Basic Design
I know this might be a bit early, but I just wanted to share my vision and hopes for this game.
RTS games have had the bad habit of focusing around resources and that is crap, in my opinion. While the aquisition and spending of resources gives a very interesting strategic element to games, the fact that all those games all pretty much only revolve around getting the biggest and best units the fastest makes it a crappy rts in my book. Strategy should be about what units you choose, where you send them and how you handle them.
So what I hope is to avoid this as much as we can. No resources. I have however read about an interesting game called Z where you could get more soldiers by owning flags that represents areas of the map. This sounds like a good replacement for resources to me. The idea of scrapping all kinds of resources irks me a bit becuase it could be a little bit too simple for a game. Now having the element of conquering areas that you might otherwise ignore makes for a bit more interesting battles. For example, a common question could be: "Would it be worth it to take that valley? Does the units it can produce be worth its poor defense?"
I figure we'd start the development with the idea of having merely one "race" and only a few basic units, thus not having to worry all too much about balance. So I think having pikemen, standard melee units, archers, light and heavy cavalry might be a good way to start. Anything else is just a bonus. They should be handled in "units" gathering a bunch together, yet everyone should count. I'll elaborate on this later, it is a bit too complex to start off with.
Maps are a tricky thing. How will that be handled? Making static maps or making them generate themselves based on a few guidelines and models? What kind of protocol would be used for maps? Should we put effort towards making a map-making program or is that something we can wait to decide? It feels a bit like something we should decide in the beginning so that we will keep that in mind will developing the map-protocol.
Alright, I think this might cover most of the basic issues. Discuss them please as well as anything else needs to be discussed. Anything you disagree with?
"ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge" - Charles Darwin