Forums → Games → Team Up Units for Easier Micromanagement when Designing a Game

Hi all,

I think I got and idea that can make micromanagement easier for many military real-time (and perhaps also turn-based) strategy games.

I will call it "unit teams". The secondary goal of this feature is to introduce thrilling dilemmas, but the main goal is to conveniently control large armies. In Civ-like games, moving units is tedious in the later stages (even with a good "GoTo" functionality). And in Warcraft-like games, it is only possible by means of multiple select, where one can too easily omit some units or make other mistake.

The rule is simple:

1. When building military or worker units, one can make a team of n^3 units of the same type for n^2 cost in resources and construction time. That means 9 for 4, 27 for 9, 64 for 16 etc. (Or we can round it to 3 for 2, 10 for 5, 30 for 10, 100 for 20 etc.)
2. The size of a team must be visible at the first glance. The team is controlled as a single unit. Its HP is the sum of individual units; so is the firepower (but it decresases with lost HP).
3. Splitting the team is not allowed (or only with a huge penalty). Merging the teams is not useful and therefore probably won't be supported.

This would motivate the players very strongly to make very few very huge teams to attack the enemy - plus several smaller teams to perform (or protect against) border skirmishes.

The second rule - team is controlled as a single unit - has the same effect as saying that each team has at most one living but damaged member, who catches all firepower until he dies and next member gets this role. In other words, the team has just one shared pool of HP's. It would be difficult and messy to display hitpoints for each team member.

Of course, 3^n for 2^n is just an example. This parameter must be considered carefully - how much I save by making one team of fifty instead of five teams of tens.

Example

Just imagine a Warcraft-like game with teams: For attack, I would build 1-3 teams of footmen and 1-2 teams of archers. For raiding undefended peasants, I would need a few small teams of knights. And instead of controlling 20 peasants, I would only have 2-3 teams of diverse size.

These rules allow huge "cost : strength" efficiency at the cost of unseparability. As a bonus, it introduces a nice dilemma, how large teams to make.

Teaming in TBS

I would enjoy some TBS (Civ-like) games much more if I didn't have to tediously move (almost) hundreds of units every turn.

I am convinced that teaming would work equally good in TBS games. But there is an issue to be addressed: Unlike Warcraft (and RTS in general), units in Civ, Panzer General and similar games "shoot back" immediatelly when someone uses his turn to attack them.

Therefore having a unit with firepower 30 and 300 health is much better than having 3 units with firepower 10 and health 100.

To illustrate the reason, I'd like to use this analogy from real world: if a mighty enemy warship ( "Bismarck" ) is attacked by 3 small warships together (each having 10 guns and withstanding 100 hits), the outcome is similar as if attacked by a ship having 30 guns and withstanding 300 hits; before the first ship is sunk, Bismarck will take 30 hits per round. But if the three small warhips approach Bismarck one at a time, each will be destroyed before it can deal considerable damage.

This will give a huge additional advantage to larger teams against smaller ones. I imagine several solutions (I don't know which is best).

1. Do not compensate this additional advantage - we do want to motivate the player to build large teams.
2. Compensate it be either eliminating (2^n units for cost of 2^n - for example 16 for 16) or reducing (5^n units for the cost of 4^n - for example 5 for 4, 25 for 16) the original advantage of teams. By "original advantage" I mean the lower "cost : army size" ratio, motivating to build large teams in RTS.
3. Or, if we want all to work similarly as in RTS, we could cancel the additional advantage by allowing a simultaneous attack of several units against one (as with the three warships attacking together). And then we could preserve the original advantage.

Games with Exponential Economic Growth

And a wild idea: If we design a Warcraft-like game and we replace typical "gold mines" (that soon exploit gold deposits and then they are useless) with "factories" (that are costly to build, but then produce resources infinitely), then the economics can grow exponentially and although a team of 3 footmen was a huge army in the beginning, later the players build teams of 10K and later 200M (millions). And in extra-long games, even 50G. I believe this might be a nice and enjoyable playing experience.

Conclusion

The last idea is wild and not usable everywhere, but the idea of relieving the micromanagement through teaming could improve many games - Warcraft-like (such as House of Wolves), Civ-like etc. It could make them more transparent and easier to control.

I think that the game would then require less amount of fast & precise clicking (in case of RTS), less tedious actions (TBS) - and therefore they would allow more concentration to planning of strategy.

Reflame