Ronin 3000: oO SnEaKiE Oo:DM.... Terrible Gametype IMO. Maybe an 8yr old gamtype
An 8 year old gametype in a "baby RTS." Yeah, sounds about right.
It's a baby RTS because it's the first good console RTS. If someone followed HW's lead then we'd eventually have good RTS on the console, just like the FPS migration. Remember how everyone thought an FPS would never work on a console???
You want to hear a brilliant strategy for making an RTS with more depth than HW but that would still have a good interface...?
Preset loadouts.
Make a game type where you design your own builds, on a map where you have no enemy. You just experiment so that you find what would be the best build order for certain things, and then save them. You can have a list of your variants before the game starts.
You could also do the same thing with squads... once you've built the proper buildings you could go to your central building and access the 'build squad' menu where you have a bunch of presets for different things. You could then just assign squads to different places on the D-pad. That would take care of a lot of the micro and would streamline the interface.
All you would need is a "Forge Mode" option in the main menu so that you could work through all this stuff offline. The game would have a clock ticking and when you ended it you would bring up a grand stat list that gave you all the times for your builds and the input/output of resources so that you could go back and optimize it. You could even share different builds online... Just think Forge in Reach... but in Halo Wars.
This way you could focus a lot more on units. If the genre picked up all the pathfinding and everything would get a lot better, and there would be more and more strategy. I would imagine since the console controls are so limited, they would focus more upon unit movement and map control. Once you have a unit selected you could hold the left trigger and then have the four A B X Y buttons count as commands. (Hold ground) (Special Ability) (Entrench) etc... You could also focus more upon different terrain bonuses on the map. Have your jackals entrench on the hill for a +1 sight bonus +1 accuracy bonus ect. Hunters in a trench for +1 defense bonus.
There's a lot of options for bringing a really in depth RTS to the console.
I really wish they would do more console RTS games. There's so many ways it could work, and I'd much rather have it on the cheap and reliable console where everyone is on the same hardware and the servers are all good, than have to pay so ****ing much for a good computer and deal with crappy internet options etc. I'm not saying the computer is bad. I'm saying it's too much of a freaking commitment.
What is happiness but the feeling of power increasing, and obstacles being overcome? -Nietzsche