Real Time Strategy Innovation (cont'd)

Good Game Design

by Brad Wardell - January, 2001

In Mobilization, the town�s population was to be determined by looking at your food production and calculating a few modifiers onto it (namely medical technology). The player then would click on their town hall and be able to assign their unused "peons" to do different things. However, even unused peons are useful. The player could even set general assignments for unused (unspecialized) peons, such as helping with research, helping to build things faster, or helping increase your tax base. This way, the player wouldn't be penalized for not "clicking around enough".

When the town hall was clicked on, a list of all the things the "peons" could do would be displayed on the right of the screen. The list would also include the number of peons required for the assignment. Want to become a knight? Okay, choose knight from the list and the peon will go off to the barracks to train to become a knight to await your orders (at which point the knight is a unit similar to units in other games, ready to be commanded). If you want to build a building or help with construction of one already underway, you could tell your peon to perform those tasks as well (same for farming). The more peons you assign to a farm, factory, or mine, the better that farm, factory, or mine will perform, up to a point.

To dispense with building mania, Mobilization would have only one type of building for construcing machines (tanks, catapults, etc.) and only one type of building for training soldiers. You can build as many of these buildings as you want (to increase the number of peons, tanks and aircraft you can build simultaneously), but all non-mechanical units are handled by the barracks and all mechanical units at done at the workshop (which can later be upgraded to a factory). These few buildings would also have a few simple settings, such as how much training time do you want to provide to your troops (longer for better units).

Instead of using buildings as prerequisites, you'd have a technology tree similar to Civilization. You would be able to build libraries (upgradeable to universities and then to research centers), assign peons to them, and choose the type of technology you want to research. The research tree would start from the stone age and go right on into the distant future with mechs and such running around. Or you could research medicines to increase your population, research advanced military training to improve the morale of your units, or research things that will improve the quality of your civilization internally.

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