Why a good MMORTS with TA-esque dynamics can't be made now.

[Dragon45]

TA dynamics demand exponential growth. Most popular RTSs' economies, in fact, demand exponential growth - essentially unbounded exponential growth. It's what It's what makes them fun. It's also what makes them infeasible.

I'm going to refer to such RTSs from now on as "fun" RTSs, because all of them are.

Keep in mind that exponential growth means exponential resource usage - CPU, memory, power. Lets say we double our economies every week - a terribly slow pace for a game. Remember that if you're trying even a little bit in current Spring single player, you can double your economy, oh say, every 5-10 minutes or so. Lets say 10, for the average player (never mind pros).

Therefore, a weekly doubling will amount to an economic expansion rate something like

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50 weeks = 50400 minutes
50400/10 = [b]5040 times as slow[/b]

This means that we have an MMORTS that is essentially paced over 5,000 times slower on a macro level than any current RTS game, meaning it consumes physical resources at a rate 5000 times slower. Okay, peachy.

Now lets say that every roughly 500 fun RTS resource units, gives you a shiny new unit to store in memory. Pretty good number. Convert our resources-per-week into units-per-week:

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5000/500 = [b]10 units in the first week[/b]

Do keep in mind we're only talking about one player at a time for now.

--But wait, mister Dragon. Can't you, say, compress some of that data? Some of those resources those units would take can surely be compressed by some fancy pants compression algorithm!

Okay - then lets say we have a 5:1 compression ratio. Hell, take a 10:1 compression ratio. A ten-to-one ratio of compression for models, location, pathfinding, simple AI, and whatnot. Okay, magical compression. Lets go with that. That means, memory-wise, we're more or less making

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10/10 = [b]1 unit in the first week[/b]

Now for the fun part: remember the exponential growth? This is where it comes in. The first week, we're doubling our 1 tank/bot/gundam/Saiyan into 2. The second week, we're doubling that into 4.

Can we come up with a formula? Yes we can!

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2^(N) = Units after some number of weeks N

Remember, I'm a lone player. Hey cool, there's 64*10 = 640 units I can play with at the 6 week mark! Hooray!

Hey, wait a second, its my next birthday! One year later( 52 weeks for the Gregorian impaired), i can have

2^(52) ~=~ 4.504 * 10^15 =

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45,040,000,000,000,000

45 QUADRILLION JETPLANES WOO in my MMORTS
i spaem 45 quadrillion gatoer!
!!!!1111111!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11oneeeoene

Lets say each compressed-unit-group takes up 500 kb (half a meg) of RAM for pathfinding, gfx, image, simple AI routines, whatever.

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(2^52*500)/1000

2.25*10^15 or 22.5 QUADRILLION megabytes of RAM. About 1000 times more than a gigabyte RAM card can offer. Imagine 1000 gigabyte RAM chips on top of each other - it would take that much RAM to store just the units of one player after a measly one year of MMORTS'ing. Never mind processing them all, or presenting the data to the user in a meaningful way.

--But multiple people playing mean that many units die instead of being stored.

You still have exponential growth. Watch the end-game charts for Spring. It's just slowed by a measly factor of two or three. You're still dealing with trillions upon trillions of things to worry about. And it works both ways; don't forget that more people means more units too!

--Aha! The developers can artificially slow growth by only increasing the size of the maps, playing fields, and tech trees, very slowly!

This may be the only way to actually make a fun MMORTS even remotely feasible in the long run. But think about it:

1) We're already dealing considering a pathetically slow-paced real time strategy game
2) Make it too slow, and it ceases to be an MMORTS and becomes an MMORPG, in a funky way.
3) To make it mathematically feasible, you would have to slow expansion to a point at which it wouldnt even be fun to use as a screensaver.

--But doesn't Moore's Law tell us that computers will simply become faster to accommodate our RTS?

Moore's law doesn't matter here, because it says that computational capacities double every 18 months, or ~78 times slower than our Really Cool MMORTS.

After a while, the growth of any fun MMORTS will exceed the computational capacity of a server, a cluster, and after a while, every supercomputer in the world - combined. It might take a while. Say, two years. Or three. But we're dealing with an MMORTS here; that's a standard time scale for an MMORTS.

At the end of your game's life cycle, there will be more units in your MMORTS than atoms in the universe (around 6.3 years, to be precise)

Please, stop talking about TA-like MMORTS. There's a reason the games quit after a few hours at most.

[Dragon45]

To iterate: hard limits on what can be constructed, or what expansion can be achieved, can be implemented. But then it's not TA-like, and it becomes a regular MMORPG with-the-addition-of-zombies-you-control (essentially). And basically my thesis and its supporting arguments do not apply.

In Summation:
-> If you want an unbounded, free-reign MMORTS, you will, before long, exhaust the computational capacity of the world.

[SwiftSpear]

There are solutions to some of these problems... Yes, it does require a different build curve than normal RTS games, that doesn't make it an impossible formula.

I think fundimentally, when you talk about an MMORTS, you aren't talking about the same style game as a standard RTS where the player with 100 APM reigns supreme.

[smoth]

in boundless planet according to one of the videos I watch research can take a full 24 hours.

[Dragon45]

Then its not RTS; its 4X in multiplayer.

[Wasp]

in boundless planet according to one of the videos I watch research can take a full 24 hours.

Sounds fun

[jcnossen]

A solution might be if all game components have economic characteristics that can be simplified to a formula. IE: Remove all integer operations and conditional stuff from the simulation, so instead of simulating you can simplify a set of static units (such as fusions and metalmakers) to a single equation...

[KDR_11k]

Capping the fielded numbers of units will be required for such a game. If you let every player grow in strength exponentially the different times at which they joined become huge power differences and once a large player eliminates all similarily large players (not necessarily through combat, just by not getting bored as fast and not leaving) without falling behind too much he'll have a perpetual advantage over others and at some point could probably eliminate all players of the world, combined.

Most RTSes limit your growth with the available resources and make your growth tied to the amount of territory you control. If metal could only be gained from mexes TA growth would not be exponential forever.

Territorial growth could probably be reigned in to a degree by making your forces grow slower than your territory making it difficult to defend. Then again a persistent world where you're always vulnerable and actions happen fairly fast would probably end up being frustrating since a whole invasion could happen in the time when you're away, forcing you to invest as much time as possible just to be able to react to attacks.

[Zpock]

Why do you need exponential growth for the game to be fun? I think exponential growth is the opposite of fun myself. To me it means slow starting and dismatched player power, and stupidly falling over hardware limits in the end. It's a misconception that exponential means fast. It means that it keeps getting faster, nothing else. Actually, out of exponential, linear and logarithmical growth to a set limit at a set time, the exponential is the SLOWEST in the sense that the other growth curves will be always be faster until the limit is reached.

The solution is simple, remove metal makers! Put in "farms" like in warcraft that caps unit numbers. There you have it!

[Saktoth]

You need only change two things to make a 'TA style' RTS into a viable MMORTS (And TA style isnt the only kind, most RTS's follow a totally different resourcing structure based on limited resources, such as Starcraft, AoE, Red Alert etc).

1. Remove metalmakers (In fact you could remove energy entirely).
2. Include an upkeep on units.

Thus, all resources are territorial (with a worldwide cap) with a increasing drain on resource depending on how many units you have in play (So you cant just sit there massing units forever). Wreckage and reclaim may also need to be adjusted/removed, to prevent metal being constantly and repeatedly fed back into the system.

Presumably the problem with this is that one player (or team of players) can eventually take over the whole game world. This is, on closer examination, is not a problem at all. In any serious competitive game there has to be an 'end point' where someone 'wins' (Otherwise its not a very serious competative game), and thus it is reasonable to assume that once one player (or group of players) takes over the whole planet, the game re-sets from 0.

Covenant of Swords in Shadowbane is a good example of this, if anyone is familiar with that. Their ability to take over the entire server should not be seen as a design flaw, but a demonstration of just how revolutionary the design of the MMO was (barring all the level grind silliness which was peripheral to the core concept and should have been left out).

[Erom]

thus it is reasonable to assume that once one player takes over the whole planet, the game re-sets from 0.

Or you move on to the next planet in a galactic map :) One contested planet at a time, hundreds of planets. Potentially hundreds of months of potential combat - plenty of time to last out the 5-8 years the typical mmorpg keeps it's servers online.

There are other ways to do this whole thing, as well, that don't mean you have to stay right at your keyboard your whole life in case someone rush flaesh.

What about each player being represented by an orbital "mothership"? When you log into the server to play, you select one of the 3-4 currently "contested" worlds to drop on. You drop with a certain amount of technology, resources, and units, with higher "level" players being able to drop more stuff. There is a global limit on how often backup can spawn on a given battlefield - and you really want to protect your spawn points (Galactic gates?) otherwise new players can't spawn (Or respawn) on that particular planet to help you.

Once all the spawn points are occupied by one side, that planet flips sides and the next one is opened as contested, with the attacking side having to fight through gaia controlled defenses and opposing players. The closer you get to either teams homeworld, the more often backup can drop, the worse the map is for attackers, ect, so the game play dynamic naturally trends toward the center.

When a player leaves, his stuff doesn't just despawn, but is given to the AI, which doesn't need to be particularly bright. Some of the AI's we have in the spring community could already handle it, especially if you _actually designed the game so the AI could understand it_.

[Zpock]

Ah yeah, I always thought it would be awesome to have a boneryards style multi player meta game. It doesn't have to be that complicated either, even if those ideas above sound awesome indeed. It could just be normal matches played out to determine the outcome of who controls the planet (or whatever, could be parts of Europe for WW2)

[Erom]

Sure, at the simplest level all you need is reliable reporting of Spring games, a mod designed to work with the meta game, and the meta game could be handled by a custom lobby, but I love the idea of gaining experience and being able to equipt your army in a bunch of different ways. Like "Oh man, we're getting killed on that ice planet, anybody have the Winter Combat upgrades on their infantry?"

We've basically described a game I've wanted to make for... oh, let's say a decade now.

[Treeform]

Dragon45: Then its not RTS; its 4X in multiplayer.

mmorts are a bit like 4x games but i guess that will depend on how you make them. The basics of RTS is command multiple units in real time. 4x games normally are turn based and yes game play might be significantly slower. It might take days to build large army but then you can just queue them all on Monday and come back on the weekend to kick some butt.

I the mmorts ganra is largely unexplored.

[SwiftSpear]

Dragon45: Then its not RTS; its 4X in multiplayer.

mmorts are a bit like 4x games but i guess that will depend on how you make them. The basics of RTS is command multiple units in real time. 4x games normally are turn based and yes game play might be significantly slower. It might take days to build large army but then you can just queue them all on Monday and come back on the weekend to kick some butt.

I the mmorts ganra is largely unexplored.

Well, it can be problematic to have a player log off, be wasted while he's not around to micromanage his mobile defenders, and then come back to see all the action is over. It defy's most of the common standards of RTS gameplay, either you don't provide enough gameplay, or you provide so much gameplay that a player must stay logged on constantly for 1 month periods.

The most common MMO game, the RPG, there is no penalty if a player just doesn't log on for 2 weeks, while he's not on his character doesn't exist in the universe, it just sits idly in a database waiting for the player to rejoin and push the character into somewhere interesting. If you do it in an MMORTS that way, either you see players log off until their enemy goes away so they don't get wasted, you allow anyone to waste anyone else at any time, even when they aren't defended, or you take away from RTS the fundamental strategy of attacking your enemies weak point while he isn't paying attention. (except for him not paying attention equates to him not even being at a PC)

[Zpock]

But with Eroms style of RTS that wouldn't be a problem. The player has his assets disconnected from the game while not online. Justify it fluffwise however you want, an offworld space ship, stargates etc. Just like in an MMORPG. Then when the player is online he can select where to insert his forces into some battlefield and fight.

[Michilus_nimbus]

Imho, an mmorts only seems feasible when there's a huge emphasis on clans and alliances, maybe even a limited number of fixed sides. That way, new players are "Welcomed" by the veteran players, safe from the front line. When they've built themselves a pretty base (yes, mmorts should be about porcing), they can engage in small skirmishes, aided by the vets.

On the subject of unit limits: Boundless Planet brilliantly limits units without any artificial rules. Instead, it's the whole point of the game: to power your units, you need fuel, which is, of course, always in short supply.

[BlackLiger]

Um...

Forget TA style.

But World In Conflict's style could work rather nicely for this, so you only get troops, no structures. Also would need tracking for how much damage has been done to an area of the planet, but eh.

[Treeform]

SwiftSpear: Well, it can be problematic to have a player log off, be wasted while he's not around to micromanage his mobile defenders

yes that is one of the problems a mmorts has to solve. Michilus_nimbus and BlackLiger both provide good solutions.

[Neddie]

Limiting fuel is an artificial limit, on a side note. No force should ever go to war without the resources to mobilize all their units for at least a short time.