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RTS "World in Conflict" From a Design Perspective
Game Designer Manveer Heir has another installment of his "Design Lesson 101" series where he takes a look at a game from a designer's standpoint and attempts to learn something in the process. In this installment he takes a look at the RTS, World in Conflict that has an interesting twist on resource management. "World in Conflict has a simple resource management system. The player is given a fixed amount of resources to obtain units with. Shortly after you requisition units, they are air-dropped into the game, eliminating the need for building bases. Immediately, this leads to a unit-centric, tactical feel to the entire game. [...] When a unit dies, however, the resources that were allocated to obtain the unit are not lost forever. Instead, what World in Conflict does is return the resources to the player. Not immediately, however. Instead, the resources trickle back in over time. Your resources aren't constrained by how well or poor you are doing in the game (at least not constrained for very long). By doing this, World in Conflict avoids the snowball effect that exists in many real-time strategy games."
There are about 10 (12?) different unit types in 3 variations of 4 basic units.
It's basically a clickfest until you get to the big green X and accomplish some goal.
Meh. IMHO, the best part of the $50+ game was the piece of the berlin wall that came with.
Not to mention, it's a resource hog for the type of game it is. My 0.02.
Actually, it just means that it slowly fluctuates back and forth, until the side with skill manages to entrench. The rate at which you get resources back is fastest when you've got a lot to regain, and slowest when you've already spent most of it. And there is a lot to be said for having a defensive position in that game. Defensive positions can make it very hard for them to knock you out of your position.
So it penalizes you for sucking at the game, but gives you a chance to shift focus midway through and come at them with other tactics.
The only reason that this is the case is because the RTS genre as a whole treats units as unlimited and expendable, which doesn't reflect the real world in any way, due to the actual time it takes to recruit, equip, and train a soldier.
As for paper/rock/scissors, you could you know, scout, do a little recon, figure out what the enemy is doing, rather than just trying to zerg rush/footy rush/chariot rush/insert early unit rush, whatever. I'm frankly bored with rush-style RTS games that are 100% about resource management, and not at all about actual tactics.
This sounds more like a "Myth-style" small unit tactics game, with a resource-managing strategic element.
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That seems like it would lead to long-drawn out games where one side, and then the other, manage to grab temporary advantage, only to be pushed back to a state of near-equilibrium.
Multiplayer WiC is amazing. The games are not long and drawn out. In fact, it is the opposite. Combat starts in as little as 15 seconds after the game begins, and the maximum round time on an official server is 20 minutes. As the game progresses, Tactical Aid points are awarded for kills and achieving objectives. These result in increasingly significant strategic attacks available, up to and including carpet bombing and nuclear weapons, which can end a round in minutes if used properly.
1. In WiC you CANNOT have both air and ground. It's a class based team game, one player goes air, the other tanks, another AA/arty/repair and a fourth infantry (each class can have multiple players of course but lacking a class or two is usually fatal). Well, okay, you can play the special 1v1 or 2v2 mode but that's really not the point of the game.
2. If your units die you lose almost nothing, if your tanks did run into heavy air, well, make new ones and get some AA support next time!
3. You always have a shortage of units and you have strategic goals to capture. Your team simply won't have enough tanks (or AA or gunships or infantry) to put a full force on every point you hold and the same goes for the enemy. You have to decide where to attack with what and when to hold. Cooperation can be a big deal here, a team that can correctly coordinate attacks between ground and air forces will do much more damage than a team where each player basically rushes for the low hanging fruit (unfortunately common in unorganized games but what do you expect on the internet...).
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