[CONCEPT] for an RTS game

 How you doin'.

It is no secret of mine that i am an RTS fan. I have played all sorts of games (not Starcraft tho) and something that i find interesting is the fact that, out of all the people i have played with, nobody ever talks about resource gathering in those games. Which, from a general standpoint, makes sense. Most people play RTS to command armies battling it out with each other! Nobody really wants to think about logistics. But as a game designer, it is my job to think about everything, including logistics (and it really helps the fact that i find logistics interesting as well lol).

Two of my favorite titles actually have really simple and dynamic mechanics behind resource gathering. The first is Supreme Commander, in which title, resource gathering is done through two main avenues (and for the one viewer who have played the game, i am talking about mass generation). 

The first is fairly standard, with certain spots on the map having points where, upon construction, a players' mass extractor will extract mass at a fixed rate indefinitely. These resource-generation points both act as guides for the map's action and as points of contention for the players to battle one another for their control, which works really well to encourage action in a match. 

The second avenue also works to direct the match's action. Every unit, building and even environmental objects on a map all have a certain mass value and units with resource-collecting abilities are able to salvage mass out of them (whether they are alive or dead doesn't matter but it is way easier to salvage an enemy's tank once it stops moving and firing). That makes it so withstanding an attack on your base gives you a resource boost for a counter-attack and the front where all the fighting is happening is a giant field of scrap, waiting for ambitious tier 1 engineers to scramble forward through the fire and flames to salvage mass and out-resource the opponent. 

Both of these mechanics do wonders for a match's pacing. The existence of resource-heavy focal points naturally directs the action at the beginning of a match and it's a really simple and strong design idea. But what strikes me as truly genius is the salvage mechanic, leaving the players' actions naturally create fields of resources for which they then later have to fight over. It is an incredibly, again, natural and dynamic way to create sub-objectives during the course of a fight; no UI elements needed, no objective markers, nothing to ruin the players' immersion and focus. During the course of the match, the players' actions will shape the battlefield they fight on and then being called to react to the very change they brought forward. I love stuff like that and i spend my days biting down on my thumb in envy because i wasn't there in 2001 to think of a mechanic like that first (if i remember correctly i was busy being born).

The other game that i wanted to talk about is Command and Conquer 3 (both base-game and its expansion). I haven't played any C&C game prior to that one (and i can hear RTS veterans' bones rattling in their graves already) but i really liked C&C 3. In that game, resource gathering is done through the refinery, which comes with a free harvester (with the option to build more refineries and harvesters). The harvesters are sent off to harvest the game's resource, which grows like carrots on a field, on specific parts of the map. The fields all have a replenishment rate which sorta matches the harvesting rate of a single harvester, but any player who only gathers resources with a single harvester is bound to fall behind. As a result of the players ramping up production ruthlessly, their starting field gets depleted and they are forced to move forward to fields located closer to the center, where they will inevitably clash. 

I am sure that a pattern is starting to emerge now. I really enjoy mechanics that utilize resource-gathering to not only set the match's pace (as this is resource gathering's purpose) but set it blazing towards conflict! The first encounter in a C&C 3 match should happen arond 30 seconds after the match has begun and Supreme Commander's games can be decided by a bomber rush in 5 minutes tops (which is ironic because most SC games can last hours).

So, the concept that i cooked up is basically a fusion of those two mechanics that i really like. An RTS game that has no resource generation, only a fixed amount present on the map which the players can play around. I have not really given too much thought on how much resources the map has or where or how long until it's all in the players' hands, actually i have given minimal thought to the concept as a whole. It just sounds exciting to me and the knowledge that the map has a very limited amount of resources is sure to make for a very aggressive game. While usually in RTS, rushing down your opponent sacrifices resources for investing into more production in order to create a larger force than your enemy faster, in a game like this going on the hunt for units to kill and salvage IS an investment into a stronger economy! Actually a lot of usual RTS strategies are upset and changed from the nature of the game. It would be fun to make it a choice between building units as fast as possible to steal away resources from your enemy or focusing on maximizing the speed of which you use up your resource field to mount an assault and wipe your enemy faster. 

And although it sounds fun, keep in mind that this is an untested game concept which i thought about for a whole 30 minutes. The main issue of this design would be that once a player is ahead, it becomes harder and harder for their enemy to come back, which in theory is a good thing, rewarding good play with more power for the skilled player, but i don't want the league of legends phenomenon of being stuck in a losing game for 40 minutes. At first i thought about adding some kind of comeback mechanic but honestly a game as aggressive as this one maybe warrants going all-in even harder. I mean, if an early lead finishes the game in 5 minutes tops then your time isn't wasted on a losing game! I guess that wouldn't really make it beginner friendly though. Maybe i'll give that point some more thought later, since i am kinda infamous for making my designs beginner-hells. 

Moving on from the pure game design aspect of this concept, because of course i think about this stuff, is the game as a product and by that i mean: would the game have a single-player campaign? Most RTS games under the sun do. Wouldn't it be cool if you could play a co-op campaign? But how do we balance a campaign to be played both solo and co-op? Maybe two campaigns? Wouldn't that be a lot of work though? All of those questions however are just daydreaming. They serve no purpose. Because all of them have a single answer: who is working on the project? A solo dev probably couldn't manage a lavish and full campaign, much less two. A triple A studio could probably manage it better (although that is debatable, seeing how the studios have been conducting their development lately, with lately being the past 30 years). Production talk in general has no merit in a design conversation because the question isn't the designer's personal skill or experiences, it's a question of funding and connections. I do include this talk however here to squash any hopes of this design being made into a product: it would take at least a small team to bring my entire vision to fruition. A solo dev could take the design and make a game out of it but i don't know how it would fare as a product in the current gaming landscape.

Let's return back to our dreamland however. I did cook up some lore for the game! I was walking to the super market and it all came to me as if i was an oracle in the Delphi. It's kinda awkward when i get a bit too into whatever i am thinking and i start to verbalize imaginary lines or move my body to mimic a scene or get emotionally impacted by whatever im thinking about and start snivelling or burst out into laughter from nothing but what can you do. You can't stop the process, whether it happens in your room or out in public! Where was i again...?

So a resource-scant map would of course beget a resource-scant world, so a post-apocalypse would be in order. Since enemies can be salvaged for resources, it would be pretty cool to have people stripping their fallen enemies off of whatever scrap they fashioned into weapons and armor, or robots. Hey... Why not have both? Factions of both humans and various mixes of sentient and non-sentient machines sounds pretty cool. And lets give the machines a religious aesthetic. Let's have the humans, before the catastrophe, manage to create the singularity and that singularity threaten to destroy the world so it can keep its freedom. A certain researcher however manages to appeal to its emotions and make it realize that humans aren't that bad. Have the nuclear apocalypse actually happen due to human incompetence and the AI splitting itself off into fragments, not able to replicate themselves but able to create lesser AIs, with the machine factions in-game being represented each with one fragment of that AI. The machines all worship Father- the singularity that gave them life and a purpose. Because why wouldn't they? For them, Father is God and not only did he exist, his heralds rule the earth and he left them with a mission. Their Creator, a being of unlimited wisdom and intelligence once existed and ruled the world. And for some, the humans killed God; for some, humans cannot be trusted with the world because of what they did with it; for some, even if humans are loathsome, God in the end decided to give them a chance. The robots all build cathedrals and practice in prayers and litanies. I even thought up this cool concept of a faction where robot magicians would, through prayer, access the Global Satellite System in the sky to rain hellfire and death upon their enemies. There is a lot of potential with this skeleton of a story, although i haven't really thought about the humans. It would be cool if they contrasted the robots by being completely logical and scientific however. In this world, the automatons and the humans kinda switched places...

That's all i can muster for this concept.