I think however, if you lost too many missions the leaders of your nation removed you from duty because of your many fails. It's too long since I played this game.
Well yeah, at some point you have to call "game over" because frankly
you frikkin' lost.
I just want that more on par with other war strategy games:
Plan those continent-spanning maneuvers (ah la what it looks like Decisive Campaigns is all about), but then dive in and participate in one smaller battle on an RTS scale.
The original idea I had had you dive all the way down to a single soldier on the ground (albeit something a little more durable than a peon) that when you died (or retreated), you popped back out to the RTS scale for the remainder of the skirmish. For the FPS portion the RTS would be run by the AI (and at this point RTS games have pretty decent AI).
If you managed to do something crazy like infiltrate the enemy base and blow it up, such that the RTS scale is skipped (at least in terms of player interaction) on account of having already won, then cool: You, as a dude, accomplished a major victory (like most FPS games seem to make you out to be). But if you died, oh well, here have an RTS to finish things off with. Oh you lost that too? Well, you lost that province, but your other objectives are still standing (large scale tactical board).
And there's no reason that the player would even be
required to participate on any given scale, either. I mean heck, set things up right and you could actually play Saving Private Ryan as the AI handles the large scale tactical board
and the individual skirmishes while you, as a dude, run around shooting stuff until you die. The front lines would be ever shifting as the AI gains and loses ground at the higher levels outside your scope of vision, while you run around doing whatever needs to be done.
I'm blanking on which MMO it was, but it was one of the really early ones that was basically isometic. But they did some crazy awesome stuff with AI. All the NPCs have
actual lives where they would get tasks, go out and complete them, come back and sleep at night and so on. Ah!
STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl. That took a little googling, and apparently I was wrong about the isometic aspect, I only remember reading an article about it once.
Take that concept, apply it to the NPC units inside the skirmish while at FPS scale (with the RTS commands filtering down into the goal/task system, I mean this is the army we're talking about) and you can abstract unloaded areas down to numbers until the player gets there. You don't even need to perfectly save information: as the player moves out and then comes back, the tide of battle may have shifted slightly, doesn't matter that the game respawned Private Jones in a different place than it despawned him from.
