Welcome to the first monthly guest blog. On the fourth Monday of every month, Flash of Steel will host an opinion not necessarily held by me.

My first guest is Frosty, an auld acquaintance from the forums of Home of the Underdogs, the first gaming forum that I took to pretty seriously. Since then, both of us have found alternate forums to impose our opinions on. Frosty is a frequent poster on the British PC Gamer forums and is one of those sorts who tends to hate a lot of games, but has fairly decent reasons why. (Generally, I don’t like pseudonyms but since he and I go back a few years, Frosty can post under his snowman name.)

Today, he gives us a design idea born out of his experiences with real time strategy games.
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I’ve been thinking lately about the new Company of Heroes game from those people who did those Homeworld games and then went slightly, if entertainingly off that course with the excellent WH40K: Dawn of War. Company of Heroes seems to be carrying on with the course set by Dawn of War, so I’m guessing we’re not going to be finding out where Homeworld was heading any time soon, which is a shame, but I’m sure someone will go further down that route eventually.

I’m thinking about Company of Heroes, though, because, like DoW, it uses a non-currency-based unit building system. I like that. I like it mainly because… Well, armies just don’t work like that. Yes, training and equipment cost money, and wars are fought over resources, I get that, but the idea that you’d go out into the field, pick up a load of “ore” and then sell it, and then instantly “buy” a soldier for “$150” or however much those guys in C&C cost just plain pisses me off. Seriously, and only just scraping the surface of things, who the hell sites their main financial supply ahead of their front line? Can’t you just see an ATM sited in the Berlin No-Man’s Land beyond the Wall getting all kinds of people going to it? No, me neither. Because the idea is nonsense.

Sure, materials supply, factories, manpower, all that jazz, they all have their place in the right kind of game, of course, but the kind of game we’re talking about there is one that simulates, at minimum, a fair old chunk of WWII Europe. Or some similar sort of area. Battlefield RTSs are not only inappropriate for any kind direct resource harvesting/manufacture of this kind, even back with Ground Control we were shown that games could do a heck of a lot better without all the supply and demand clogging up the works.

Relic’s games are using a system that’s based on your possession of tactically significant areas of the map. Relic’s tactical points are usually placed in chokepoints of some sort, where the inspired ability to build powerful defensive structures on top of the tacpoint really comes into its own. The better you’re doing, the more tacpoints you can capture. The more tacpoints you’ve captured, the better you’re doing and the more resources your higher-ups allocate to you area of the battlefront.

And that’s the point that really got me thinking about Company of Heroes.

RTS games, possibly even more so than FPS, are played an awful lot for their online sections. You all know that, of course. Starcraft matches are actually being televised in some countries, though I’ve never particularly seen the attraction of Blizzard’s RTS model. At any given moment, there are probably thousands of RTS multiplayer games going on over the world. Each pair, or set, of players struggling for resources and troops and defending and attacking and all sorts of similarly violent and improper behaviours, no doubt. What intrigues me, however, is the idea of a commander controlling troop and resource allocations to those players. Resources perhaps taken from a central pool supplied by the land area these virtual commanders had managed to capture. Generals deciding on the fly where their commanders’ battlefields are going to be.

Assigning a gifted defender to a region after it’s been taken by one of his attackers. Watching him set up a defensive fort in an area, then perhaps moving the fort-builder on to a newly-taken region. Sending in a rookie commander to take over the running of the fort and keeping a careful eye on him to make sure he’s not letting up on his border controls and letting a enemy scouting force slip through. His opposing counterpart watching the rookie let through such a scouting force. The scout commander’s operational borders loading new map areas on the fly, dynamically resizing and moving his area of influence around the map as troops under his command move around. Sudden panic within the first general’s borders as the scouting force launches a daring raid on an important factory or supply route. A rush to reallocate a human commander to take over one of his internal defence squads, hoping he can route troops and arms into the crisis zone fast enough that the scout force is overwhelmed before it causes a supply crisis on his borders.

Sure, there’d be problems. Oh, would there be problems. A single enemy “spy” (and for “spy”, read fifteen-year-old pinhead) could take down half a country if he were left unchecked. But that would be the commander’s responsibility to deal with. Keeping one’s troops loyal (or turning them against their fellow countrymen) would be integral to the gameworld’s workings. Military coups by dissatisfied commanders could start up new nations. Setting up your new “guild”, or “clan” as a new military power would be a hard and dangerous task for any budding rulers. The teamwork required to hide your secessionist plans from your superiors; even getting the plot off the ground in the first place would require perhaps days of effort…

The people who’d be willing to dedicate their time to such a game would be few and far between. Careful decisions would have to be made about where and how to curb realism in the name of enjoyment, as would be required in the best of games. Surely an EVE Online worldwide playerbase would be necessary to keep defenses from collapsing in embarrassing Planetside fashion every night.

But the more I consider it, the closer to viable possibility I see it being. Surely someone is going to get around to making this game in the next five years. Maybe even sooner.

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Interested in Guest Blogging for Flash of Steel? Drop me a line at troy DOT goodfellow AT gmail DOT com and let me know.