Real Time Strategy Innovation

Good Game Design

by Brad Wardell - January, 2001

A couple of years ago after making (and surviving) the Starcraft add-on for GT Interactive (Starcraft: Retribution), we talked to them about Total Annihilation. I was a total TA addict who played on Boneyards regularly. I was the top ranked "Winner Take All" player (Frogboy) for a very long time, and when Boneyards went down, I had the highest winning percentage of any of the top 10 players.

I pitched the idea to GT that companies like Cavedog could make a lot of money by creating strategy game engines. Id was making a good living selling the Quake engine, for instance, so why not Cavedog with its TA engine? After all, most strategy games have basic requirements that have to be met, such as pathfinding, way points, hit detection, unit creation, etc. And best of all, Cavedog was way ahead of the others with a true 3D engine that others could already create units and maps for.

Our friend at GT Interactive (Wizard Works) liked the idea but wasn’t sure how one would even get started on that. I suggested that they license it first to Stardock, we would make a lot of noise that we were licensing the TA engine and pave the way for other companies to be able to license it. Regardless of whether someone liked Total Annihilation, few will disagree that it had a great engine.

For the game, we sat back and looked at our checklist of features we felt were missing and what we wanted in our "ultimate" RTS game and came up with: Mobilization.

Mobilization was to introduce a few new concepts to the genre. We wanted to simplify the actual game play while making the game mechanics more complex. That is, less clicking, more thinking. So the first thing we did was eliminate the entire unit creation mechanism. Really, how do you build people? I bet Napoleon would have loved to be able to conjure up 10,000 more soldiers after Waterloo if he just had enough wood and gold.