RTS Suggestions

[Kaiser Caesar]

I want a MMORTS.

The setting can be anything -- medieval, WW2, sci-fi, or whatever. The idea is to have a simulation as close to a real full-scale war as possible -- armies of millions of men, thousands of miles of front. Since, except on a superficial scale, no one can handle this alone, we expand the number of players to several hundred on each side. Each person is responsible for a particular sector/group of units, and there is a chain of command, including a supreme commander. So some people are only playing rather standard RTS, but others are responsible for coordinating the actions of these players into a coherent strategy.

If I remember, a company was doing a MMORTS based on the Dune universe back at the turn of the century. I think they went bankrupt, though, before they could finish it.

[Uraniun235]

Reminds me of the old Boneyards metagame from Total Annihilation; there was a "galactic map" which consisted of a bunch of planets, and each planet corresponded to a map (or maybe several similar-themed maps? it's been so long, I can't remember), and every day there would be one or two planets under contention, and people would enter matches on these planets. At the end of the day, whichever side (ARM or CORE) would be pronounced the winner (and listed as now owning the planet), the Boneyards crew would write up a little fanfiction featuring the names of the notable players of the day or the week, and the war would go on. Every so often one side or the other would win the board and a new galactic map would be thrown up.


It didn't really mean much, but it was a fun little backdrop to the multiplayer game. Does anyone do that these days?



As for making a MMORTS, I suspect a good platform for that could be something like EVE Online... except that instead of focusing on commanding a single ship, players could now command several ships. Low-rank players would start as minor squadron commanders, and through time and victory could move up to eventually become fleet admirals commanding tens of thousands of starships. Missions could range from hunting down space pirates, to putting down minor insurrections, to waging a billion-man campaign of unification across known space.