2 Problems with today's War / Strategy Games

[Sinzygy]

I used to play 2 or 3 war / strategy web games.
The focus of these games lay heavily on building up your own village / planet and then create a strong force to duke it out with the other players.
Most if not all of these games were in real time or at least tried to give off this impression. From the very beginning of a new round it was almost impossible to keep up with the top players, simply because they apparently didn't have a life and managed to be always online.
Since all buildings needed time to finish the players who were online at the right time managed to play with the smalles "time-loss" between completing one building and starting another one.
Also, players with a high activity managed to safe their armies more often than players that could only log in once, maybe twice a day.

Problem #1: Casual Gamers cannot keep up with the 'hardcore' gamers due to the difference in activity

Sure, you may argue now that these games were not designed for normal people, but I disagree with you there. They were designed for the casual gamers, but were then taken over by the hardcore gamers.

The next thing that always bugged me about this type of games was, that no one is forced to play in a team. Of course, allinances were formed but rather to display unity and to have some sort of protection, but still, every player is able to sustain his army on his own.
This is caused by the current way building upgrades are handled. Every building is divided into levels, and each level is more expensive than the previous one, but also produces a lot more. So we have a woodcutter that produces 12 wood at level 1 per hour, but ~92 per hour at level 5 (random numbers to illustrate my point). With this method every player can gradually upgrade his industry to have an immense output and therefore to sustain a huge army which leads to more villages which lead to more resources which lead to bigger armies, etc. There's just this constant updrift in the economy of todays games.
I can tolerate the fact that there is an unlimited supply of all resources, simply because it simplifies a lot of the mechanics and gameplay. But having this upwind in the economy is something else.

Problem #2: The way resource production / gathering is handeld

For me, a much more logic way to handle this would be by having the building price stay the same but the production level as well. So in the end the player has a linear resource output instead of an exponential one.


The game I'm currently working on is trying to fix both of these aspects, but I'm not sure if the concept will catch on, tho.
Well, that was about it... just felt like ranting a bit --;

If anyone is interested I can explain a bit more about my game.

- Sinzygy

[Zeggy]

Rather than having an exponential increase when you upgrade buildings, you could have the opposite. The next building may have a large increase, but the increase will keep becoming less and less while the price increases, and after that it is up to the player to decide whether it is worth it or not.

What I'd like to see myself is better teamplay, meaning a possibility to share resources or merge their empire or something I'm not sure how this would work out, but it might be something to think about

[Sinzygy]

I'm trying to force the players to specialise in one direction or another.

So you're either a gatherer and collect resources, or are a defender who functions as a bank, or are an attacker who tries to cover his needed supply by raiding other players.
Players are also able to sell units to other players.

Maybe I'll even allow resource transfers within an alliance.

Rather than having an exponential increase when you upgrade buildings, you could have the opposite. The next building may have a large increase, but the increase will keep becoming less and less while the price increases, and after that it is up to the player to decide whether it is worth it or not.

That's a nice idea Maybe I'll try this one out sometime.

- Sinzygy

[Marek]

Sounds promising, Sinzygy!