The Uncertainty Principle

I have been a fan of RTS games for quite a while. From my experience, the most enjoyable plays of an RTS happen in the first few weeks of owning it: every unit is new and different, things are surprising, strategies haven't been seen before.

This is particularly true for the game Warhammer: Dawn of War. When I first played the game, 75% of my enjoyment was coming from finding out what cool units I had, and what new technologies I had. Seeing the predator tank, one with 4 huge lasers and a machine gun, with lots of hitpoints, was a real thrill. Finding out that my Force Commander had a move that shot laser artillery off a satellite and could decimate an opposing force was just awesome.

All of a sudden, when I had become more familiar with my own units, these massive units from my opposition entered the field. The Squiggoth, a 15000 hitpoint elephant with 6 cannons and the ability to eat almost any unit appeared outside my base. I had no idea what to do. I sent 5 squads against it, only to watch them instantly dispersed and, one by one, mercilessly killed off by this opponent I hadn't seen before.

There is nothing quite like having that sort of "insurmountable" challenge appear unpredictably. This high level of uncertainty made the gameplay so much more enjoyable, especially in the early months playing the game. It was very satisfying discovering all the different units for all the different races, ranging from their quick but versatile units to their super-powered, take-up-have-the-screen behemoths. But as time went on, and I became more and more familiar with the game, the entertainment completely shifted off this uncertainty of available units to the uncertainty of the opposing players' strategies.

This gave me a thought of an RTS game where the player was able to create their own units during gameplay. This would be somewhat reminiscent of a real war. Take World War II for instance. Towards the end of the war, Japan believed they had seen most of the US arsenal. Then the nuclear bomb was invented and dropped, and the sheer awe created by this technology completely changed the "gameplay", if you will.

I originally thought that it might be useful to create your own units and upload them online, but a friend brought up the issue of everyone just creating things that would just kill everything on the map in one shot, and removing the fun from any game aspect. Then again, this could also be a problem in-game, with people racing to build a "killer unit" earliest.

Perhaps it would be best if each player had some confines on the statistics of these units, for example, strength, hitpoints and speed would all be drawn from the same point. That way, nothing too powerful could be created.

There's also the matter of the character model that this unit would use. Thinking of some way to create one in-game would be a real exercise. So at this stage, I guess I'm uncertain as to how to make a strategy game's uncertainty... uncertain. Let's see how we go.