So follow up question for your rts (after seeing your gushing about it in response to another question, haha): How do you envision the X-Com and RTS elements tying together? Is it sort of like having the geoscape be the base building part of it, transitioning to a tactical view (or battlescape, keeping with the X-Com terminology) when going on a mission, sort of like CoH?
Also god I loved red alert 2 and wish I could play it right now.
so I really want to expand the concept of the geoscape a bit largely because I feel one of the core parts of base building in an RTS should also include resource management and, in this case, supply lines. the plan (though who knows how long this will last into development) is basically something like this
- you establish a home base, which starts with the bare minimum you need to start doing operations
- you can expand on this base once you start getting more resources like fuel, metal, food, that sort of stuff while on missions
- with enough resources, you can build what amounts to a harvester in sc/c&c that will automatically bring in resources, but at a reduced rate compared to mission stuff
- you can only travel within a limited range of a base, meaning you're locked to doing missions within a certain radius. I'm basically handwaving this away as "you just don't have enough fuel to get there"
- to access more areas of the world, which may include a different balance of resources/recruitable people from where you started, you have the option to build a new base if you've completed what I'm classifying as liberation missions. complete one of those, you can build a base there
- you can move resources between bases, even disconnected ones, but it takes time. if the bases are within each other's radius or there's a path of bases between them, there's a severely reduced movement penalty
basically I think this will allow me to add actual stakes to base defence stuff since I don't want to go for as punishing a difficulty curve as xcom used