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Comment by roymurdock | Hacker News Reader

per my comment below > it's pretty amazing how well designed and entertaining the game is 15 years on with the 3 unique race systems, beautiful tilesets/models, fantastic music, etc.

add to that: great lore borrowed from mythology/made up, fantastic voice acting, champion units with extra abilities and item usage, complicated (but not overly) resource management, competitive online community, modding ability with a full map editor/scripting engine. plus a lot of interesting/funny people play the game all over the world which always spices things up. and continuous tweaks to improve the games balance

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What would you think of a multiplayer RTS, but where there is a vast ongoing struggle between various kingdoms and empires of the 4 races? (Persistent, vast MMO shared world.) The player doesn't command any side or any kingdom in its entirely, but can act as a hero unit and can command forces in his/her vicinity. (Basically, they're all like a kind of King Arthur who can reappear in a time of need.) The empires and kingdoms are entirely managed by AI and follow a cycle, where they reach a peak of their power (a morale stat follows a peaking curve) then decline and die.

The player works to increase his/her own legend by winning battles. The purpose of this design is to create an extremely complex and immersive world with depth of gameplay, but still enable players to "dip in" for a half hour session every once in awhile.

I'll tell you what I think about it: I miss games having LAN support instead of expecting me to connect to a server that won't exist in 15 years or will be nigh unusable when I go to a LAN party somewhere with a crap connection.

That's what I miss most from 90s RTSs.

The MMO system I'm developing can run the entire server cluster as 3 coroutines in a single process. (goroutines, actually) This is meant to facilitate local development, but it would be quite easy to harness this to distribute a game that automatically has a local LAN mode.

sounds a lot like Eve online set in medieval times. Guild Wars had a similar system where you could choose a faction and battle other factions to win reputation etc but was nowhere as dynamic as you're describing. also kind of sounds like Dynasty Warriors which kicked ass but followed a more traditional set path of battles

all of these are great games and a blend of them would be awesome if you had a clear vision for how to combine them, but would also probably be a massive undertaking

side note, i wouldn't consider anything a true RTS unless it has some type of resource gathering and tech/unit building element to it

sounds a lot like Eve online set in medieval times.

Except that the empires ebbing and flowing wouldn't be due to content writing and large groups of players. (At least at first.)

i wouldn't consider anything a true RTS unless it has some type of resource gathering and tech/unit building element to it

It would have that, but in the form of unit recruitment or negotiating with and giving advice to nearby lords. (Perhaps local lords could grant you use of their smithies, craftspeople, and peasants for support/logistical tasks.)

> i wouldn't consider anything a true RTS unless it has some type of resource gathering and tech/unit building element to it

Then you'd be discounting the Myth series, which means you are objectively incorrect.

This is the first line in the Myth gameplay Wikipedia:

All three Myth games play very similarly. They are real-time tactics games, and as such, unlike the gameplay in real-time strategy games, the player does not engage in resource micromanagement or economic macromanagement, does not construct a base or buildings, and does not gradually build up their army by acquiring resources and researching new technologies.[9] Instead, each level begins with the player's army already assembled and ready for combat

Is base construction a requirement, so long as the player can engage in resource micromanagement or economic macromanagement?

....ok, fair enough.

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