OK OK, my post was a bit flame material.
It''s just I am bored of metaphoric games, and those that just don''t play as they look.
What am I saying ? Well, when I saw Starcraft intro and cut scenes I was crying with happiness, those guys could enter Annecy Animation Festival without a problem, the Diablo II movies are just even better, and what can I say about the Warcraft III orks movie except "OMG!".
The thing is that I saw all those realistic graphics, and those realistic units, etc. What I discovered was a simply perfected version of Warcraft (yes I am unfair). The core concepts haven''t evolved since Dune II (how many years ago was that again ? 10 years or something ?)
Build buildings, mine resource, upgrade buildings, build more units, tank rush. Yeaaah, I really really want to play another game like that. And you ?

Now for your ideas, I won''t comment 1 and 2 since they are, well, they are
number 3 is interesting. You would make landscape become an integral part of the game in terms of objectives. First you could give low value to unpleasant wones (lava, marsh, mountain), higher to interesting ones (road, flatland, concrete slab anyone ?).
You would give even higher value to area containing objectives ? (a mine, a lab, an industrial compound, etc).
The investment you are talking about would simply a sort of "terraformaing" of low value land to upper values. For instance in real life, marsh zones can be filled to builda flat zone that then become constructible.
I can see only the problem of time scale. But in a game where you build a whole city and start from a soldier to end up with starcruiser in an hour of gameplay, to heck with realism
You could even have more civilian units, transforming your game into a sort of SimCity meets Starcraft ? (I am not even joking here...)

Oh BTW, my first post was totally biased. Actually France sold Mirage F1 (air fighters) to Irak before, and I think even during the Gulf War, testing their new planes on their old ones ... "l''argent est le nerf dela guerre" !

youpla :-P

Now come on ! YOu are reading my thoughts

I remember playing a scorched earth / worms kind of game on the MAcintosh years ago ( 9 actually). You had a castle, you could build mines in the mountain, with the gold, buy more cannonballs, better weaponry. Plus the castle was composed of modules. You could destroy canons separately, blow the ammo reserve up, destroy mine tunnel. Very basic, but yet, I promisedmyself taht one day I would code something better but on the same concept. And everytime I end up wondering, where do I stop being a pure Worms game, where do I start doing a RTS ... can you draw the line ? Because I can''t. Technologically, I was gonna do such a Game for my BSc, but I decided against, since my design wasn''t good enough in my head :/

youpla :-P

quote: Original post by Niphty

Hey Paul, i just got done with a 72 hour stint of playing Civ 2:Test of Time I''m beat. LOL. Actually, i won.. hehe. I had both the science and the ship endings almost at the same time. I needed like 5 turns to complete and send the ship, but i was getting too bored so i dumped all my resources to science and just finished that in like 2 turns.. lol.

Anyways, RTS games have a deffinate place, but their replayability is low most of the time. Especially games like Civilization. Once you''ve beaten it, there''s nothing to do but beat your own score. And at later turns, you end up with such a mass empire that it gets to be an interface problem. I truely think it needed a MUCH better interface.. they hadn''t improved over the original Civ at all! Like a list of all the cities, and what happened.. especially for those on auto-build! And some kinda notification if the auto-build wasn''t building something new BEFORE the next turn came along!

Anyways.. this is just back to the old interface problem. Ahh well

J

Hey Niphty,

You might want to try Freeciv when you get a chance. It has the features that you said would''ve been nice.

Yep, that''s a nice thought.
One major problem is the need for room to put your units inside your base. I still remember having to send a transport to rescue one of my builder stuck between for walls of buildings ... how stupid is THiS ?
Now the problem is that by increasing the size of the map, you make it much more complicated to locate you bases.
As well, the reason we play with so dense packs of units is because there is no such thing as formations in most RTS (yes, I have seen AoE, Homeworld, and Ground control, but they are NEW), making big packs make it easier to order your troops around.

So we need some sort of formations, my personal choice would be a "click to go deeper" system, where clicking on a unit would first select the detachment it is in, then the unit itself (and you could go up or down the scale by clicking, alt+clicking).
As well, if you increase the size of the maps, you need a proper way to see what''s going on, not just a radar map, that more often than not is marginally useful, but something like a real GUi to manage your base and troops.
Personaly I would see a data screen, with icons of your buildings, the current state/production/activity, a list of the detachments of your army, with their status. And of course a "click to see it" function.
If we had all this first, I believe then, the question of increasing the spaces to make it easier to maneuver wouldn''t that relevant.

If you JUST increase the size of maps, all you''re gonna make is giv more room for more troops, which will be as crunched as before. First you need to solve the deeper problems.
Maybe I have got some answers here, then again, I could wrong

youpla :-P