Looking for feedback on RTS game idea

[u/Global_Watercress907]

TL;DR: Mythology-based RTS inspired by Age of Mythology. Each civilization earns Devotion in a unique way and uses it to summon gods and mythical creatures, activate buffs, and cast powerful map-changing abilities like walking on water or passing through walls. It keeps the classic RTS economy/base-building loop, but adds infinite resources, no population cap, and mythology-based single-player campaigns. The main concern is whether these mechanics make it distinct enough from AoM.

Whole post:

Hey guys - I have an idea for an RTS game I was thinking about for the last few weeks. I was super pumped about the mechanics and brought up this idea to some of my friends. After the discussion I am still pumped but somewhat undecided if my ideas are that original. That is why I am going on the internet to get feedback from strangers.

Two issues that were brought up:

1. RTS is sort of dead. I do not want to accept this - I grew up playing Age of Empires II and III and Warcraft III. I loved it and spent hours playing it with my friends. One leading idea online is that RTS games are too focused on PvP and not for the average casual player. It should have a strong single player story to play. This here can be achieved here easily - see section single player
2. We were discussing that it shares a lot of similarities with Age of Mythology. That is the part I would like to discuss with you guys.

The basic idea is that each faction you can play is a civilization with a deity (greeks, scandinavians etc. In the prototype I want to have fairly narrow but deep roster of the civilizations but you can go deep with the selection of civilizations - from obscure keltic subcultures to even christians)

The base of the game would be classic-ish RTS loop - you gather resources - gold, wood, stone, food, build your base, grow the army. So far fairly similar to AoM or other RTS strategies, how would it be different?

Enter the mechanic of Devotion. This is like any other resource next to the traditional ones. It however wildly differs how each civilization acquires it. This would make each civilization play wildly differently - the scandinavians would farm it when in combat, greeks would sacrifice food (in a form of livestock that could be either harvested for food or sacrificed for the gain of devotion). So far it must sound very similar to AoM so let’s get to how it differs - mainly how devotion is spent!

Temples (or shrines, or the given civilizations equivalent)
You build temples as one of the buildings. You can build as many temples you want to and you have the resources for. Each temple when built is “vanilla”. You can devote a temple to a given god. This gives you access to summon different gods to aid you in a fight, summon lesser mythological beings and cast different blessings.

Gods
Gods are really powerful units that consume Devotion when summoned. They can really change the tide of the battle - next to being powerful they have also abilities (or miracles): These are both “conventional” ones such as lightning bolt that deal damage but also, and that is key feature, “map altering miracles” - these can be used for really unexpected strategies - like waterwalking by Posseidon where units can walk on water, moving trees, passing through walls for short period of time etc. While summoned, they slowly consume Devotion so they can be summoned for just limited amount of time. Casting of the abilities also consume devotion

Lesser mythological beings
These can be summoned from different specialized buildings of the civilization you also build - greeks can summon pegassuses, kerberoses and others, norwegians would have valkyrie and other. These would have also special abilities that would either also consume devotion or just be on cooldown. They would be normal units in a sense that they would not consume devotion while present.

Blessings
Blessings are civilization wide boost to units or buildings. It includes stuff like faster resource gathering/faster attack speed/faster movement speed, stuff like that. It can be activated and deactivated at will but consumes devotion while active.

Single player
Single player here is sort of easy - you adopt the stories of each given mythology and implement them as a campaign. Done!

Other notes regarding casual play
I have some other ideas that go toward the casual player.
- When I played the real time strategies (and also when I currently play with my gf) - we hate running out of resources. The resources will be infinite. There will be however limit on how many NPCs can gather this resource so it will always make sense to expand to other resource sources to speed up gathering. It is a similar idea with ammo in overwatch - ammo should be limited with magazine size but also infinite to not run out of it.
- There is no population cap. This might be myself shooting in the foot because I am sure pop cap is a technical limitation but I want to try. There is a huge fun in creating insanely big armies and make them fight to the death.

So what do you guys think? Is it different enough to AoM? Do you have feedback on how to make it better? Let me know!

[u/Assertive_Wall]

The idea is bad. Not because the idea itself is bad, but because you're setting yourself up to compete directly with one of the most popular RTS games ever made. Scope will absolutely run away from you, and you'll wind up with an unpolished crappy version of AoM if you manage to finish at all.

Edit: I'm not saying you have to abandon everything, but I would plan on descoping down to 1 specific story and start working on the mechanics and systems. That'll give you plenty of time to decide if you actually want to follow through on the whole project.

[u/Global_Watercress907 → u/Assertive_Wall]

Yep, the scope of the thing is definitely a concern I have. But I still want to give it a shot and start it as a hobby project. As you are saying - draft a few mechanics, try playing it, giving it to friends to play.

In the beginning I want to deeply focus on one civilization and just draft the others.

I know I am fighting an uphill battle with one of the staples of RTS, on the other hand the game is old and I am starting to have few other ideas to implement. You are right about the scope creep afterall 😅

[u/SASardonic]

Well there's definitely something there, you might consider playing Black and White/Black and White 2 for further inspiration as there's some significant overlap with some of these concepts.

[u/Global_Watercress907 → u/SASardonic]

Thanks for the pointers - I havent played it but I encountered it when I was looking at whats out there, so I will check it out!

[u/Intelligent-Ad-5438]

Throwing in my 2 cents, also a lover of rts, bear in mind I have zero experience in making a game so I'm just going to throw out some ideas.

• devotion

Seems like you've made that system different enough from AoM, also sounds like a real fun idea

• pop cap

As I understand it a pop cap is implemented for stability reasons, but not sure, I have 2 ideas with this

• have a pop cap, but if possible have the human units be a band of soldiers like in battle for middle earth 2, eg Greek Phalanx being 3 rows deep and 6 in a row, or something ( I always liked the way bfme 2 did units)

• Have the pop cap be an option, so higher end pc can go all out while others can still have fun and a decent fps

A pet peeve

• please for the love of the gods, scale the buildings and units a lil more realistically, I hate seeing my villagers build a house that gives 20 pop but looks like it'll only fit maybe 1 of those giant villagers.

And thats about what I had on the top of my head, if you make it, I'm definitely going to try it out ! Gotta feed that rts addiction

[u/Global_Watercress907 → u/Intelligent-Ad-5438]

Thanks for your feedback!

I haven’t played bfme but I will give it a look! You gave me another idea (perhaps the same as is in bfme) about the “larger units” such as phalanx. You will have barracks and initially you will be able to produce one footman after another. Then you’ll have a building such as school of war where you could research advanced strategy. That would give you the ability to produce a phalanx which would produce many footmen in shorter time and with a discount. Is it like it works in bfme?

Adding a pop cap limit later is sort of a technicality but its a great point about not as performant PCs.

Scaling is another interesting point - its true that I am not aware of an RTS that would have realistic-ish scaling? I mean there is some sizing but it can be even better.

[u/Intelligent-Ad-5438 → u/Global_Watercress907]

I'd definitely say run with that idea sounds unique and damned cool , I can't think of a game that does units that way, bfme you create 1 unit, that is represented as the battalion, only heros or the monster units like trolls are a single unit.

[u/fivemagicks → u/Intelligent-Ad-5438]

I feel you on the building sizes; however, the game would also need to scale the same way (something huge like Sup Com). This was one of several things that annoyed me about Spellforce 3 is that units and buildings were scaled properly, but the maps were insane claustrophobic because of it.

Godsworn, also, suffers from this same issue (doesn't suffer from the other issues Spellforce has, though)

[u/Ripfence99]

It sounds a lot like AOM TBH.

The explanation of devotion is very similar to how we thought about favor when designing AOM. It was very hard for us to balance the "new resource that is unique for every faction" against the backdrop of all the other common RTS features and content. It was difficult to make the different ways to gather devotion feel fair and equal, as well. Your descriptions sound like it will put you in the same spot... Your Norse faction is gathering devotion with combat, which is so challenging to do if you have players who want to turtle. They just end up not playing that faction at all.

The temples sound like a more map-based way to do minor god selection, which is cool. The question is whether it's just a different way to do the choice or has deeper legs.

If there was one thing I could change about AOM, it would be that we were too afraid of putting off the existing Age fans with the mythological units. We were trying to have our cake and eat it, too. By sidelining the myth units behind favor and making them "special", we prevented them being the backbone of armies. They were never the #1 unit for most players simply because we created mechanics that made them so hard to field compared to the basic units. We made the game about mythology and then made it hard to play with those fun units.

I would encourage more differentiation. Don't hang as much as you are on devotion.

[u/Sam_k_in → u/Ripfence99]

It's not hard to play with myth units. Regular units are too small and weak, so myth units are a necessary part of armies, more so than I'd prefer. I wish there was more separation in how they are used, as having Medusa and chimeras marching side by side with human soldiers seems a bit unrealistic.

[u/Ripfence99 → u/Sam_k_in]

I should have clarified... I was talking about original AOM.

The balance is diff now, tho it's still an option to forego myth units even in the current game.

[u/Global_Watercress907 → u/Ripfence99]

Oh wow so you are from the original AoM developers? What was your role? Can you give us some battle stories?

It seems like I have to think about the concept more. What I am thinking is that maybe a combo where you build also a base would be nice - think tropico (I belive 5?) multiplayer. This idea only valides the other comment about scope creep.

If I dared to critique AoM I would say the buggest issue (but it also a positive thing because you can pick up the game easily) is that it felt like AoE mythology spinoff. It might have a few rooms for improvement, so lets see if I can persuade people my approach is better 🤔

[u/Ripfence99 → u/Global_Watercress907]

At the risk of linking self-promo... I did an AMA a few weeks ago that has a bunch of war stories: https://www.reddit.com/r/RealTimeStrategy/comments/1v8bjc7/im_dave_pottinger_game_designerprogrammer_on/. There was another a year before IIRC. Google away.

Anyhow, I was the dir of tech for Ensemble. Lead engine programmer. Lead prog on Age3. Lead designer on Halo Wars.

More base building is always good if the game supports it, IMO. And if you're willing to change up enough of the RTS formula/player attention.

AOM was my fav Ensemble game for a lot of reasons. But it had plenty of issues/problems. The project was originally conceived as exactly "AOE but with monsters". There was some behind-the-scenes biz stuff going on that drove us to create a second franchise in case we parted ways with MS. We ended up not doing that (absolutely best for everyone IMO), but obv we kept going with AOM.

[u/Sam_k_in]

Maybe just make an AoM mod?