Gathering Resources - Let’s try to put it in a modular perspective using a bunch of games and comparing them… (might be useful to someone)
In an RTS game, so far I have seen the following ways to gather resource to be most frequent:
- Generals Style
- Starcraft II Style
Detailed:
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Generals Style
In the red box that the “stuff” that’s already there on the map and the player needs to collect it. The chopper stroked in green is a vehicle made by special building with a sole purpose of flying there, hovering for a bit (“gathering resource”) then hauling it back to that building. Once that happens, player has just accumulated some resource… It’s allowed for player to build multiple of that building as well as multiple of the resource gathering unit ‘chopper’.
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Starcraft II Style
In Starcraft II for player to be able to harvest gas, he/she needs to build a special building on top of that natural resource that’s scattered throughout the map. He/she then needs to assign a X number of “regular” workers (while there is an upper limit) to that building and only then gas harvesting production has started.
As for minerals, player just needs to assign workers to them, and they will automatically haul them back to command center while no special building is required.
If we take a look at Warcraft 3, we see similar fashion to starcraft minerals style:
You just need to assign workers to the gold/trees and they will haul them back to command center. Granted, if you choose to play Night Elves then (if I’m not mistaken) you can build something over the gold mine to increase production, but that’s similar thing to the Starcraft 2 gas…
If we take a look at Age of Empires 3:
It’s really similar to the Warcraft 3, with addition of food that you can gather from killing animals and planting crop fields and stuff like that.
Conclusion:
Granted, there are many RTS now that are totally different, some even don’t allow buildings and stuff, but if we look at some of the most successful RTS games we can see the mechanic that should be in place in any generic RTS engine (or framework in this case) to cover all these possibilities…
There should be mainly 3 different ways to handle resources:
- 3-part blueprint: natural resource spot + necessary building that produces necessary units for harvesting it + that harvesting unit, all linked together (generals)
- single blueprint: natural resource that can be “farmed” by regular workers (think trees/gold warcraft3)
- modification of 1). natural resource spot that expects building on top of it so that it can be farmed by regular workers (starcraft 2 gas, warcraft 3 night elves gold scenario)