So I have recently become interested in Real Time Strategy games, and seeing how there haven't been any major RTS's released I thought it might be interesting to design one.  Note that I am not actually thinking about coding one right now, just designing the game elements.  If this were to be coded, I think it might be a good candidate for a joint coding project.

    Now, for the concept, I set my game in a Medieval themed world, where each player owns a castle, and must destroy the opponent in typical RTS fashion.  There are no air units designed, partly because of the theming, and partly because I think it can get a bit difficult to see what is going on in a battle with flying units, considering the resolution of the screen.  The design sports a regular 8x8 building tilemap, but with a 4x4 movement tilemap.  Meaning all buildings will be constrained to an 8x8 grid, but actual units are 4x4 and have more freedom of movement.  This is simply so the player can see more of their army at any given time.  Now, with the 4x4 constraints, making unit sprites can be a bit tricky, as well as finding ways to designate between enemy and yourself.  This is where I think I could use some help from you guys the most, feel free to offer suggestions, sprites, or changes of the 8x8 4x4 system.

UNITS:
   Now for the units, there are 11 ingame units, each trainable at a specific building.  Each of them has specific stats such as damage, speed, and health, as well as types of armor, and damage type.  Each unit can have 1 of 4 armor types: Soft, Medium, Hard, and Fortified.  And each unit can have 1 of 4 damage types:  Blunt, Sharp, Explosive, or Magic.  These attack and armor types have specific advantages and disadvantages against each other, which can lead to certain units being more or less effective against other units.  The summary of these effectiveness of each damage type against each armor type.

Armor Type	|	Blunt	Sharp	Explosive	Magic
----------	|	----	-----	--------	-----
Soft	|	Good	Bad	Average	Good
Medium	|	Average	Average	Average	Good
Hard	|	Bad	Average	Average	Good
Fortefied	|	Average	Good	Good	Bad

    -Soft armor is flexible and strong, and is good at absorbing energy from ranged attacks, but is light and therefore vulnerable to blunt force.
    -Medium armor is good all around, does not give any extra bonuses against any physical attacks
    -Hard armor is heavy metal plates, extremely strong against blunt force, but weak against sharp penetrating attacks
    -Fortefied armor is usually only dealt to buildings, and is the strongest of all armors, but weak against explosive attacks

    -Blunt force is the kind of attacks dealt by swords and axes, effectively breaking through weaker armor
    -Sharp force is a ranged attack that penetrates armored units, but does less damage against flexible armor
    -Explosive force is good all round damage, and does extra damage against buildings
    -Magic force is very effective in bypassing most lower forms of armor, but has a hard time affecting non biological units such as buildings


Here is a summary of all the units i have designed, with their skills and info:



There are several categories of units.  Regular meele, which consist or soldiers and broadsmen.  Ranged units, which consist of archers ans crossbowsmen.  Siege units, which consist of stationary turrets and catapults.  1 Healing unit.  And magic units, which consist of the mage and the wizzard.   All units cost some amount of resources to create, and all require a house to live in.  1 House can hold 4 units, and some units take up more than 1 space.  To generate the resources to create units, farmland must be created.  Farmland draws in a certain amount of resources per second, and can be upgraded to produce more per second.  More farmland can be purchased for high amounts.  Farmland never stops producing resources, so each castle will never run out of resources to spend on units.  

The magical units are special, being able to cast spells.  The Wizzard is a defensive unit, which can cast non-damage spells that you can use to protect your troops and castle.  Mages are offensive spellcasters, and they have 2 paths of research, Fire and Ice.  You can only research one of these, and therefore only unlock 1 half of the Mage's abilities in a game.  Magical units also require dark crystal to create.  You cannot generate dark crystal on your own, but need to find it in the map somewhere and harvest it.  This both limits magical units to late game, and forces the player to leave the safety of their castle if they want to get magical units.  Players can hunt out and guard these crystal deposits to prevent their opponents from getting magical units.

BUILDINGS:
The player can and must construct many buildings during the game.  All buildings have fortified armor, and a good amount of health.  Different buildings need to be built to produce different types of units, and they are summarized below.  I have not included build time yet, but it should be soon.


The Keep is the most important building.  You can only ever have 1, and if it is destroyed, you lose the game.  All other buildings are either for producing units, or upgrading units strengths.  Upgrades are automatically applied to all units on the field and from there on out.  Even if an upgrade building is destroyed, upgrades already researched will persist.  Houses act as your 'supply limit' in the game.  Each house supports 4 units, with some units taking up more than one place.  There is going to be a supply cap, but it has not been determined yet.  The Sorcery Tower is unique in that it is the only building that needs dark crystal to manufacture, all others simply require resources.




That's it for now, I will likely edit this post as I figure out more information.  Feel free to post ideas and requests!  I am new to designing RTS's, so any and all advice is awesome

Wow, that's a lot of work for just an idea.

Turrets would act like buildings but technically still be the same as units as far as code goes, since it has all the attributes of a unit, it would be easier code-wise just to make it an immobile unit.

And me and my friend just got together to brainstorm some more, and we augmented the damage/armor interactions, as well as how resources would work, and how the tech tree would be shaped.

Hmm this is interesting,but the Greenfoot demo almost froze Opera X.x. Anyway testing after I finish writing this post.

ANyway I would love to see an RTS for calcs. It would definitively need to have a limited amount of units at once, though (maybe 30-50 supply cap per player?) and not process every unit every frame, so the cursor can move fast. I think units would even need to all be one square large and if zergling-type units were to be implemented, they would be in group of 4 stuck together (when dying the entire group die) in one tile or something.

EDIT: How do you spawn units in the demo?

Ah ok thanks, and yeah maybe that could work with zerglings.