Designing A Co-op RTS

So what would co-op probably look like? What ideas are there?

I like SC2's co-op for the short time I spent in it, I definitely liked the variety of commanders. It felt more relaxing. Kinda like a Super Smash Bros. of RTS. According to reports, co-op is the most widely played mode in SC2.

One thing I feel like is being missed, though, I don't see too much synergy between players, at least to its potential. Or maybe it's just the commanders I've played.

All-In-All, What Is The Point Of Co-op, Anyways?:

The thing about co-op is that there are other players that, for good or for ill, will affect you. If one messes up, it is your job to shoulder the team, so to speak. This can simply mean you are just in the same team fulfilling the same goal, destroy everyone else, but that seems hollow to just limit co-op to your normal RTS multiplayer alliance. If you want to be independent and not be disturbed by people in your game playing, then play multiplayer. So co-op is made to mess around with friends or whatever.

I'm not saying all these ideas are good or viable, just that they exist.

Allowing Others To Build On Your Land:

This I think is the very least most team RTSes see coop, not very far from just being on the same team and not shooting each other in multiplayer. This does help in survival, or such as squirreling away a construction or worker unit in your allied base just in case your base is destroyed.

Map Marking, Notifications, Voice Chat, and Communications:

Cooperation is based on communication. Marking on maps what your intents are to attack or to move or whatever seems like another floor for a co-op game.

Also notifications are very important, I think, to make a successful coop RTS. Most coop games have the players nearby, or other players will not reach you.

An in-game voice chat is probably necessary. I actually hate voice chat, tbh, but I know I would use it for games of Call of Duty with friends.

Pre-Planning Phase:

There are co-op games with pre-planning phases. There was a game like PayDay 2 that did it well, can't remember the name of it, but it had the tools necessary to actually draw out the plan. And the maps were randomly generated, so planning was a must. The plan was drawn on the minimap equivalent during the game.

Classes as Sub-Factions:

Command and Conquer 4 had the idea of classes for each co-op commander, divided into defense (infantry and base defenses), offense (tanks), and support (air and support powers). Other than it being a horrible game, I saw where they were going at.

They are basically very specialized sub-factions/races.

Not sure if it should reflect FPS and MOBA game classes. Though I think it's fun to make up classes in my mind at least. A sniper RTS class would have artillery and superweapon focus. And an economy class handles economy, harvesting, etc. A healer class would have the medics and repairers.

The new co-op Dwarfheim RTS has classes, but I don't know much about them. They are Warrior, Builder, and Miner, and Miner sounds like the economic class I threw out there.

More Explicit Reviving and Supplying Of Other Players:

To look at other games that are not RTS, I liked how Left 4 Dead did co-op. You are able to easily heal a fellow player. You can eventually "resurrect" a player by finding them if the other players don't die.

In Killing Floor, not only are there healers, but you can get explosives and bombs from the ammo guy.

What if there was a mechanic to resurrect your fellow player?

Unit and Resource Exchange:

How about a unit exchange mechanic? Where you can trade or lend or borrow units from your fellow player? Instead of just shooting off credits or resources to your fellow for nothing (though the option could be good), you can get something back for your trouble.

I do envision it being more packs of units being exchanged, rather than just a single unit everytime. So a squad, battalion, or whatever. Maybe there could be an in-game specific structure they can be exchanged in.

Letting Other Players Command or Lead (Some of) your Units or Structures (Sometimes or Partially):

Instead of necessarily doing a unit exchange, this can be done as well. Maybe there is a command you can use to toggle your own units that it can be used by an allied player, and an indicator and notification will notify your ally that they can use them. Then you can take back control by toggling out or the player can toggle out himself as well.

Or one can do partial control. I envision this is mostly for structures, but things like having allied harvesters drop at your refineries will add resources to their pile, and could charge them a fee for using your structures or something. Or do it for free like usual, but harvesting can take up space from other harvesters.

Special Units or Technology When You Have Certain Combinations of Factions/Classes:

I always loved the CnC mechanic where you capture the other enemy's tech, and then you can build your own units from other factions. Even better, the spy system in the Red Alert games lets you get a spy in the tech labs, and you get a super special unit that is a chimera of the factions. For example, in Red Alert 2, your Allied spy getting to an Allied Battle Lab will give you Chrono Commandos, a teleporting Navy Seal. Going to a Soviet lab will give you a Chrono Ivan, which is a teleporting explosives lobber. Going to a Yuri lab would give you Psi Commandos, Navy Seals with a mind control device. This idea gets even crazier in mods, like Mental Omega.

With co-op, one could have access to a unit that only those classes or factions share when they play together.

Edit: Added a couple of points 

Individual Units or Squads or a Combo of Both?

In most older RTS games, you can only produce one unit at a time. The first "definitive" RTS game, Dune 2, had infantry as squads, but they weren't true squad units, because they were just a sprite/image of a squad, each sub-unit was not semi-independent.

Some newer RTS games let's you produce units as squads, such as C&C3 and Dawn of War. These squads when you select one unit in a squad, you select all the other units in the squad, they act as one unit with many sub-units. Each sub-unit had their own health and their own firing and were semi-independent.

Some have combinations of both. Starcraft has reactors where you can produce multiple marines at once. Of course, selecting multiple units make them in a sort of a squad. But that's not the default, of course, just that selected units sort of act like a squad. Carriers makes interceptors, so a carrier is basically like a squad unit.

I would like more squad units in more RTS games. But Blizzard RTS games are not known for squad units. If Frost Giant will stick to the individual unit philosophy, and have things like reactors and carriers to augment units, my preference is to normalize making batches of individual units from the very beginning. In a real war, (lower level) units come in batches, 10 at once, 20 at once, or whatever, not just a single soldier you train every so often. So instead of just training one marine in the beginning of the game and then cycle to the next marine, 10 will pop out the first training class. It will normalize massive firefights in the beginning like a real war, instead of a battle, to me, at least.

If you want to make an RTS with mass wide appeal (rather than RTS gamer only appeal), look at Age of Empires and C&C

(In context of the new studio Frost Giant, a studio composed of former Blizzard developers looking to make the next great RTS)

While it is true Starcraft has far more current players today, it is arguable that Age of Empires and C&C have a wider mass appeal among non-gamers and non-RTS gamers. Current numbers would only be useful since there are no true new releases of both series that are not remakes or remasters (or the most recent titles from them do not capture the early spirit).

These are just anecdotal experiences, so you can take them with a grain of salt.

I run a fairly okay and generic RTS page, and AoE, C&C, and SC is the order of ranking in popularity in regards to posts made on there. So that's one indication.

I am not a gamer (as in someone who spends half his day gaming, cause I have work and live a fairly normal life), so I meet a lot of non-gamers and non-RTS gamers (ie someone who would play, say, Call of Duty rather than a strategy game) in my circles.

A lot of older non-gamers I've met have played and enjoyed Age of Empires with fond memory, even though they don't play any games anymore (quite a few of them were politicians, might give you an idea what line of work I used to do) but would not touch other strategy games. A lot of the reasons they would give me is that they learned history from it. Quite a few also have played Civilization alongside it, which makes sense. But they would never touch Starcraft.

Now, another trend I've seen were those who were older gamers, but not RTS gamers, again, those who would usually play something mainstream like Call of Duty rather than a strategy game. They usually gravitated to the Command and Conquer series back in the day when it was popular, particularly Red Alert 2. But not Starcraft. Some of the reasons they gave me were it was patriotic (the America versus Soviet timeline). The ones who were not into Red Alert were into Tiberian C&C's story of Kane. But they would never touch Starcraft.

So most normal people really like history. There's a reason why World War 2 games come out every year. Should Frost Giant's game be based on realism and history? Not necessarily, but it is to be considered that Starcraft's science fiction does go over the head of a lot of people. You can talk Marauders and Reapers and what have you and most people will look at you strange, while the AoE archers, musketeers, and knights people would immediately recognize what they would do. Red Alert 2 was a bit whacky, but soldiers with guns and tanks are fairly easy to understand. You have to learn basically a three new cultures for each race in Starcraft, Terrans are recognizable cause humans, and they have soldiers with guns and tanks. But Protoss and Zerg are basically homework if you want to learn how to play them. Of course, making it historical and realistic will limit gameplay, as well (unless you are creative). But the post is about accessibility to mass wide appeal. If a balance can be struck, then do so.

Those are my anecdotal experiences. It is clear to me that most Starcraft players in contrast, are RTS gamers. That's not a bad thing, don't get me wrong. I love all RTS games, as I said, I run a generic RTS game page myself. I've played almost all of them at least once, even the very obscure ones, though I keep finding even more obscure ones to this very day.

But one non-anecdote is how Microsoft made Age of Empires mass appeal. There was a very old article that I can't find anymore where Microsoft had every demographic do quality testing for Age of Empires. In that article, an old grandma was interviewed who tested the game, and it apparently went really well that she was able to play the campaign missions and hold off her own in a multiplayer match for at least 15 minutes before she succumbed. That's how strong the tutorials and pacing were in Age of Empires. Now, a grandma is probably not Frost Giant's target audience (and neither was her Age of Empires' audience), but can it really be said that a very old person can access Starcraft enough to be able to hold their own for a few minutes?

So if Frost Giant just wants to target RTS gamers, which is not a bad thing at all, and create a spiritual successor to Starcraft, with esports scene and all that, then that's totally fine. That's what they are experts on. I'll definitely still play it.

But if they want to reach non-gamers and non-RTS gamers, they need to look at how AoE and C&C do things, maybe not necessarily in terms of gameplay, but in terms of tutorials and accessibility (for AoE) and theming (for C&C).

Many Pitfalls of Conspiracy Strategy Games: Secret Societies, Subterfuge, Traitors, Etc.

There has been a fascination for strategy games that let you mastermind a conspiracy. Who doesn't want to be an evil puppet master behind the scenes? 

However fascinating the ideas are, there are very few dedicated games for it, and those dedicated ones... arguably aren't very good.

Elements of Conspiracy Strategy Games

A conspiracy strategy game usually has the following I have noticed:

Behind The Scenes - In a conspiracy strategy game, you are often not one of the "major players" in the world stage. You are not a king, or a country, or a military commander. You are an advisor, a grandmaster, a priest, a prophet, a cult leader behind the thrones. Your goal is often to affect the major players to bow down to your will. 

Indirect Influence - To convince the "major players", you will need to convince them. One way to do this is automatically. In Civilization, a neighboring city may come over to your side because of your strong cultural influence in a number of turns. Another is to do it manually, you order agents to convince the major player, through seduction, bribes, blackmail. 

Voting - Because conspiracy games are about influence, a lot of them have voting somewhere, where it shows if your influence actually works. 

Multiple Map Overlays - Because there is something as behind the scenes, there is often at least one other map overlay. For example, in Civilization, a religious map and cultural map will show the different kinds of influences.

Agents - Agents do things. They are spies. They are assassins. They are diplomats. They are cultists. They are information brokers. They are prophets and preachers to convert the flock. They can often do a lot of things and are not specialized.

Information Warfare - Because conspiracy strategy games are all about subterfuge, information warfare is king. At its basic level, this would be the fog of war that conceals enemy units. 

Examples

What are some examples of conspiracy strategy games or strategy games with subterfuge elements?

Game of Thrones: Genesis was a failed product. It was very convoluted.You gain prestige, and the methods to get that prestige were very arcane, at best. There was a war aspect, but the subterfuge aspect confused everyone. There are so many moving parts. It seems automation would help this.

Shadow Council The Puppeteers is an okay indie strategy game. It's very click to do something, and boom, you increased influence. Yeah, very much an oversimplified spreadsheet game.

Shadows Behind The Throne suffers from your actions not having very clear effects at all. You make nobles vote to ignore the Lovecraftian army you are creating. While that sounds sort of exciting, it's not. Lots of micromanagement. 

Republic: The Revolution was a really cool political RTS. You canvassed neighborhoods and got votes in order to enact a revolution in an alternate history East European country.

Left Behind: Eternal Forces was very similar to Republic: The Revolution. You prayed and converted people to your side. It was just very tedious to do that. It seems automatic preaching and conversion would have helped from the beginning. But it was a story-based game, so that could be forgiven.

Conspiracrat: A Game of Secret Machinations is a game of my own making. There should have been better objectives, like causing an actual war and nuclear warfare, rather than just accumulating much money and power. Ordering agents was tedious.

Offworld Trading Company was probably the best non-violent RTS I have played. The interplay between trading felt visceral. There was clear objectives and progress. Subterfuge also had clear results. An EMP bomb would disable my opponent's buildings very clearly.

Secret Government is a recent grand strategy game in the same vein. Early Access reviews show it is mostly positive. Time will tell if it actually will last the test of time.

Crusader Kings and similar Paradox games seem to be long lasting, but they are very convoluted for the average player.

The more warlike RUSE offers a solution, while combat would be a thing, give commanders more explicit information destroying abilities such as "fake armies". Many RTS games have some form of information disruption, but RUSE makes it front and center.

There was a simple Flash game, I'm not sure what it was called, but I think it was called "Third Party" or "Third Side" where you played both sides in a war and you had to balance the war so one side would not win and so you could get an endless war. Units fought automatically. You were given a random unit and you can place the unit on the left or right side, so if you place it on the left side, it will fight for the left side, and vice versa. If you balanced it long enough, a nuclear war starts and you win.

Among Us isn't strictly a strategy game, but it is a strategy game. It is a traitor game like Mafia. It's ideas on how to play an Impostor, Sabotages, and the voting system can be translated into a gameplay with multiple units.

Proposed Solutions

What are some solutions to the pitfalls of conspiracy strategy games?

Less Micromanagement, More Macromanagement: In many conspiracy strategy games, you have many agents working for you. Clicking and ordering your agents is tedious and gets overwhelming the more agents you get. We will get to more specific details how on the next points.

More Automation: Agents are agents for a reason. They need to be independent. Have them bribe automatically. Have them infiltrate automatically. Have them assassinate automatically. And so on.

A lot of other things in conspiracy strategy games can be automated as well. We look at automating voting last.

Agent Specialization: Another way to lessen micromanagement is to make agents specialized rather than all-around hero units with many abilities. So spies always spy, assassins always assassinate, etc. rather than have agents that can do all these.

For converter units, it is very tedious to keep clicking to convert other units, when in the end, those units are just walking resources. See converter units as harvesters rather than hero units in their own right.

More Strategy, Less Tactics With Planners: This ties to both micro and macro as well, and even automation, but it is beyond those. Strategy means you can set an overarching goal with actual planning. Strategy games do not have planners. They really need to.

A planner would where you can choose objectives or goals or layouts or loadouts (whatever you need to prepare) before the game that every unit would know beforehand. Most planners in strategy games just consist of loadouts, such as for XCOM.

Maybe the goal is nuclear war. You choose "nuclear war" in your planner as an objective. Then all your agents would work with that plan in mind. Diplomats would automatically tell rulers to consider nuclear war. Sabotages would target nuclear silos immediately.

There should be a planner in-game as well so that changes to the master plan that would immediately affect everyone. If I want to switch from "nuclear war" to "make a one world government", I should just be able to do it with a button.

Real-time strategy games have always leaned towards tactics, command this building to produce this single unit, command this unit to go here, etc. A focus on strategy would make this less of a hassle. For example, switching to a "mobilized vehicle strategy" from an "infantry strategy" can be done with a button, changing all your unit production into vehicles rather than going to each factory to make vehicles and going to each barracks to stop infantry production. 

Information Warfare Progression: 

There should be no or little information warfare in the beginning. Only when it is near the end should complete "plot twists" be accessible and reveal themselves. Conspiracy strategy games like to throw you to a complete subterfuge mode where everyone is a double agent.

This would be a good progression:

Start - Everyone on the map has clear allegiances. When you send agents to convert someone, they fully convert to your side with no question.

Mid-game - Making more fog of war, some people have unclear allegiances because multiple sides are vying for them. 

End-game - Most people are close to their end game objective (nuclear war), secret agreements and double agents can now be a thing, where some people seemed to be working for you, when they were sleeper agents. And they will be revealed as double agents and sleeper agents when they act (or close to it), rather than it being hidden the whole time so that enemies can react and don't feel too bamboozled.

A system like DEFCON where you are allowed to use some things depending on DEFCON level would probably work in some capacity, but you can design it naturally as well.

Make Soft Power More Impactful and Deterministic, Not Probabilistic:

It is hard to show "soft power" and "indirect influence" and making them impact hard. Religious and cultural victories in Civilization are often maligned because influence mechanics are just not hard hitting. This is probabilistic and not deterministic.

Rather than, say, influence giving you a vote, have it that those you have influenced always vote like you. Or even better, they always vote according to your planned strategy.

There also needs to be a lot of UI that indicates this. For example, mind control lines like in Red Alert Yuri's Revenge clearly shows who is in control of a unit. A place getting cultural influence in Civ should have the number of turns shown when it will convert.

Reduce Voting In General (Or Turn It Into A Resource Rather Than A Game Stopper): 

Showing influence's impact to just culminate in a single vote is anticlimatic. Often, the game pauses just for a vote so you could choose. And often, that vote doesn't do much of anything impactful, maybe just +1 Economy. Whoppee.

Instead of influencing "major powers" just to vote on some proposal, influence them to do more concrete things like pressing a nuclear button for war immediately. Or if you still want votes system of gameplay, make them vote automatically for your benefit (and planner strategy) without you having to click to choose (thus more automation). Turn votes into a resource and a number than something you have to pause the game for (which Shadows Behind The Throne is particularly bad at).

So if your strategy is nuclear war, agents and the influenced will always vote for it. If it's a vote for something like +1 economy for you and -1 economy for everyone, then they will always vote for +1 economy for you. Of course, there may be a subtlety here, that they would vote for themselves if it affects them if the against vote makes them get -1 economy, but for things that do not affect them, they would vote for you.

RTS Equivalent of A Deathmatch: Learning From FPS Games

Team Based Gameplay:

In FPS games, team deathmatches are very popular. In RTS games, gameplay is pretty much centered on single player campaigns, skirmishes, or 1 v1. 

The thing with RTS games though is that you are controlling a team instead of being in a team. It is more akin to being a coach or a team managers. There is no team of team managers.

Respawning: 

In FPS games, when you die, you usually respawn in most game modes. This lets off pressure to succeed.

RTS games do not have respawning when a player "dies". The closest would be hero units respawning in Warcraft 3, or having a builder unit like an MCV tucked away for a future base. 

How this can work in an RTS game is that players (like in C&C4) or whole armies can respawn (like MOBA creeps or how Art of War did it).

Different Loadout: 

In Call of Duty, you can choose which loadout you start with when you spawn and respawn. And that each loadout is more or less lethal as other loadouts.

This needs to be coupled with a respawn mechanic.

Comeback: 

When one respawns in an FPS, the player is still in more or less the same equal to their enemies. A respawned gun is the same as a spawned gun. An unspawned player may have the superior position, but in terms of potential lethality, it's still the same.

The ability to come back is paramount to an FPS success. RTS games arguably have the worse mechanics in order for a player to come back from a very precarious position.

Looking At Extremes: Many Factions (6+) Strategy Games and Balancing

Games with more than 6 factions, actual factions instead of AoE style where there is like only one unique unit, feel very sandboxy. This may appeal to some.

Total War: Warhammer has many factions and they do them well, in my opinion. But then it is a slower paced game of amassing huge armies in formation.

Illwinter's Conquest of Elysium, while more of a turn based strategy game with a auto real time battle component, has many factions as well. Balanced? It really depends on the map because each faction depends on entirely different resources, units, and game mechanics and playstyles.

Their Dominions series is more of the same but a bit more dynamic Illwinter's balancing strategy is every unit has at least one severe weakness in some other faction, not necessarily all factions.

Dawn of War series has about 9 factions with all the expansions. Most units feel tanky enough that they aren't bulldozed immediately. Not sure if that is good balancing, but I love the variety. 

I have not played Warlords Battlecry which is supposed to have many factions up to around 16. So I cannot give input there.