Right back at my first post, I did mention that one of my motivations of making this particular type of game is that I have a deep love of ‘Advanced Wars’. Each entity in that game (units and buildings) can do a number of actions which take place in a series of battles against the opponents. Ultimately with the aim to destroy all of the opponents entities or complete a specific objective I.e capture the enemy headquarters.
I certainly do not want to make a carbon copy of this game as for one it would not be as good and secondly this will be a product of my creation and I want it to stand on its own. That being said, it is a great model of how these types of games can be constructed. In particular, each entity can perform a certain number of actions which ultimately can be defined by some configuration. These actions include:
- Movement
- Attack
- Capture
- Resupply
- Build
- Defence
These are to name a few but to get to the point, each ability e.g attacking can vary wildly from each unit but for the most part fall into a small set of parameters. For example, an infantry unit and an artillery unit are used very differently and their interaction can create some very interesting tactical decisions. However, they are at its core very similar from a programming perspective but just vary on the parameters I.e artillery range Is longer, its strengths against different entities are different, artillery cannot use their attack once moved etc. But those are just a series of numbers and adding the other abilities and all of the other entity configurations together, ultimately make an exquisite game with lots of tactical gameplay and replayability.
Therefore what remains is to choose what actions to implement and for those actions, what specific properties to add. Ultimately the only consideration should be what combination of actions will make interesting gameplay.