Popcap

[Gben 20]

I was thinking about a throw-away line in the comments by new EALA boss about innovation of RTS. And had an idea... it's not an innovation... but a variation of the popcap idea.

What if the campaign/meta level had a pop-cap and not the individual maps/missions?

 

So you start the mission with 1000 points and every mission you debit from the meta account points for units used for each mission, and the next mission you had a smaller pool of funds to draw from.

 

Then when you finished the campaign, you had an obvious ranking based on how much of the pool was left.

Raising the difficulty - could be easily achieved by reducing the pool of reinforcements available (among other things).

 

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I would probably not suggest a persistent army, or a debit & credit system, for the pool but maybe that could be an option. I am thinking of the board game rish here - where you deploy your soldiers before the combat round, and you have to work out how many soldiers each country needs to take out the enemy country?

 

But perhaps a debit/credit system could work. Perhaps base an upkeep on the size of the base, and the remainder of units could be returned to the pool.

If there was a decent meta game or galatic map that works, then obviously you add more choice to the garrison force you leave behind to defend again counter-insurgencies.

 

Anyway the idea was to create a sense that individual units were valuable.

And noting that I love, more than anything else, long starcraft battles on finite resource maps.