What do you find the best prospect of either turn based or real time strategy games? What do you feel could use improvement?
Some food for thought:
I think every RTS player goes through all the stages at some point, with the final stage being complete understanding of the game played at high level and transcending the fear of defeat. One of the first stages is turtling... I remember playing exactly like the noobturtles I now despise when I was about 12 and playing through the TA campaign for the first time.
I like Warhammer 40k with the Eldar.
They can teleport buildings out of danger, so that you can avoid combat in PvP
This game also have a unit limit, which reduces the amount of micro and thus make the game more relaxed.
The most common problem of FFA in Zero-K is, that noobs like to porc in their base and avoid fighting the strong one because they fear to lose.
The strong one can pick up one after another and especially try to kill a player which got recently attacked (thus weakened).
I think one thing you might have difficulty with is that while there always seem to be a few players who want to play SimCity with their base... I don't know if you would actually attract those players with a Base Building RTS... they play like that because they "want a solid infrastructure" or "don't want their base overrun"...
As such I think the solution would be to remove the option... limit the number of useful buildings that a player could build... or have a "base building phase" and a "combat phase"... or start the player with a base of operations but don't let them improve it...
or simply balance a game towards rewarding good base building...
Almost no one wants to play the mighty pro 1v1s, they almost always want to play team games. SpeedMetal emerged, allowing players to play SimCity each in it's own "island". And the map Castles. And the map Altored Divide. And the mod Chickens, which is just turtling against the computer.
What you're describing is partly the evolution of RTSs, if you think about it.
Warcrap 3 had a very strong focus on the heroes. But you still had all those "chores" that were "annoying" and removed you from focusing decently on the most "fun" part of the game. Thus DotA emerged and latter LoL and Heroes of Newerth. You no longer have those petty chores and all you do is play around in the front line, where the action is. DotA and LoL had huuuge successes because they catered to desires the players had but that weren't being satisfied by any other games.
On the other direction, you can see from some years a great emmergence of Tower Defense games. You just turtle, have absolutely no armies and just babysit your base. Plants vs Zombies had a huuuge success because it catered to desires players had that weren't being satisfied by any other games.
The standard position about playing SimCity in RTSs is to regard the players as wrong. I think *that* is wrong. I think the stance you're having about it is highly commendable - the fact is that players are having desires uncatered for and why should any game developer regard the players as being wrong instead of the other way around?
There are many paths I'd like to see pursued in catering for the player's specific desires without forcing players into the standard RTS paradigm where you have to do everything (SimCity, Tower Defense, raiding, etc, etc, etc). Even with the emergence of Tower Defense games and MOBAs, I believe there's still lots of ground that can be covered here.
A success example in Spring is Delta Siege Dry. I believe it works so well because it allows the games/mods to cater for many different needs on the players. You have 3 roles in those games: the SimCity guys at the back; the raiders at the bottom; and the Tower Defense guys at the top.
Much ground can still be "broken" (ground-breaking) by breaking away from the rigid classical RTS paradigm and new success stories can come up.
It's not about high APM, just about tight play. RTS newbies float resources like they collect interest, they don't build stuff as fast as they can.
I don't think that playing Anno competitively would be fun.
And frankly if you add enough randomness and fudge factors that newbies don't get steamrolled you just end up with a game where the player doesn't really matter...[it] can be pretty damn frustrating, after all when the RNG turns what should be a certain victory into a defeat that's just utter BS. Of course some people take the hate of randomness too far but when you've got nonsense like CoH's vehicle system (a vehicle will only die to a critical hit, as long as the RNG doesn't roll one the vehicle just stays at 5% HP despite repeated penetrating hits) you can get some really WTF moments. You can try to minimize or calculate risks but in the end you may still suffer an unfair loss at the hands of the RNG.
The worst example of "RNG says you lose" is probably Mario Party, followed by the f***ing blue shell.
Yes, but RNG is not incompatible with competitive gaming. Obviously you want to avoid games where the RNG is too decisive in choosing a victor. The "pikeman kills my tank" Civ effect should be avoided. But lots of random games are successful at a competitive level. People play Poker competitively. Catan competitively. Magic the Gathering competitively. Drawing inventory is a *great* place to put randomness, for example. Forget the Blue Shell in Mario Kart and look at the pickup system itself - there's a lot of randomness there, but it provides a tight competition. Maybe not fit for a pro tournament, but high-enough level play that hardcore players will not feel the game is broken.
And by APM, I meant *any* action, building included. If the pace were adjusted so players had time to spend their resources properly without panicking? That would help. Even look at KP - you could easily avoid the "excessing" thing by having the home-facs pump out swarmers when nothing else is selected.
Imho, designing a casual multiplayer RTS needs to go far further than simply making it defensive. RTS games are intrinsically hardcore - they're based on slippery slopes, elimination, and randomization - three things that are highly casual-unfriendly. What's even worse is that attempts to make an RTS "casual", like giving them beefy early-game defenses, actually only prolongs the one-sided stomping of the game, converting a quick execution into a long painful evisceration (see Dotalikes for this problem).
I'd look outside of the RTS industry to see what makes games palateable to casuals... even the most vicious FPS games are more casual-friendly because they've taken elimination off the table and have very little slippery-slopeage - the loser is free to start respawning over and over again, and all he needs to get into the game properly is an armor pickup and a weapon pickup. He'll get promptly obliterated, but still, he can keep getting into a good position as long as it's FFA (less-so with a 1v1 where his opponent can take complete map-control).
Go even further, look at kart games - a huge difference between Mario Kart and its more hardcore copycats is randomized pickups, as well as feeding catchup-oriented pickups to the rear players and special weapons that target the leaders. Obviously you can take this too far - the Blue Shell is an abomination before God and Man. Randomness takes a bit of the edge off since it means a weaker player can get a bit of luck and get an occasional win. Also, we've got the opposite of a slippery slope called "negative feedback", which basically means "punishing the winner/rewarding the loser". Quite the opposite of RTS games where the winner can snowball larger and larger firepower.
Now, obviously randomization can frustrate hardcore players, but it can be made palateable by focusing on randomization of equipment and peripheral stuff instead of direct Risk-style roll-the-dice-for-damage. Things like watching your tanks get pwned by hoplites in Civ are bad randomization, because it makes the player feel most directly like he was killed by the dice. Meanwhile, random loadouts may be the same "killed by the dice" in effect, but it's less directly frustrating to the player.
Taking a step further, look at popular boardgames - look how most boardgames avoid the "murder every other player" goal and instead focus on victory points or other victory mechanics, meaning that even as the leader is on the edge of victory, all the other players are still in game. This must be tempered with kill-the-leader or negative feedback mechanics, though, because otherwise you get situations where the game is completely moribund... all the players are in-game, but victory has long-since been decided and we're just going through the motions.
Kill the leader is a fantastic casual mechanic (hardcores hate it because it causes a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingmaker_scenario) but it requires offering players far more complete information than is typical of an RTS. In Catan or SmallWorld or Cosmic Encounter or Munchkin, you can see roughly how close a player is to victory - their only secret are the cards in their hand, but you have a rough idea of their power and how close they are to winning based on the stuff that's face-up on the table.
A good example of an RTS that embraces these kinds of mechanics is NetPanzer - in that game, the map is dotted with factories, and players spawn in with a squad of tanks. There is no fog of war - players just grab factories. First player to N factories wins. So we've got a kill-the-winner mechanic and respawning to keep everybody playing. The problem is that NetPanzer is a bad game - dull unit-spread and terrible unit-AI makes it tedious instead of fun. Also, RTS buffs will be disappointed with the near-total lack of construction. But still, the mechanics are there.
Anyways, my point: it *is* possible to create a casual PVP RTS, but you'd have to heavily break from traditional RTS mechanics and look outside the genre. Focus on fun sources of randomization, keeping every player in the game until the end (so non-elimination victory is a must), reducing the slippery-slope snowballs that are intrinsic to the RTS genre, and kill-the-winner or other negative-feedback mechanics.
Discuss.because the game is not really cut out for them..
NO EXPANSION, NO MICRO, NO SERVICE!
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