Designing RTS Units For a Card Game
My goal for Flaregate Network is to make something pretty faithful to my StarCraft II mod, KeyStone, which takes the units from StarCraft and lets you create and command them by playing cards.
There is one major area where I definitely cannot do a perfectly faithful port though, and that’s unit designs.
One obvious barrier is intellectual property. I don’t own the characters and vehicles from StarCraft II, and stealing all of their stats and mechanics, even with new art, is probably over the legal line.
But even if I could steal everything, I don’t think that would lead to a successful game.
Complexity Budgets
and Where to Spend Them
In game design circles, it’s really common to think about complexity as a limited “budget” that you “spend” on different parts of the game. But I haven’t seen a lot of discussion around how you should decide where to spend your budget. Here’s my personal theory: the most complex part of the game should be the part that the player engages with the most directly.
A first-person shooter can have a ton of gun types with complicated nuances, because you spend all of your time shooting guns. Imagine if you had to personally equip every single unit in an RTS with a different weapon. It might sound cool at first, but in practice large-scale battles would be a confusing mess. For RTS it’s better to put the complexity and variety at the unit level, because players engage with the game by commanding units, not by shooting guns.
So what do you engage with the most in a CCG-RTS hybrid? The cards or the units?
I don’t think there’s a universally correct answer here. Other games that mix CCG and RTS elements seem to pick units over cards. Clash Royale, for example, has a large variety of units and spells, but the cards are relatively simple.
For KeyStone, I chose cards over units and I think this is part of the game’s unique magic. But I also got a bunch of complexity “for free” because new players come into the game already understanding the StarCraft unit roster.
This brings me back to why I wouldn’t reskin and steal all of the StarCraft units even if I could: I believe that if you take KeyStone-level card complexity and StarCraft-level unit complexity and throw them both at a new player at the same time, they’ll get overwhelmed.
Reducing Unit Complexity
I want to target Keystone’s level of card complexity for Flaregate Network, so I have to do everything I can to keep unit complexity low, ideally without sacrificing any strategic depth.
Unit Variety
The simplest way to lower unit complexity is to just have fewer types of units for players to learn.
Discovering new unit types can also be a huge source of excitement though, and there is some minimum number of unit types required to get interesting counters and interactions.
So I’m definitely trying to strike a balance here. I’m currently looking at 7 combat units and 2 combat structures for the first faction, but this could change (up or down).
Unit Abilities
Another way to reduce unit complexity is to just make every unit less complex.
In RTS you control units directly, so having a unit with one attack and three abilities may be complicated, but it’s complicated at the layer you are focused on (controlling units) as you learn the game.
When you have to figure out what units do by just watching them, “one” is almost always the correct number of attacks and abilities. That said, I can imagine sparingly adding a second attack/ability, as long as the rules are simple to learn and predict.
Visual Language
The last way I’m thinking about reducing unit complexity is the most nuanced: by communicating game rules with consistent visual rules.
A common RTS staple is to give units tags like light, heavy, armored, large, biological, etc as a way of granting damage bonuses and penalties. Which units have which tags is occasionally a bit hard to figure out though (think: SC2 Hellbats being biological AND mechanical), often in pursuit of balance.
For Flaregate Network I plan to simply use size: small, medium, and large, with each size class having obvious visual rules. There is a big gap between the size of the biggest “small” ship and the smallest “medium” ship.
I’m doing something similar with attacks. If laser weapons have special rules, then I want to make sure all lasers look very similar (all red for example).
Once you see these patterns, you should no longer have to consult unit stats to understand counters, even when encountering a unit for the first time.
That about wraps for my thoughts on unit design. Post in the community Discord if you have thoughts or questions on the topic, and I’ll check it out!
In other news, my wrist injury from late 2023 is healed enough that I’m back to making a lot of progress on the game. I’ve also begun working with an artist, and I’m hoping to be able to start to share art and lore this year. We’ll see though!