"All war is deception"

Sunday, February 19, 2017

Game Design: A Soulslike RTS?

Anyone play Dark Souls?
So DS has a reputation of tight but deliberate combat gameplay.
And there has been a crop of games called Soulslike (as a genre) trying to emulate the tightness and deliberate combat.
For those who haven't played Dark Souls:
1. DS has a stamina bar, which limits your combat actions until it refills
2. Each combat action cannot be stopped midair, if you commit to an attack, you can't cancel it.
3. Each enemy has a distinct and non-randomized pattern in combat.
Is there an RTS equivalent? 
Starcraft is the first to come to mind. It is said to be the tightest RTS gameplay there is.
Dune 2's limitation of being able to select only one unit and attack brings it to mind. It felt deliberate, even though limiting.
But if there's no RTS equivalent, what if a Soulslike RTS would play as follows:
1. It would have a sort of stamina bar for the player to limit his actions of selection and combat? Basically, you get only a few actions per minute.
2. If you send out a unit/squad to move or attack or whatever, you can't immediately micromanage it out of the way to avoid an attack or whatever, so then you must commit to whatever action you put forth.
3. More experimentally, in a squad, you are able to command the units directly and instantly like a character with hotkeys along with mouse. Switch formations on the fly, use the WASD to "guide" the flow of attack. Right clicking is instantly responsive despite distance, for example, clicking for an archer squad will immediately fire a volley of arrows at the mouse location (without doing that hotkey then click or click button then click). Kinda like a MOBA style control.

Thoughts?

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