You may be on a timed objective, meaning each second is critical. It will take a decent amount of time to fully regroup. Throwing an entire squad off to die isn't viable. If the player is forced to drop units further back from the front line of battle, it's more difficult to reinforce, take new control points, and make positive progress in the game.ĭue to this, the player cannot just haphazardly throw units towards the enemy. Holding control points affects the drop-position of new units. Having less units affects the player's ability to hold control points. In World in Conflict, the negative consequence of losing a unit is the time it takes to get a replacement. Otherwise, the tactical decisions made will be meaningless. There needs to be consequences for a players choices, both positive and negative. There still is a disadvantage to losing units, however.

If you incorrectly spent all your unit points on an air force, only to find the enemy base swarming with anti-air defenses, you can get tanks next time instead. You may have to wait a couple minutes in order to be able to afford replacing that unit. The death of one unit can be replaced, but not immediately.

In many games once a player gets the upper hand, it quickly snowballs into victory without much chance for retaliation by the opposition. Your resources aren't constrained by how well or poor you are doing in the game (at least not constrained for very long).īy doing this, World in Conflict avoids the snowball effect that exists in many real-time strategy games. Instead, the resources trickle back in over time. Instead, what World in Conflict does is return the resources to the player. When a unit dies, however, the resources that were allocated to obtain the unit are not lost forever. The number of units being controlled are usually under a dozen (in single player at least), so every unit matters. Once those decisions are made, the player attempts to take their objectives. Do you wish to have a mix of air and ground forces, or would you rather have a squad of heavy tanks that are vulnerable from air attacks? Immediately, this leads to a unit-centric, tactical feel to the entire game.īy giving the player a fixed pool of resources, the decisions that have to be made are reduced, but not minimized. Shortly after you requisition units, they are air-dropped into the game, eliminating the need for building bases. The player is given a fixed amount of resources to obtain units with. Massive goes a different route with the resources in World in Conflict and is able to create a more intimate experience because of it.ĭesign Lesson: World in Conflict minimizes resource management, allowing the game to concentrate on constant action through tactics rather than large build times World in Conflict has a simple resource management system. When there is a fixed amount of resources on the map, it reduces available resources for other players permanently. One player gathering resources reduces available resources for another player at any given moment. These systems rely on divvying up the resources among the players in the game. Given two similarly skilled players, it can often be expected that the player with the most resources will win the game. Resources are at the core of the strategy in these games. The majority of real-time strategy games on the market follow a similar formula: collect resources, build a base, pump out units, research upgrades, demolish enemy, win.

World in conflict game play