Any color, I believe. For example, color the first paragraph red, the second yellow, etc.
oh god it's huge part of it.
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.
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Topic: Game Idea: Army Commander (Read 3160 times)