified and that'll be the end of it. Letting people edit this shit in a game is like letting someone choose how much damage their tanks do in-game, and most developers can't even balance a BASIC RTS.

And like Cov says, what's the draw? To make the equipment and organisational decisions made by military innovators? What's the stimulus to these decisions? If you can change it ingame, it'd be WORTHLESS to arrange your army's abilities beforehand, because you'd have NO FUCKING IDEA what the other guy was going to use. Even worst, some arrangements are obviously more flexible, more sophisticated, require more training or technology and are all-around better, so you'd need a complex build point system to balance this.

[Covenant]

Even if we avoid including historical Earth groups, you'll have a few options that are helpful, and the rest won't be. A phalanax of armored slingmen? Not so good. How about guys with shortswords on horses? Sure, but compared to a guy with a cavalary saber? Or knight-armored men on foot using two-handed warhammers? Yeah. Agincourt calling bullshit on that one. The reason that men in dense formations used spears and shields is because it was effective, and the reason that other weapon/formation/tactical combinations survived long enough for them to be remembered even today is because they were also very effective. If you made the game very open and also realistic, it'd just trend towards realistically effective combinations. You'd actually need to purposefully alter the stats of the weapons to be unrealistic in order for these divergent strategems to work, or to allow historically unrealistic options to be available, like mounting Greek Fire spewers on armored War Elephants, or letting someone deploy DaVinci's battletank. At this point you're nearly in the realm of fantasy, so my Buffalomen are already looking more realistic.

Rome fought the way they did because it suited the tactics and weapons they used. If you alter the weapons, the tactics change, and vice versa. So really, what's the point? To allow players to make bad combinations? If you think you could do Roman tactics better, you're wrong. There are occasional instances of total oversight of viable technologies and techniques, but a lot of the things we could look back that they changed were--as stated--organizational. Unless you're willing to hamper the player by giving him massive blocks of units that he cannot effectively direct around the battlefield (simulating a Phalax versus Cohort/Maniple battle) you won't be able to model that effectively. My game of Blue Goblins and Buffalomen is already a step ahead though--remember I mentioned social structure impacting unit size and behavior? Mine is just a little less opaque and more intuitive than understanding how anyone could have thought organizing everyone under a single general was a brilliant idea. We live in a world defined by much more refined small group command tactics, so that really does shoot a lot of Ye Olde Tactics Balance in the foote as far as balancing go.

I don't like being the Old Grumpy Grizzley of G&C, so this isn't meant as latent rage. I do encourage people to try modding--there's a few very easily modded games--and to play those mods with others to get the balance right. It's a very interesting thing to do to get a lot of insight into the challanges of balance, and I think once people tried it they'd realize how much of game-making isn't simple theorizing, but actually bound by a few very simple premises.

[Stark]

From a game perspective, heaps of games already allow you to do this - Dawn of Heroes, World in Conflict and such. You can adjust your team/playstyle/unit balance to suit the changing battlefield situation by buying more heavy weapons/changing to infantry/etc. While this isn't 'UPGRADE GLADIUS TO SCARAMSAX nonsense, from a game perspective it's identical; someone shows up with a pile of horse archers/helicopters/tyranids, and you adjust your organisation to deal with it. It's not really a new idea beyond the Civilization-like framework of history.

[Singular Intellect]

Unit Balance would be a nightmare and easily broken.

And that would be a very reaslitic and fun aspect. The decision between large numbers of average units or low numbers of superior ones, or trying to balance both with available resources.

[Stark]

You don't know what unit balance means, and you apparently don't know how RTS games are played either, since you think deciding between high and low cost units and managing resources is a new addition.

It's even totally wrong; some of the more 'advanced' options in this speculative game will actually use LESS resources, simply because they're more efficient. Being an RTS it won't be able to reflect the industrial, political, social and economic forces acting on military theory throughout history, so you'll end up with retarded rules like 'knights are cheaper than dragoons because... um... well... SWORD'.

[Duckie]

Unit Balance would be a nightmare and easily broken.

And that would be a very reaslitic and fun aspect. The decision between large numbers of average units or low numbers of superior ones, or trying to balance both with available resources.

What you just described is neither a nightmare nor broken.

[Stark]

And is, in fact, how every RTS since Dune2 has been played. Do I buy devastators or light infantry? Do I push for more resource fields or turtle up? Turns out these decisions are governed by analysis of cost:benefit and there's generally a 'best path' that you should take, thus invalidating the other apparent 'options'.

[Samuel]

And is, in fact, how every RTS since Dune2 has been played. Do I buy devastators or light infantry? Do I push for more resource fields or turtle up? Turns out these decisions are governed by analysis of cost:benefit and there's generally a 'best path' that you should take, thus invalidating the other apparent 'options'.

Light infantry- $175
Devastator- $1500 and a general point
Seeing your opponents base go up in a nuclear fire ball- priceless

http://wiki.cncreneclips.com/wiki/Manua ... Devastator



Stark is right. Every single game has worked on that premise of quantity vs quality. Except maybe Perimeter, ones without base building and some others.

[ray245]

Which I why I prefered Rome total war. One of the few games where actual tactics matters to some extend.

Combined arms tactics without micromanaging to a huge extend.

[Stark]

Even the Total War games are only very slightly different; they simply use morale to amplify the suckness of cheaper units and reduce the rate of battle. They're extremely simplistic (which isn't helped by the AI) and again, nobody uses 'real' tactics - they just do what the game engine rewards (ie units breaking instantly when surrounded etc).

[Zablorg]

So, Dune II as been mentioned as before RTS's became stale; what exactly about the game or games before it that made it different from your basic "GATHER BUILD FIGHT" formula?

[folti78]

So, Dune II as been mentioned as before RTS's became stale; what exactly about the game or games before it that made it different from your basic "GATHER BUILD FIGHT" formula?

IIRC Dune II was the first "GATHER BUILD FIGHT" RTS. Earlier RTS's lacked resource gathering or building or in some bordeline cases (like Supremacy direct combat.

Resource gathering as we know it, was Dune II's invention. Most of the earlier games' economy relied on holding fixed cities/factories/forts/etc which give you units.

Customizable base building was also a first in Dune II.