fair enough, but pooling them assumes all orders are created equal - which could be a tight game-design constraint. but i agree what i am saying is in the same spirit as that
I agree 100% with this and havent found the right game for it. not exactly RTS, but friends and I play Civ5 with 1-2 minute turn timer and it's a pretty good balance.
I think there might be enough of a market for something in-between.
There is an itch to be scratched by people who want to fight with a balance of quick and strategic decisions. Where "quick" is fluid. For example, when your 1 second decision is a really good 1 second decision, and you realize that with 10 seconds you wont improve it much - then you want to be able to make the decision in 1 second and then not be punished by someone who took 5 seconds to make an equal decision, and spent another 5 making it only slightly better. You also dont want to be punished by people making your quick decision obsolete through brute force of action.
Basically, something that promotes thinking before acting - while also promoting thinking efficiently over thinking exhaustively.
I am not sure yet what design principles best bring this out in a game, but I have been thinking about it a lot.
turn-based is great (big civ5 fan) but it has the opposite problem - it favors the player who takes the most advantage of the turn timer.
Ive thought a lot about possible hybrids, but havent settled on anything really catchy yet. Some ideas are cooldowns instead of turns, or turn timers that are so aggressive that barely anything is accomplished each turn - but you get a lot of turns so it's okay to burn some rather than commit to a mistake
Make actions have cost, and / or put cooldowns on orders. Still allow the ability to burst out a high APM for a short period of time, but design it so overdoing it is suicide.
I've whiteboarded some very similar ideas to this! If multiple people are coming to similar conclusions, there might be something here.
In my thoughts, my hesitation is that I think I might have a bias for unit management, which is a new "thing" typical MMO players would need to start doing and optimizing in order to keep up.
So I wasnt convinced it would stick.
I think the new V Rising game has a well thought out and related mechanic along these lines in that you still have 1 character, but you can get "servants" which you send out on missions to collect / farm materials from areas you've surpassed
sounds like a meta-verse with a kind of "game context module" that creates /toggles constraints and features for each user / player.
ive been whiteboarding something similar to this. My scope is geared more towards round-based game loops rather than entire world building but I think the technical implementation would be very similar.
I think there's a lot of potential in connecting traditionally single-player activities, so the core game loops work well without depending on a lot of people being online like MMO's.. but it still benefits greatly from having more people on, so it has snowball potential.
Something I had in mind (which this thread has showed me wasnt original haha) was like an RTS and FPS 1+5 v 1+5 mix. There is a typical 1v1 RTS match against an opponent, and then in the middle of the war is a 5v5 FPS match. The FPS players and RTS players are not sharing any win conditions, but are on same teams. for example, fps players might be confined to a subsection of the RTS map
I kept getting hung up on creating meaningful interaction. It seems like a really cool feature to me, if it could be developed for free.. but i couldnt find a way to justify having a less polished version of either of the game types without the interaction becoming too dominant. In other words, if my gameplay isnt really impacted by the other game types then im just playing a worse version of some game. Alternatively, if it significantly impacted by the other game modes - i become dependent on things far outside my control.
this tension might actually relax a lot by moving out of the context of round-based games and into a persistent world-building context, but that scale / scope is also significantly larger too.