Some interesting ideas...

I was recently thinking about what direction I want to go with this game. I want to put more S into this game than any previous Dune game ever.

First of all, I want to get rid of the "build buildings, units, select units and attack". I want to get to: Build a base, build units, create attack groups, lay down (attack) orders, and initiate multiple attacks at the same time.

First of all, the way Dune II played is going to be the same as in the original. However, I want to add some more functionality to it which allows players to focus more on strategic parts, such as attack patterns, defensive patterns and sneak attacks. Also, for future strategy games, I want to make the game act more realistic. More about that later in this entry.

Combat Interface

I want to accomplish this through a combat interface(CI). The CI allows players to compose attack groups(AGs) of units and give them buffered orders. These orders are stored in a general buffer shared by the attack groups, and aren't executed until ordered. Also, attack groups can be ordered to wait till for other attack groups.

The orders can be seen as way points, supported by many strategy games but not used much. Instead of just moving, they can also mean attack, defend, distract, wait for AG signal. Signals are used by AGs to inform they're ready and waiting.

So, in order to implement a classic pincher pattern, you need 2 AGs, each containing move orders to the left and right side of the base. When an AG reaches it's position through the way points, it's raises a signal and waits for a signal of the other group. When the other AG reaches it's position, it raises it's signal and waits for the signal for the first group. Since this group raised the signal before, it doesn't wait and immediatly initiates attack.

This forces the other side to actually balance it's defenses well, and perhaps come up with a strategy to effectively counter the attack pattern.

Factory Refitting

This forces a player to re-think it's building strategy and perhaps construct several factories. For instance, take the Heavy Factory from the game. It constructs Harvesters, Light tanks, Heavy tanks and Rocket launchers. In most strategy games, you click on a bunch of icons, and wham, it starts building it.

However, in a future game, I want to insert a refitting period for each unit. Say you're constructing a MCV in your HF. Once done, you start building 2 heavy tanks, 5 light tanks and 7 heavy tanks. If you retain that order, and with refitting, the factory would be inoperable between for say 20 seconds between each unit switch, to refit it's construction facilities.

Because of this, players could decide to build 3 HFs, which auto balance the construction as much as possible. Which also brings me to the next point:

Multiple unit constructions

Most RTSes I've seen using the classic C&C interface have 1 short coming: Even tho you built 8 factories, you're still building 1 unit. The construction time went down a bit per each factory, but you're still only constructing 1 unit at a time. Imagine the Germans and Russians construct 1 tank at a time with 4 factories each.

I want to change this, also in my D2 implementation: If you have 2 factories, both are constructing units. I'm aware of the consequences of this: You need a massive amount of cash flow to keep them all running and the player with most factories wins because he can construct massive amounts of units.

A good way to counter-act this is to make running factories consume more energy. Say an idle heavy factory comsumes 15 energy. A running factory then consumes 30 energy units. Therefor, if you want to hit a player that's building a lot of units hard, you attack his power supply, and knock out a few factories because of that.

Yes, I said a few. I dislike the power management in most RTSes aswell.

Power Profiles

Again, the C&C games act strange when it comes to power: When you consume too much power, all your energy dependant facilities lose power and grind to a halt. Again, I want to change this aswell. When you lose a wind trap, and you do not have enough power to keep your 4 factories running, 1 will stop construction to provide the others with enough power to work.

In order to give the player several options on how a low power situation is handled, I want to introduce power profiles. Profiles where certain types of buildings get a higher priority than others. For instance, the "Defend Base" profile will first opt to turn off factories in order to keep the defenses online where the "Construction" profile will turn off the base defenses first.

When a building loses power, it needs to restart after obtaining enough power, and is therefor knocked out for an additional 1 or 2 seconds. This forces players to think about their power profile, because when you're constructing with offline base defenses it gives you an advantage when you can quickly switch when you're attacked(Between the attack waves, you can switch profiles to quickly finish off 3 or 4 units without being defenseless at all).

That's all for now. I really want to hear feedback on these ideas.