Looking for feedback on RTS game idea
TL;DR: Mythology-based RTS inspired by Age of Mythology. Each civilization earns Devotion in a unique way and uses it to summon gods and mythical creatures, activate buffs, and cast powerful map-changing abilities like walking on water or passing through walls. It keeps the classic RTS economy/base-building loop, but adds infinite resources, no population cap, and mythology-based single-player campaigns. The main concern is whether these mechanics make it distinct enough from AoM.
Whole post:
Hey guys - I have an idea for an RTS game I was thinking about for the last few weeks. I was super pumped about the mechanics and brought up this idea to some of my friends. After the discussion I am still pumped but somewhat undecided if my ideas are that original. That is why I am going on the internet to get feedback from strangers.
Two issues that were brought up:
- RTS is sort of dead. I do not want to accept this - I grew up playing Age of Empires II and III and Warcraft III. I loved it and spent hours playing it with my friends. One leading idea online is that RTS games are too focused on PvP and not for the average casual player. It should have a strong single player story to play. This here can be achieved here easily - see section single player
- We were discussing that it shares a lot of similarities with Age of Mythology. That is the part I would like to discuss with you guys.
The basic idea is that each faction you can play is a civilization with a deity (greeks, scandinavians etc. In the prototype I want to have fairly narrow but deep roster of the civilizations but you can go deep with the selection of civilizations - from obscure keltic subcultures to even christians)
The base of the game would be classic-ish RTS loop - you gather resources - gold, wood, stone, food, build your base, grow the army. So far fairly similar to AoM or other RTS strategies, how would it be different?
Enter the mechanic of Devotion. This is like any other resource next to the traditional ones. It however wildly differs how each civilization acquires it. This would make each civilization play wildly differently - the scandinavians would farm it when in combat, greeks would sacrifice food (in a form of livestock that could be either harvested for food or sacrificed for the gain of devotion). So far it must sound very similar to AoM so let’s get to how it differs - mainly how devotion is spent!
Temples (or shrines, or the given civilizations equivalent)
You build temples as one of the buildings. You can build as many temples you want to and you have the resources for. Each temple when built is “vanilla”. You can devote a temple to a given god. This gives you access to summon different gods to aid you in a fight, summon lesser mythological beings and cast different blessings.
Gods
Gods are really powerful units that consume Devotion when summoned. They can really change the tide of the battle - next to being powerful they have also abilities (or miracles): These are both “conventional” ones such as lightning bolt that deal damage but also, and that is key feature, “map altering miracles” - these can be used for really unexpected strategies - like waterwalking by Posseidon where units can walk on water, moving trees, passing through walls for short period of time etc. While summoned, they slowly consume Devotion so they can be summoned for just limited amount of time. Casting of the abilities also consume devotion
Lesser mythological beings
These can be summoned from different specialized buildings of the civilization you also build - greeks can summon pegassuses, kerberoses and others, norwegians would have valkyrie and other. These would have also special abilities that would either also consume devotion or just be on cooldown. They would be normal units in a sense that they would not consume devotion while present.
Blessings
Blessings are civilization wide boost to units or buildings. It includes stuff like faster resource gathering/faster attack speed/faster movement speed, stuff like that. It can be activated and deactivated at will but consumes devotion while active.
Single player
Single player here is sort of easy - you adopt the stories of each given mythology and implement them as a campaign. Done!
Other notes regarding casual play
I have some other ideas that go toward the casual player.
- When I played the real time strategies (and also when I currently play with my gf) - we hate running out of resources. The resources will be infinite. There will be however limit on how many NPCs can gather this resource so it will always make sense to expand to other resource sources to speed up gathering. It is a similar idea with ammo in overwatch - ammo should be limited with magazine size but also infinite to not run out of it.
- There is no population cap. This might be myself shooting in the foot because I am sure pop cap is a technical limitation but I want to try. There is a huge fun in creating insanely big armies and make them fight to the death.
So what do you guys think? Is it different enough to AoM? Do you have feedback on how to make it better? Let me know!