nancygold's Journal

The Spell of Mastery Progress
The functional buildings concept makes me feel like making a War Wind clone.
War Wind was probably the most convoluted RTS to ever exist.
Think XCOM Apocalypse, but in the RTS genre.

Since the inception of RTS games, there was a design dichotomy.

Westwood's Dune/C&C games focused on managing larger groups of cheap cannon fodder.
The game loop these was always collect resources to build overwhelming army
Send them all to die. These games idioms like sending cheap infantry first.
So that obelisks/tesla-coils will kill them, instead of more expensive tanks.
Units had smaller sprites dwarfed by realistically proportioned buildings

Blizzard's games focused on micro-managing smaller groups of units.
Including healing the wounded units.
Later games like Starcraft tried added Zerg side, which mimicked C&C games,
in the way how most units were cannon fodder.
With Warcraft 3, Blizzard reach almost pinnacle in this design
by having heroes with experience.

Yet there was another game, called War Wind.
It went further than Blizzard games in the the Sims RPG direction.
War Wind had limited supply of units can have.
The player recruited from villages with limited population.
The population was no replenishable during game.
Opponents could have also ethnically cleansed the villages.
Just to prevent you from recruiting.

So once the player recruited everyone they could
it was end game.

The recruited units started as civilians and had to be trained.
That was done by placing them inside buildings.
These had fully drawn interiors
Other buildings allowed to do research and construction.
All the vehicles also had to be manned.

So a death of a single unit could mean game over.
Overall the game felt more like The Sims.
And it had art direction matching Alpha Centauri.

I personally never played it since as a child I had PSX.
And Playstation only had the bydlo game like Red Alert.
The good PSX games (Zork, Civizard, etc..) were Japan only.

Do I have no duck syndrome, since I hate the games I had as a child?