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Mount & Blade, re-imagined as a 2D RTS

Zanzoken

Arcane
Joined
Dec 16, 2014
Messages
3,559
Do you think a Mount & Blade style game would work as a 2D RTS?

I don't see anything whatsoever about the M&B overworld that couldn't be done in 2D.

The battles are the tricky part. Just like in M&B, the battles would range from small skirmishes of just a few guys, up to large pitched battles and sieges with hundreds of units on each side. You would divide your attention between commanding your troops like an RTS, and using your Avatar to fight and kill enemies directly.

The presentation I have in my head is kind of like Warcraft 1. Small, simple sprites and a fixed perspective 2D camera.

The concerns I have would be (a) controls (b) having to move the camera away from your Avatar in order to issue commands elsewhere on the battlefield. I think these are solvable though.

Thoughts?
 
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Quilty

Magister
Joined
Apr 11, 2008
Messages
2,406
Sounds like a cool idea to me, although I dislike the style of the game in your second post, but that's just a personal thing. If going with sprites, I'd prefer the style of the original Shogun Total War, but again, just personal taste.

Regarding the issue of control, I guess you could constrain the camera so that it can only move a short distance away from your character, effectively creating a zone of control for the player and forcing them to move around the map in order to issue commands.
 

bionicman

Liturgist
Joined
May 31, 2019
Messages
674
The way I would do it is (battlefield-wise):

When it comes to controls, it would be similar to Hotline Miami: top down view, character rotates to cursor's position, WASD to move around, left-click to swing, right-click to block.

Then, there would be a button you can press for the game to pause and open a zoomed-out view of the entire map, where your and enemy army would be abstracted, and while the game is paused this way you could issue commands on this big map view.

And yeah, the overworld would be easy to copy-paste from M&B (Battle brothers already did this).
 

Zanzoken

Arcane
Joined
Dec 16, 2014
Messages
3,559
Sounds like a cool idea to me, although I dislike the style of the game in your second post, but that's just a personal thing. If going with sprites, I'd prefer the style of the original Shogun Total War, but again, just personal taste.

Regarding the issue of control, I guess you could constrain the camera so that it can only move a short distance away from your character, effectively creating a zone of control for the player and forcing them to move around the map in order to issue commands.

The FE sprites are a little more cartoonish than what I would want, but I like how they are able to squeeze a lot of detail into such a small image. The enemy sprites are perhaps a bit better representation, since they aren't quite as stylized as the hero characters.

QXC6OmE.png
I like the idea of forcing the player to move up and down the battle lines, shouting commands. The camera is anchored to your character in M&B, but it's different obviously, since you are in 3rd person and can see out over the battlefield.
 

Zanzoken

Arcane
Joined
Dec 16, 2014
Messages
3,559
The way I would do it is (battlefield-wise):

When it comes to controls, it would be similar to Hotline Miami: top down view, character rotates to cursor's position, WASD to move around, left-click to swing, right-click to block.

Then, there would be a button you can press for the game to pause and open a zoomed-out view of the entire map, where your and enemy army would be abstracted, and while the game is paused this way you could issue commands on this big map view.

And yeah, the overworld would be easy to copy-paste from M&B (Battle brothers already did this).

That's what I was thinking too. Split it into two sets of controls, and assign a hotkey (spacebar comes to mind) that allows the player to alternate between them at will.

The only thing I might disagree with is pausing the game while you're in "command" mode, since I like the idea of creating a risk-reward dynamic where leading from the front is bold & charismatic (maybe you give the player character bonuses for getting kills in combat and stuff) but doing so means you lose a degree of control over the battle plan.

The battles in M&B don't usually end up being all that strategic anyway. Sometimes tactics affect the outcome of a battle, such as getting your archers positioned in a good spot or timing a cavalry charge just right. But often it just devolves into a cluster where whoever has the most / best troops wins.

Features that have somehow always been missing from M&B, like a good pre-battle deployment system and better control over how you group your troops, would also go a long way to making the battle plans easier to set up and execute.
 

Reality

Learned
Joined
Dec 6, 2019
Messages
333
RTS games with an "action style" commander usually feel like they handicap themselves to me tbh. I think of Herzog Zwei, Tooth and Tail, Airmech Strike, etc.

Gimmick has novelty for a week or so , but leads to getting annoyed and feeling the game is just slopp (Sloppy games can be fun, but sloppy in RTS should be an RTS that encourages Macro>Micro, not RTS but your basic command system is handicapped)
 

Zanzoken

Arcane
Joined
Dec 16, 2014
Messages
3,559
RTS games with an "action style" commander usually feel like they handicap themselves to me tbh. I think of Herzog Zwei, Tooth and Tail, Airmech Strike, etc.

Gimmick has novelty for a week or so , but leads to getting annoyed and feeling the game is just slopp (Sloppy games can be fun, but sloppy in RTS should be an RTS that encourages Macro>Micro, not RTS but your basic command system is handicapped)

In a full-fledged RTS then I would agree that's true, but in this case it would just be RTS-style battles that are essentially pitched. Kind of like Total War, but not even as tactical as that.

The micro in a M&B battle basically just involves putting your archers in the right place, timing your infantry charge correctly, and leading your cavalry around to flank. You rarely have an opportunity (or a need) for more complex maneuvers.
 

Agesilaus

Antiquity Studio
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Developer
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4,456
Grab the Codex by the pussy Codex USB, 2014 Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Do you think a Mount & Blade style game would work as a 2D RTS?

I don't see anything whatsoever about the M&B overworld that couldn't be done in 2D.

The battles are the tricky part. Just like in M&B, the battles would range from small skirmishes of just a few guys, up to large pitched battles and sieges with hundreds of units on each side. You would divide your attention between commanding your troops like an RTS, and using your Avatar to fight and kill enemies directly.

The presentation I have in my head is kind of like Warcraft 1. Small, simple sprites and a fixed perspective 2D camera.

The concerns I have would be (a) controls (b) having to move the camera away from your Avatar in order to issue commands elsewhere on the battlefield. I think these are solvable though.

Thoughts?

2764928-2242288430-

Have you considered Ambush at Sorinor?

It's an old game, but it did have 2d rts combat that involved large numbers of hired troops. Or check out the related titles like Siege.

In those games you don't control a special commander unit on the battlefield, though. For that, there is another game but the name escapes me called Dominus. You have a castle and surrounding territory, and it is invaded from all sides. You can click on map tiles and your commander swoops down on his chariot so you can engage in direct combat. Or just deploy your men on the map and let them do it without you. There are more features, but I only mention Dominus because it has 2d combat between opposing sides (although it's disordered and you can't issue tactical commands) and you can control a particular character in the battle.
 
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bionicman

Liturgist
Joined
May 31, 2019
Messages
674
This is a bit off-topic, but to me M&B has a lot of potential as a multiplayer game, and I don't mean as like the way multiplayer is implemented in M&B or M&B-inspired multiplayer games like Chivalry.

Instead, imagine if the AI vassals were actually all players, and if there was perma-death. So, when a vassal/player dies or his army is defeated, he has to respawn as a level 1 vassal with no army and build a new army from scratch.

The player vassals could join up and form factions, or if it were free-for-all, it could even work as a (heretical statement warning) battle-royale game.

Not sure if something like this already exists. The closest thing to this idea to me is, bizarrely, this popular web game: https://agar.io/#ffa in a sense that it's an abstract representation of the idea of growing an army or levelling up your character in a perma-death environment.
 

Zanzoken

Arcane
Joined
Dec 16, 2014
Messages
3,559
Have you considered Ambush at Sorinor?

It's an old game, but it did have 2d rts combat that involved large numbers of hired troops. Or check out the related titles like Siege.

In those games you don't control a special commander unit on the battlefield, though. For that, there is another game but the name escapes me called Dominus. You have a castle and surrounding territory, and it is invaded from all sides. You can click on map tiles and your commander swoops down on his chariot so you can engage in direct combat. Or just deploy your men on the map and let them do it without you. There are more features, but I only mention Dominus because it has 2d combat between opposing sides (although it's disordered and you can't issue tactical commands) and you can control a particular character in the battle.

Thanks for the recommendations! I have never played any of those, but checked them out on Youtube and they all have some similarities to what I am envisioning.

The 80s and early 90s were certainly an interesting time in gamedev. Genre expectations were much less solidified than they are now, and projects were small enough that developers could still experiment and innovate, which resulted in a lot of unique designs. I know Sid Meier's Pirates and Sword of the Samurai were big influences on Mount & Blade itself.

Another old game that comes to mind is Lords of the Realm II. It has a turn-based campaign map where each turn represents a season (so 4 turns = 1 year) and the battles are fought in real-time.



Lords 2 doesn't have super deep mechanics on either the strategic or tactical layer, but strikes a good balance between the two imo and moves at a fairly fast pace. I played this game a ton as a kid and still enjoy it today.
 

Zanzoken

Arcane
Joined
Dec 16, 2014
Messages
3,559
This is a bit off-topic, but to me M&B has a lot of potential as a multiplayer game, and I don't mean as like the way multiplayer is implemented in M&B or M&B-inspired multiplayer games like Chivalry.

Instead, imagine if the AI vassals were actually all players, and if there was perma-death. So, when a vassal/player dies or his army is defeated, he has to respawn as a level 1 vassal with no army and build a new army from scratch.

The player vassals could join up and form factions, or if it were free-for-all, it could even work as a (heretical statement warning) battle-royale game.

Not sure if something like this already exists. The closest thing to this idea to me is, bizarrely, this popular web game: https://agar.io/#ffa in a sense that it's an abstract representation of the idea of growing an army or levelling up your character in a perma-death environment.

I'm not aware of anything like this that exists, but it's an interesting concept. My guess is you'd need to condense the game so that the map could be cleared within just a few hours of gameplay?

If nothing else it would be cool to at least have a M&B that could support 2-player co-op.
 

dacencora

Guest
Different genre but I really like the sprites and maps in Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia as well. Or just the Fire Emblem series in general.

Again very simple, but they exude a lot of personality and you can see how it would be fairly easy to differentiate units even on a crowded RTS battlefield.

t9zsujn.png


fire-emblem-echoes-pic2.jpg
Do you mean the visual design of Echoes’ maps? For me, the map design (placement, etc) was one of the weakest parts of Echoes. The maps had a nice style though.
 

Zanzoken

Arcane
Joined
Dec 16, 2014
Messages
3,559
Do you mean the visual design of Echoes’ maps? For me, the map design (placement, etc) was one of the weakest parts of Echoes. The maps had a nice style though.

Yep, just thinking purely in terms of aesthetics. The question in my mind is, what is a visual style that

(a) can handle battles with dozens of sprites at one time without insane performance demands or becoming an unreadable mess
(b) is visually appealing enough to stand out in a crowded marketplace
 
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Zanzoken

Arcane
Joined
Dec 16, 2014
Messages
3,559
The way I would do it is (battlefield-wise):

When it comes to controls, it would be similar to Hotline Miami: top down view, character rotates to cursor's position, WASD to move around, left-click to swing, right-click to block.

Then, there would be a button you can press for the game to pause and open a zoomed-out view of the entire map, where your and enemy army would be abstracted, and while the game is paused this way you could issue commands on this big map view.

And yeah, the overworld would be easy to copy-paste from M&B (Battle brothers already did this).

That's what I was thinking too. Split it into two sets of controls, and assign a hotkey (spacebar comes to mind) that allows the player to alternate between them at will.

The only thing I might disagree with is pausing the game while you're in "command" mode, since I like the idea of creating a risk-reward dynamic where leading from the front is bold & charismatic (maybe you give the player character bonuses for getting kills in combat and stuff) but doing so means you lose a degree of control over the battle plan.

The battles in M&B don't usually end up being all that strategic anyway. Sometimes tactics affect the outcome of a battle, such as getting your archers positioned in a good spot or timing a cavalry charge just right. But often it just devolves into a cluster where whoever has the most / best troops wins.

Features that have somehow always been missing from M&B, like a good pre-battle deployment system and better control over how you group your troops, would also go a long way to making the battle plans easier to set up and execute.

I was thinking about it today and I am reconsidering my position on pausing to issue orders. I think it would be interesting to tie the ability to pause to a character skill, like Tactics or whatever. Basically the higher the character's skill, the longer / more often you are able to pause. So maybe at level 1 you can only pause for 10 seconds with a 60 second cooldown, level 2 is 20 seconds, level 3 the cooldown shortens to 45 seconds, etc etc.

This would make the Tactics skill extremely useful (unlike in M&B where it's basically a dump skill) and it would scale well over the course of the game. In the beginning when it's 10 of your guys vs 20 looters you don't really need much in the way of tactics, but later when you're trying to coordinate a siege involving hundreds of troops it becomes much more valuable.
 

bionicman

Liturgist
Joined
May 31, 2019
Messages
674
Not a bad idea, but I would prefer if the tactics weren't time-constrained. Assuming that you don't see the whole battlefield while the tactics skill is off, this means one would only get to start thinking about what to do when the tactics skill gets turned on, but e.g. 10 seconds isn't enough to do anything. Even when you increase it, the time pressure would sort of ruin it, for me at least.
Maybe a better solution would be something like:
- you have a set X number of tactics points at the start of every battle (the amount of these points is determined by your tactics skill)
- every time you want to pause the game to order your units around (and you can do this at any point in time during a battle, no cooldowns), you have to spend a tactics point, if you don't have enough tactics points you can't use the ability
- the tactics points are not recovered during the battle, so you have to think wisely as to when to spend them
Speculating like this is stupid btw, best for you would be to code a prototype and experiment with it. Try out different ideas and see which one feels the best etc.
 

Zanzoken

Arcane
Joined
Dec 16, 2014
Messages
3,559
I figured out the visual style I want, at least. It's from Hammerwatch and its sequel / remake, Heroes of Hammerwatch.



I am pretty sure this is just 16x16 pixel art with some engine lighting effects. Simple, but still looks quite good imo.

The character sprites are readable, easily animated for 8 directions of movement, and easy to display lots of them on screen at once. And I am guessing there are a number of fantasy pixel art asset packs out there that would work for environments, UI, font, etc.
 

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