DONE! I can't believe I wrote all that. If there's anything I missed, I'll amend it to the end at a later date. I hope you like my idea. Please note that I broke the character cap, and there's a second half to my idea in the second post of this thread.
Things I've yet to write about:
Basic Foot soldiers
Special Units
Unit progression (Aka, experience)
Unit Effects
Public Service buildings and their special effects
Special civilians
Combat
Intelligent combat AI
grenades
C4
Vehicles
Nation-types
espionage
camouflage
Naval Battles
Aerial Battles
Fire/napalm
?story? CANCELLED, doesn't contribute significantly to idea.
funny sound effects
Army Commander
Alright, so I’ve actually had this idea for awhile now, but it’s never occurred to me to actually write it down. This is probably because I’ve never devoted enough time to it to develop it fully. Now, I wouldn’t say the idea is finished by any means, but I suppose I should write down what I have.
Alright, I’m a person that has liked strategy games from a very early age, and thus when I discovered RTS’s, I nearly flipped. However, your typical RTS usually has an element which turns me off immediately, which is the incessant need to micro-manage the collecting of resources and the building of an infrastructure to support an army. I’m a person that hates such small details, and would wish that they be divorced from this genre completely. However, thinking about it, that’s actually difficult to do, so I’ve been coming up with an idea to nearly replace it, while still maintaining some elements of tactical strategy.
Let me try to sum up my idea in a single paragraph, and then I’ll explain the different points to the best of my ability. Before I begin though, I’m going to be making a lot of comparisons to Age of Empires 2, since it’s the only RTS that I know inside and out. Alright, since I made it a point to mention resource gathering first, I’ll mention what the ideal in my game would be. Firstly, there will only be three resources in the form of money, people, and ‘productivity points’ but to boil it down, the cities function alot like Civ2 cities, but they’re actually large interactive cities on an RTS map instead of little icons with stats. Now, there would be NO manual collecting of these resources. Instead, you get a certain amount added to your stockpile every minute or so depending on certain factors. The primary factor being the existence of cities.
Cities are large groups of AI-controlled buildings populated with naturally neutral citizen units. In the middle of these towns are town centers/city halls. Gaining control over a City Hall will place the entirety of the city in your nation’s control, and then it’s obligated to start contributing via providing money in the form of taxes, new recruits, and with enough resources then large parts of the city can have their purpose re-allocated to producing war machinery. Besides the cities, there’s also the presence of a “Mother Nation” which is where your entire force comes from in the first place. Relying on the Mother Nation is a vital part of your success, but the actual capabilities of the MN depend on which Nation Type you choose.
Your Nation Type is like your ‘civilization’ in Age of Empires, but different. Every Nation has a different set of the same basic units. The units I have in mind are very minimalistic, with there only being a few units that have many utilities. With each nation though, the abilities of these units varies. Will be elaborated on later.
The maps for the battles will be very large, with stand-alone battles taking place on a square map with the equivalent of mile-long sides and larger, to larger battles encompassing several maps interconnected to form entire countries, which would be played sequentially in order to simulate the effect of individual battles between neighboring countries.
My era of my game would ideally be in the 1950‘s, in order to both have automobiles, hardened structures, air planes, and nuclear bombs. My game, ideally, would also be multiplayer, but also a single player mode, you know, usual stuff.
Alright, now more in-depth:
About Cities. Cities are special, they’re comprised of many buildings, of varying shape and size depending on the theme of the map, and have fairly harmless AI-civilians populating them. Now, these cities are special because they’re “mostly” autonomous. The number of civilians will grow and build new buildings and expand their borders automatically without any of the players needing to do anything. All cities will be very large, with there only being a couple every map, and the way they grow is that they will grow in a near-perfect circle, and only deviate from this when the environment forces otherwise. Why this is important though is that if cities become larger, then when you control a city, it can provide you with more things. More money, more people, more work. Now, since Cities are autonomous, they can’t be built by the player, so if you want more resources, you have to capture one, you can’t just build one yourself, and if one is completely destroyed, this it’s gone forever. Even when you do have governance over a city, you only have loose control over what it builds and how it functions. This is dictated by things called 'districts’. Now, what districts are is that they’re the specialized parts of a city. Normally, a city will only grow in residential, commercial, and industrial districts when not controlled or told to do anything. These dictate it’s population, tax revenue, and productivity points, your only three resources you have to worry about. With control over the City Hall, it’s possible to manipulate a City’s functions in various ways. Firstly, and most importantly, it’s possible to alter a city’s district layout. You see, since a city is usually circular, to make things simple, all the districts are consume ‘pie percentage’ so each district is cone-shaped with it being slimmer nearer the middle and wider near the edge, with the City Hall always placed in the exact center.
There are a variety of different districts, and using a small menu available at the City Hall, you can reallocate specific pie percentages of the city to different district-types. Your choices include:
Residential: These house your citizens. Increasing the size of max population of the city. As a note, population growth is reasonable, so even if current population is much smaller than max population, you can expect it to grow to max within a reasonable time frame.
Commercial: These areas produce the largest amount of revenue per building than in any other district, making them ideal for money making. They also employ some citizens, increasing production slightly.
Industrial: These are the mass employers; The factories, steel mills, plants, and things of that nature. Buildings in this district produce many more jobs, and will produce more production points than buildings in any other district. Also, since they’re also technically businesses, they’ll also produce some revenue, but not as greatly as the commercial district.
Army/Barracks: Your basic and most often used military district will be this. With these, you can recruit citizens into the army, and they’ll become your basic foot soldier units, which will be elaborated on later. When a Barracks district produces a foot soldier, they either start automatically patrolling to defend the city, or head to a predetermined point.
Public Service District: This district will only spawn things like fire departments, police departments, hospitals, swat teams, bomb squads, homeless shelters, and similar buildings. As well, with these buildings in existence, citizens will automatically be trained as doctors, policemen, SWAT members, and will have automatically have corresponding vehicles to aid them. I’ll elaborate on the different civilian professions and buildings later. What’s important to note though is that these buildings produce no revenue or production points, and in fact will subtract money every cycle (explained later) from the your total cash since they’re buildings funded by the government for the common good, and you’re the one that needs to foot the bill for the employees.
War Machine District: These will create factories that can be used for the creation of tanks, jeeps, airplanes, helicopters, and things like that. Also, they’ll build warehouses to store them all. Vehicles will be elaborated on later. However, war factories don’t contribute to the economy, and, like the Public Service District, don’t produce revenue or production points and consume money to maintain.
Aerial District: This district specializes in airplanes and helicopters, but instead of being made entirely of buildings, they will have some Control towers, other warehouses, and long strips of land devoted to being landing/takeoff strips for airplanes.
As a note, since there will be oceans and seas, if a district comes into contact with a shore, in order to compensate for not being able to expand over the water, will produce higher quality buildings along the shore. The Public Service District produces a Coast Guard, the War Machine district can make a large military harbor that can make war ships, residential will make homes that house more people, Commercial will make buildings that make much more money, Aerial Districts can make watercraft airplanes and big aircraft carriers, and Industrial will make large seaside factories that exploit the riches of the ocean. Also, to further compensate for the loss of buildings due to not being able to expand, cities with a coastline have a special mechanic applied to them: Oceanic Control.
Oceanic control is simple, as a coastline city expands and touches the coast, it gains a small sphere of control over the ocean, which will hopefully envelop a resource which is present in the ocean. With the resources gained in conjunction with the sheer amount of Oceanic Control gained, more projects will open up that will offset the economical disadvantages of being unable to expand into the ocean.
As another note, all buildings that aren’t homes will have job slots. All job slots will always be filled if there are people to fill them. If there are more jobs than people, then some buildings chosen at random just either won’t produce at full capacity, or won’t produce at all depending on the severity of the lack of people. If there’s more people than jobs, then all the slots will be used up, and the remaining people will be free to be used as recruits or whatever else.
Now, before I continue further, I should elaborate on the purpose of the three main resources: Money, People, and Production Points, all of which are absolutely vital to your success.
Money: A lot of things cost money. Training units, building vehicles, funding the wages of government-dedicated building’s employees, starting projects (explained later), and base improvements (also explained later) all cost money. Money is added to your treasury every cycle.
People: You need people for everything. You need them for making soldiers and filling job slots, which are the backbone of your Nation. In more depth though, cities can have hundreds of citizens, and citizens are their own units which populate each city. Citizens need only exist in the city to contribute to it, and so don’t need to actually shuffle to and from their job to contribute, however they do exist physically, instead of being an intangible resource like in Civ2. Citizens are very weak units, having the lowest stats, hp, and no weaponry (unless, part of a militia, explained later). You cannot directly control citizens, they are completely controlled by their AI, however, their AI ideally would be very conservative, fleeing from any threat either in the opposite direction, taking refuge inside a home, or to the nearest Shelter (Heavy duty Public Service building). Citizens, however, have different functions depending on if they have a job at a public service building, but this will be elaborated on later. The number of citizens you’re allowed to have is determined by the number of homes in your Residential districts, which all contribute to a population cap. If you have fewer people than the population cap, then more citizens will be born every cycle, which then immediately begin working, provided there are jobs. The birthrate can be affected drastically, through projects and certain weapons, which will also be elaborated on later. If, through the destruction of homes, that your maximum population cap dives below the number of surviving Citizens, then growth will cease, and citizens will instead begin dying due to homelessness. This can be prevented with homeless shelters (Public Service building) which simply prevent the death of the homeless, with each one providing care to a certain number of citizens.
Production Points: Responsible for the construction of anything and everything, with some exceptions. Production points are more intangible than money is, since it’s more a measurement of the amount of work being done than a physical thing like money is. The way it works may sound complicated, but let me try to make it as simple as possible. Whenever you want the construction of anything, be it vehicles, buildings, or projects, then a certain number of production points are used every cycle to build these things. For speed’s sake, I’ll refer to production points as PP from here on out. PP, as I said, is a measure of the amount of work being done, and so PP can’t be stockpiled like money can. PP is generated from your factories and other buildings every cycle, and purchases requiring PP have to wait until the end of the current cycle until the required PP is generated can be expended to use it. If there are several things being built with PP, then the first things selected will be the first to use up the PP, and all things that have had their requirements fulfilled will be built at the beginning of that cycle simultaneously. If the purchases requiring PP outweigh your PP output, then the first things will be built, and then the others will be put on hold until the next cycle. PP is never wasted though, if you don’t have enough purchases that consume every cycle’s output of PP then the city that is producing the PP will automatically use the PP to contribute to the City, by way of building more structures to the various districts, expanding the borders, and repairing damaged buildings. Even neutral, unowned cities will make use of it’s PP in order to build useful things. Your PP output each cycle would be shown right next to your money stockpile, and things requiring PP don’t need to be attached to the city that produces it in order to be built.
Now I’ve been talking about cycles an awful lot, but I haven’t really elaborated on what a cycle is. You see, exactly every game minute is considered a ‘cycle’. Cycle’s determine the pace that everything is made. All resources collected, all citizens born, all things made, all happen at the end of each cycle. This counts for every player and every city simultaneously. I think there could even be a little timer to let the player know when the current cycle is ending and the next is beginning. Of course, this would be alterable in an options setting, so cycles could be made to be faster or slower to speed up or slow down the game.
Now, when I started writing this, I promised this would all be simple right? Trust me, it IS simple. Almost all of what I’ve explained happens automatically, without you ever needing to actually intervene. This entire system of economy is handled automatically in order to streamline and simply the game, so you can worry about your units and strategy and stuff without having to worry about micro-managing base building with an efficiency that rivals machines, because now it IS handled by a machine.
It should be noted that even though you can’t build certain buildings, the City’s would be so large and the AI auto-building mechanism would ideally be good enough to include an even gradient between building types, so you don’t have to worry about a certain structure not being built, and your City being deprived of a valuable service.
Now, even though most of that is automated, it is possible to loosely control how a city works. As I mentioned already, you can alter a City’s districts. It’s possible to alter these districts with no limit; You can make them consume as large of a pie percentage as you’d like, and you can make several different slices of the same type of district if you please. Besides that though, there is another way to alter a city, and make it useful, these are projects. From a menu accessible via the City Hall, Projects are special purchases which require lump sums of money and a fair deal of PP to alter the city in a vital or non-vital way, and can help or hurt it depending on the circumstances. Certain projects are only accessible if you have a certain portion of your city dedicated to certain districts, and that some are very easy to implement and de-implement, some are massively expensive, permanent, and would require many cycles to pay for.
Examples of Projects include, but are not limited to:
Militia: Every citizen is made to both undergo mandatory firearm training and making firearm ownership obligatory, for the common defense. This alters all Citizens to, instead of running away and hiding in case of an attack, will take defensive positions inside homes and open fire on the intruders, allowing a a massive surge of relatively weak citizens to overpower undetermined attacks. However, citizens are still weak units, and the weapons they have are but mere shotguns, hunting rifles, and pistols, so while they may be able to kill normal foot soldiers, they won’t make dents in tanks or other vehicles, and so their bravery may cause them to be killed enmasse should a more prepared attack be launched against them.
Cascading Wall: Circular portions of the city, starting from the center and progressing outward at regular intervals, will be sacrificed in order to build a series of walls that can protect against advancing ground forces invading into the city. At the regular intervals, a growing city will continue to build the walls in the same pattern, for further protection.
Freeway: Builds a large multi-lane road either between two cities or between a city and a base. Will automatically choose the most time-efficient path for the road, and has a price that varies by how long it is. Anything on a freeway always moves at it’s maximum speed, and this is very useful for moving things to and from a base or city.
Nuclear Bomb: Military grade Uranium isn’t easy to make you know, and is actually so expensive and time-consuming that making enough to build a bomb is a task that requires the strength of a nation. Upon completion, this sets the bomb inside a warehouse inside a War Machine District, and can be manually detonated at any time. This bomb can be placed inside an air plane or truck, and must be physically carried to it’s destination. Upon detonation, this bomb’s blast radius is so large and powerful, that you can rest assured that it will destroy atleast a quarter of the map.
These are but examples, and I will most definitely be adding to it as I write this.
Now, the next thing I want to elaborate on, which I haven’t made great mention of yet, are Bases. Now, while you can’t build Cities, you CAN build bases. When you have a grouping of 15-20 foot soldier units, you can order them to group together and build a Base. You can build Bases anywhere, and they act as centers of military necessity. Bases are different from Cities, as Bases can’t produce any resources at all, and need to leech off of Cities in order to grow and function. Now, Bases are more like traditional drop and build RTS games, with the ability to build anything within the Base’s zone of control.
Before I go any further, let me explain what I mean by that. When you build a base, only a certain small radius of land around it is considered it’s zone of control, and things can only be built with this area. However, this initial zone of control is much too small to make use of. To expand the ZoC, you have to set up a defensive perimeter, and make the particular base a bit more permanent by doing so. To set up a defense perimeter, you’d have to click the base, and select any number of options. These options would include a series of automatically built watch towers, trenches, barbed wire fields, machine gun nests, big thick walls, and so on, with each one having it’s own cost, PP requirements, and permanence.
Now, what I mean by permanence is more of a meta-concept. Building large walls around a base will protect it more, sure, but those walls are expensive and require a time, money, and PP investment to build, and expanding beyond it would be difficult, what with removing the walls requiring a time investment in and of itself.
Anyway, ZoC’s can be expanded with defense perimeters. It should be noted, that building one doesn’t exclude you from another, and that various forms of defense can be built on top of eachother. With this in mind, it’d be possible to build trenches with barbed wire fields, and machine gun nests right next to eachother, with flak cannons on the innermost grounds.
Now, there are a number of different types of defense perimeters that can be chosen, and the size and shape can be modified to alter your base to fit the surroundings better. For example, you can project your defense perimeter to project out to one side, and build one big wall on one side instead of a wall which surrounds the entire base. Though this has the drawback of the ZoC only growing on one side as well. You can, however, modify the size and shape in different ways, so you can build the big wall on one side, and a circular wall on the other.
Now, there’s another special relationship between ZoC and Bases, and that’s population. Any and all of your foot soldiers inside the ZoC of a base is considered to be ‘In’ the base, and thus part of it’s population. This alters the dynamic AI of the soldiers (elaborated later) and causes them to defend it in case of an attack by automatically manning machine gun nests, jumping into trenches, and helping the wounded.
Back to bases, the drag and drop style of building has a particular limitation that should be mentioned, and that’s that almost all buildings need to be manned by foot soldiers in order to function at all, and this is why I mention population. Since all soldiers in a base count towards the population of the base and thus will will contribute to both it’s defense should it be attacked and it’s general functioning without having to be told to do so, this will help streamline defense and combat when you don’t have to tell your units to do obvious things. There’s a number of buildings that can be built inside a base’s ZoC besides the various defensive perimeter buildings, these include, but are not limited to:
Training barracks: will automatically send jeeps to the nearest town, pick up civilians, and return, where they can be trained into foot soldiers without there having to be a Barracks District within a city.
Air Strips: Building air strips into the ground allow air planes to land, refuel, reload, and take off again without have to travel back to a city
Military Academy: Can transform a foot soldier into a special unit, decided by whichever Nation-type you happen to be.
I haven’t thought of many, but I’m going for minimalism to keep the game simple. As a note, things can be deconstructed on a timer, but upon doing so you will only receive a portion of the money spent to build it, and a fraction of the PP spent to build it will be added to the next cycle.
Bases are meant for both defense and offense, and simple ones can be built and deconstructed on the fly, and a strategically implanted base with the proper use of defensive perimeter can allow a relatively small force to deal significant damage to a much larger force.
Now, I’ve been talking a WHOLE lot about foot soldiers, but I haven’t really explained what the little rascals are. Foot soldiers are your basic combat units, they are the backbone of your military and you will need a great deal of them if you intend to win. Foot soldiers, as I’ve explained earlier, are made when you recruit civilians into either the barracks district, or a training facility built in a base. They can be built by any nation-type, but each Nation-type produces a different variation with different abilities and stats. Elaborated on later, of course.
Foot Soldiers are the backbone of your military because you need them to operate all vehicles, and to operate all military related buildings. Foot Soldiers are also multi-talented and well-prepared to handle most of your military concerns. For basic combat, each Foot Soldier has an automatic rifles which have fair range, fair accuracy, and infinite ammo, and a single explosive. As you might expect, you can select the Soldiers by themselves or in large groups, and move them about, or tell them to attack things.Now, the “explosive” I mentioned earlier can take two forms, a grenade or a C4. When in combat, when a soldier deems it necessary due to certain factors, will automatically use his explosive to throw a grenade at the opposing force, where it will explode and deal damage to everyone in the radius, as you might expect. Now, C4 has a different use, where if say a foot soldier comes into close proximity to an enemy tank or a building, he can hop onto it, use his explosive to plant a C4 charge, and then run away as it explodes. This is important because of shrapnel and explosive defense, which will be elaborated on later. Another thing foot soldiers can do, is when in a dense forest (explained more thoroughly when I elaborate on environments) they can automatically use the forest as cover, and become stealthy, limiting other units’ ability to see them. Also, if there is an unoccupied building nearby when a firefight begins, the foot soldier will jump into the building and fire with cover from the windows, borrowing the defense of the building and becoming stationary as a tradeoff. Also, when extremely low on HP, Soldiers become mortally wounded and lose the ability to move, in this situation a compatriot soldier’s AI (elaborated on in a minute, I promise!) will assess the situation, and if it’s a dangerous situation then he will continue firing will trying to drag his friend to safety, while if it’s safe, can perform emergency first aid to bring his hp back up enough to get him walking again, and if given enough time, up to full health. Also, as I explained before, a group of 15 or more foot soldiers can group together to form a Base.
Now, I should elaborate on dynamic AI to make the use of the foot soldiers easier to understand. There would be a priority list which is always in direct conflict with your direct orders that determine a soldier’s actions. For example, a solitary soldier being sent to scout ahead may encounter a large force, which immediately attacks him, in this situation, while you ordered it to move ahead, it will instead retreat after sensing that many enemies are targeting it, it’s not in a base, and that no other soldiers are nearby to back him up. In another example, a soldier is defending a base which is being intruded upon by a powerful enemy force which is penetrating the defensive perimeter, so he falls back and jumps into a building and fires from the windows, however, also in his line of sight is a soldier which is severely wounded and can’t move, but can still shoot, so the soldier jumps out of the building momentarily to drag the wounded soldier into the building with him.
All this is meant to make strategy more viable, while also simultaneously adding character to the little units (instead of them being little robots), to make army macromanagement easier since you don’t have to micromanage individual groups of units to do obvious things, and to make battles more lively than just groups of enemies attacking eachother until the statistically superior one wins out.
So, in short, foot soldiers are necessary due to their adaptability. They can move over any terrain, go through forests and swamps, are cheaply produced, have many abilities, and you need them to man vehicles and create bases, as well as allow the buildings within bases to function.
Now, before I go any further with units, I should elaborate on the types of stats that units have. They have HP, which takes damage from attacks, and when it hits zero the unit dies. When a unit is very low on hp, it becomes mortally wounded and cannot move or perform first aid on others or themselves, however, they are still conscious and can still attack if they’re a combat capable unit. Now, HP is restored in a couple ways; Foot soldiers can perform first aid on any injured units, and slowly restore them to full health given that they have enough time and aren’t distracted. A special civilian unit, the doctor, is produced when hospitals are made in a Public Service district, these will quickly come to the aid of any injured civilians and try to steer them into the hospital, where they can be healed the more quickly. There’s also a special unit, the Field Specialist, which is like a foot soldier with vastly improved healing skills and other abilities. Special units will be elaborated on it a bit.
Now, aside from HP, there’s also attack power, attack type, and range. Attack power, as you might expect, determines the strength of attacks. Attack type determines the type of damage, which is important. There’s three different types of damage: shrapnel, explosive, and fire. Shrapnel damage is dealt by guns and grenades. Explosive damage is dealt by all bombs, C4, and tanks. Fire damage is dealt by napalm canisters, flame throwers, and burning environments/buildings. Finally, there’s range, which determines the distance which a unit can attack another unit, plain and simple. To note though, each unit normally has an field of vision which exceeds the distance they can attack opponents, and thus can react to opponents which they can’t attack yet.
Now, the last three stats are defense, there’s shrapnel, explosive, and fire defense respectively, and simply determines that unit’s resistance to that form of attack. That concludes the types of stats that each unit can have. To note, buildings also count as units, and thus have stats of their own. As a rule of thumb, civilians have poor everything, Foot soldiers have decent attack, range, shrapnel defense, and HP, but very low explosive and fire defense; vehicles have high hp and high shrapnel defense, but only moderate explosive defense, and low fire defense; finally, buildings have high hp, extremely high shrapnel defense, but due to their rigidity, have very low explosive and fire defense. To note, vehicles, when hitting zero hp, will simply cease functioning instead of exploding, like you would see in other games. When a vehicle ceases functioning, it leaves it’s useless husk behind, and gains a ‘second’ HP bar, which represents how broken the vehicle is. While the vehicle can no longer move, units can still reside in it and it can still take damage with it’s second HP bar. If a Field Specialist is able to reach the vehicle before the deterioration bar depletes due to damage, then he can repair it to working condition again or if a broken vehicle happens to be in a city, then one of the worker civilians will automatically attempt to repair it. If the deterioration bar is also depleted, THEN the vehicle explodes and becomes irreparable. Planes and boats are exceptions to the ‘husk’ rule though, because if they’re reduced to zero HP, then if they aren’t able to use their last moments of movement to get into an airport or harbor, then they’ll crash/sink, destroying them completely. As a note, vehicles aren’t tied to their makers, and enemy field specialists can repair the husks and/or hijack your unused vehicles. Also, while most vehicles travel faster than foot soldiers, if in a squad with foot soldiers then the drivers will drive slowly so as to not speed ahead of the pack.
I just realized that I have a bad habit of starting every paragraph with the word ‘now’, so let me try to not do that, and see how long I last.
Next up are vehicles. There’s quite a few vehicles; Jeeps, tanks, planes, and boats count as vehicles, and they each have their own purpose. Vehicles will not operate by themselves, like in other games, they must have foot soldiers operating them. To make using vehicles easy, you can set all vehicles as either ‘in’ or ‘out’ of service, where an in-service vehicle will automatically have a nearby foot soldier commanded to man it, out-of-service vehicles will be parked either in a War Machine District warehouse, or in neat-rows in a base. While a lot of vehicles, like tanks and planes, need to be manually ordered to be built, there are some buildings that, when built, will automatically produce a certain number of specific vehicles. For example, a hospital, when built, will generate two or three AI-controlled ambulances which carry doctors quickly around a city, and will automatically ferry injured civilians to the nearest hospital.
Alright, let me summarize the basic vehicles, and their purpose within the game:
Civilian Cars: These are unarmored, low HP vehicles which populate cities alongside the citizens. They drive about randomly, and can’t be ordered around, but can still be used for cover or for clogging up roads, necessitating that they be destroyed. They are weak though, and don’t stand a chance against an actual military vehicle.
Jeeps: Jeeps are a light, small vehicle which allows a driver and three other passengers to ride over even, non-forested landscape with speed, ease, and relative safety. They have a machine gun mounted on them which is slightly stronger than the one that foot soldiers carry, but can only be manned by foot soldier They’re small, quick, and maneuverable, making them ideal for light and fast attacks.
Tanks: Tanks are large heavy machines which can only pass over unobstructed terrain. They are much better armored than other vehicles, and can have a driver and two other foot soldier passengers. They have a large cannon which deals large amounts of explosive damage, and can severely damage buildings and other vehicles much more easily than other units can. Foot soldiers, if given the opportunity, will hop onto an enemy tank and plant C4 in order to damage a tank, as no other way is efficient.
Planes: Planes are multipurpose vehicles, but have heavier requirements than others. Firstly, they can only take off and land from/on airports from the appropriate district, from airstrips in bases, or from a aircraft carriers. They can be packed with up to 10 units each, regardless of type, and any unit in a plane automatically receives a parachute so that they can jump out at any time, can be manually forced to jump, and in fact will jump out automatically should the plane be reduced to zero HP and crashing is imminent. Also, they can have their passenger slots instead filled with bombs or napalm canisters (produced at War Machine Districts) and ordered to drop their payload evenly over a large area. Also, planes can be ordered to travel between airports, and quickly ferry units this way. All planes also have guns which can allow for dog-fighting or shooting at ground-based units. For these three purposes, airplanes need to be manually commanded, and will continue to fit these purposes until commanded otherwise.
Helicopters: Helicopters are light and fast air-based vehicles meant exclusively for combat, only needing a single driver, and only having enough room for one passenger. Helicopters have large amounts of firepower though, having a heavy machine gun and several rockets, they can dish out large amounts of damage and be maneuverable enough to evade attack. They don’t have great HP or armor though, so if they do take damage it’s very likely to destroy them outright. Of course, they need be built at aerial districts, but can take off and land on any unobstructed flat land.
Destroyers and Cruisers: Destroyers are large ships produced at War Harbors. They can carry several large tank-sized cannons, and need 5 foot soldiers to operate, with room for up to 20 other unit passengers. They’re large and thus need deep ocean water to move about in, but they carry huge amounts of firepower and armor, allowing them to sail up to anything by the coast and utterly lay waste to it. Cruisers are another type of boat produced at War Harbors; they are smaller boats made for coast guards, but can be made manually in order to be used alongside Destroyers. They are much smaller than destroyers, but are much faster and more maneuverable, as well as capable of traveling in shallower waters, and marshes. However, they also have much less firepower, only having a few machine guns, and only room for around 6 foot soldiers plus driver.
Aircraft carriers: Aircraft carriers are massive ships that can only be produced by seaside airplane districts, and can be occupied by up to 30 foot soldiers plus driver. Aircraft carriers are basically floating landing strips with enough space to land planes, store planes, and while they don’t natively have any weapons, the foot soldiers on deck can fire at enemy ships and the planes on-board will automatically deploy to defend the ship. To somewhat compensate for how slow and huge these are, they have superb defense and HP.
Those are the basic ones, that all nation-types can build.
Author
Topic: Game Idea: Army Commander (Read 3158 times)