Game ideas: MMORTS
A Massively Multiplayer Online Real Time Strategy.
Contents |
Concept
Each player starts with a small number of troops or buildings. They then build up their military, economic, agricultural and cultural aspects. Players can become allies with other players or fight them. Basically a normal RTS except with hundreds of other forces.
Possible Features
- Range of different units, races, buildings, etc.
- Ally with/Fight against/Chat to/Trade with other players
- Plan strategic manoveurs with other players, etc.
- Multiplayer players controlling a single force/civilisation, perhaps have an entire world of many civilisations, and players choose to join one of the civilisations, at first they could be limited to controlling a small force (with possibly their own avatar character, to throw in some RPG elements?) without being able to manage resources and build or produce new units, but depending upon their success in their missions against the enemy the game may promote them and give them more responsibilities, up until the point of having their own kingdom, while fighting and waging war against another kingdom in the same cilivisation would be frowned upon by the game, it would have advantages if you are succesful, such as taking over said kingdom and controlling it etc.
Problems
Some problems I forsee:
Too much bandwidth
The obvious one, too much information to be transfered between the client and server. But wouldn't it be possible to make the game very basic but still tactical(as in archers and seige weapons but not 15 different types of each). Anyother possiblity would be to only load a small section of the map to the client as they cannot interact with object very far away. However this would be ruined if the player split up there troops.
Unequal forces
New players being destroyed by larger armies that have been around longer. Not much could be done about this. Perhaps every new player must be protected by an older one until it can defend itself. The new player cannot attack the old one. (But then older civilasations could abuse this)
Possibly a similar method to the one employed by many web-browser games could be implemented.
New players would be protected for X hours, to give them time to build up some infrastructure and prepare to defend. After this, they're on their own. To prevent rampant ganking, the benefits of victory are decreased or increased, in direct relation to how powerful the enemy is compared to you.
Another idea is to force the players into factions from the start (shattered galaxy does this nicely) so that they are under the protection of the older players in the faction.
Over crowding
Too many players in the one space. A possible solution would be to expand the world as more and more players join. Another solution is to offer multiple instances of the same world so that if a world becomes full, players can simply jump to another to begin their game and start to develop.
Leaving/Quiting the game
If a player leaves with 100 troops and buildings intact what happens. Are they destroyed, do they still fight, does AI take over?
I Think it should
In an MMORTS, Beyond Protocol, this is addressed in a number of ways. The first method is that the player receives messages from the game that they can respond to in order to make the AI behave in a certain manner. The second method is that there is an "invulnerability" state to a portion of the player's units and facilities. This means they can still be attacked, but they get to choose what is "safe". The third method is through player aliasing and group cooperation. In this form, the player assigns a subaccount of the empire to users. The other user can then receive the information and log in under the alias and commence defense of the empire.
