Untitled RTS Game
I've been discussing making an RTS game based on the game engine I'm developing for my maths quiz action RPG.
First the player builds a mill. Farmland spawns around the mill and villagers go to work like people in Sim City. When enemy forces are spotted, villagers teleport to inside the mill. If the mill dies the villagers inside also die and the player's pool of available villagers decreases.
If the player places a tower near the mill, the two buildings form a building group. If enemy forces arrive, villagers teleport to inside the tower. The tower shoots arrows at the enemy forces. If the mill is destroyed the villagers don't die, but if the tower is destroyed the villagers die and they are subtracted from the players pool of available villagers.
The player can upgrade the tower to a keep and then a castle, adding extra protection or firepower.
The basic unit of a player's army is a group of 12 foot soldiers, 6 horses or one elephant. The simulation treats these as one entity and then individuals are rendered separately.
Units can garrison in buildings for added firepower and protection.
Update 18/9/2026
Docks project an economic zone where villagers can sail around and fish. The villagers do this automatically and act like people in a Sim City game. Ships in deeper water project an economic zone that extends the dock's economic zone.
The player can choose between training small fast ships or large, slow, strong ships. Ships can garrison units the same way that towers do. Ships containing archers shoot arrows, ships containing cannons shoot cannon balls, ships containing rams can ram other ships.
Placing a military building near a dock creates a building group. A building group with an archery range and a dock can train ships preloaded with archers. A building group with a siege workshop and a dock can produce ships preloaded with cannons, etc.
I might not be able to make a full RTS game on my own, but these are some ideas,
Boston.
PS
I wanted to see what groups of 12 soldiers would feel like, so I made a mock-up in my work in progress game engine. They look pretty cute.
Boss
Update 20/9/2026
Villagers are like people in a SimCity game. They organise themselves to work and collect resources. In order to build, the player must recruit builders from the town centre.
A siege workshop trains mobile siege equipment. Mobile siege equipment can be used in the field or garrisoned in towers and ships. Siege workshops also train engineers. engineers are like builders, but they build things like anti-cavalry stakes, palisades and large siege equipment. Large siege equipment could be something like a trebuchet or a siege tower. Large siege equipment takes time and resources to build, and must be operated by an engineer.
Boston
Update 22/9/2026
I'm going to assemble a bunch of drawings like these and compose them into a battle field to get an idea of the visual language of the game.
Units will be divided into control groups. A control group would be like a player character and a bunch of minions, or a number of groups of 12 soldiers. Having different members in a control group would unlock abilities. Having infantry and some engineers in a control group would allow the infantry to entrench. Having a bunch of skeletons in a group would allow the player to command them to swarm an enemy.
I plan to implement both RTS and RPG mechanics in my game engine so that it will be easier to port from one genre to another.
One idea I had recently was to allow control groups to contain units owned by allied players. One player would then take responsibility for commanding a retinue of English longbowmen that are being protected by a Viking shield wall. This could lead to a rich system of allegiances. One player could choose to allow another player to command their military.
On allegiances: in a game like Age of Empires, the game usually ends when one team resigns. I have an idea for a richer style of gameplay. Player A can resign or be forced to resign to Player B. Player B can no longer attack player A, but player A is subjugated by player B. A subjugated player can continue to play and earn points based on some metric dependent on the game-type, but is forced to fight on the side of the player that subjugated them. The game ends when some victory condition is reached or all but one player has been subjugated.
That's probably enough for now.
Boston
Update 23/9/2026
I was able to colourise my sketches of the ballistas using the fill tool in GIMP3.
The game is designed to give the player control while keeping the user experience simple and focused on the more enjoyable aspects of gameplay. Civilizations don't have ages or tech trees in the traditional sense. Instead they have technology timelines. Progressing in a timeline unlocks upgrades and new features.
Each technology timeline is concerned with one category of upgrades and features. The timelines are: Economy, Architecture, Military, and Naval. The player has control over which timeline they prioritize. A team could have one player that specialises in each technology. One player might focus on their economy and send resources to the others. One might focus on building defenses and one might train units to man the defenses.
All for now,
Boston
Update 29/92026
RTS games generally have a map divided into tiles. I was thinking of making a game with a map that's divided into polygons. Instead of having to perform pathfinding going from tile to tile in a map with thousands of tiles, pathfinding would be calculated on a map made up of hundreds of polygons. To give a sense of scale, a polygon would be about 32 times the size of a map tile or the size of a clump of forest in the game.
Tiles would be nodes in a graph and pathfinding would just be finding the shortest path through the graph. There might be optimisations like covering large open areas with square tiles. Building walls and cutting down trees would modify the underlying tiling / graph. Building farms would be more of a visual change than a change to the "NavMesh".
There will be 2 levels to the polygon system. At a lower level, the system will be concerned with navigation. Another layer will represent visual terrain differences. I could design a complete GIS system with multiple layers.
Trees come in groups that are treated as one entity by the simulation. If deforestation converts the ground under the trees from woodland to cleared land, the trees themselves will each decide what state they're in. The states could be upright, being logged, or fully cleared. There could even be animations for a tree swaying in the wind, a tree falling down, lumberjacks working on a tree, etc. The great thing is the simulation doesn't need to see the state of the individual trees and the trees only exist in the graphics thread if they're on-screen.
There will be a layer to the GIS system that represents what the player sees when they look at the ground. The ground will be made up of polygons filled with different textures. These would be things like grass, dirt, sand, road, farmland, or water. Water would play a special role in the NavMesh because it is only traversed by ships and fishing boats.
Farmland is interesting because farmland develops within a radius of a mill or a town with a mill. We don't want farmland to develop on the opposite side of a cliff to the mill. We would have to subtract the polygon of the cliff from the polygon of the farmland and then test for connectivity.
I think I'd want arbitrary polygons but there could be optimisations for convex polygons or even squares that match the existing spatial partitioning system.
That's enough on polygons,
Boston.
Update 30/9/2026
Here is a bit of a proof of concept for the 12 unit groups. The player gets chased by hundreds of little foxes, with not much strain on the cpu.
I was thinking about resource management in the game. Wood, stone and gold would just be resources that accumulate, that are then spent on making buildings and training units.
Food would be different because of attrition. Food stockpiled would increase over time based on the area of land being farmed, and decrease over time based on the population of the players civilisation.
Population would be another resource. The civilisation's population would limit the number of available SimCity workers and units. The population would grow when there's plenty of food and housing, and decrease when there's a food or housing shortage, or when SimCity workers or units are killed.
A man can dream :P
Boston
Update 3/10/2026
The game will be designed around having a modding community. The game will have map theme packs and civilisation packs. When an object is spawned in the graphics thread, the game will first search for assets in the graphics pack associated with that civilisation. If the civilisation pack doesn't contain an asset for the object being spawned, the game will search for an asset in the current theme pack. If the theme pack doesn't contain an asset for the object being spawned an asset from the default pack will be used.
It might be nice to swap out themes during gameplay. The game theme could switch between summer / autumn / winter / spring themes or day / night themes.
There could be a space theme and space civilisations. A space them could have open space for water and solar farms instead of crops. A space civilisation could have robot workers instead of humans.
This could lead to interesting combinations like human farnomic mers tending to solar farms or robot workers tending to crops.
All for now,
Boston
Update 5/10/2027
Since there's no tech tree and instead technologies are unlocked by increasing your technology timeline, there won't be any technologies to research at a blacksmith. Instead, a blacksmith speeds up your military timeline advancement. A mason's workshop would speed up defensive building advancement. A market would speed up economic advancement, and a dock would speed up naval advancement.
A blacksmith could also increase the rate at which units are trained.
I don't know. I'll keep my options open. Tech trees and tech timelines (and RPG skill trees) would essentially be a directed graph, where events notify the system to unlock abilities. This could all be user data stored in a civilisation pack and be totally customisable without having to recompile the game.
All for now,
Boston.
Update 6/10/2026
I figured out how to convert animations from 0AD into sprite sheets and I made a little combat scene:
I've been thinking a lot about a scripting system within the game. I think I'll post it on the other thread.
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