User blog:DanChan123/Original Game Idea Planner - War On Earth

War On Earth is a real-time tactical war MMO videogame created by DanChan123 and published by DanChan123 for Microsoft Windows personal computers and Apple Mac OS computers. War On Earth features real-time tactical gameplay where the player takes god-omniscient command over his or her own WWII-era-style military force to engage other the forces of other players or bots. The game is mostly free-to-play but virtual earning bonuses and access to certain events/features requires a paid account upgrade. The rather slow progress rate and period for non-paid accounts provides an incentive for common players to purchase the account upgrade.

Gameplay
All player progress is greatly dependent on earned virtual currencies, Credits and Experience; each type of currency has different purposes. Credits are used to buy Units, Equipment, and Ammo that make up players' military forces. Experience is used to research new types of Units, Equipment, and Ammo, and to purchase Equipment/Unit exclusive Skills and Perks that you can apply to your forces to improve their performance.

War On Earth is built on an evolved version of the Google Earth engine, which has provided the game with its realistic terrain, weather, and real-world features that contribute to the gameplay.

Ranking
2nd Officer - 50 Basic Units

1st Officer - 100

Second Lieutenant - 200

First Lieutenant - 400

Captain - 800

Major - 1,600

Lieutenant Colonel - 3,200

Colonel - 6,400

Brigadier General - 12,800

Major General - 25,600

Lieutenant General - 51,200

General - 102,400

Grand Marshal - 204,800

(After every rank-up, the player will need double the amount of Rank XP of the last rank-up to achieve the next Rank)

Ranking up is the primary path of progress in War On Earth. While progressing through the game, the player will also be promoted in rank from Rank Experience Points given in battle games. Each rank increases the total Basic Unit size (One Basic Unit, or BU, is one soldier. A two-manned aircraft is worth two BUs, and a 30-man submarine is worth 30 BUs), and unlocks new Unit types and Equipment up for Research, starting off from 2nd Officer with 50 BUs, up to Grand Marshal with 204,800 BUs.

There are three military research branches to rank up in: Ground Force, Air Force, and Naval Force. Rankings in each branch does not have to be equal, and the differing progress rate in each branch is dependent on how the player wants to split his earned Rank XP on the available branches. Total BU count in multiple ranks do not overlap, so a player who is a Grand Marshal in all three branches can have a total of 614,400 BUs, 204,800 per branch. All players will default start out with Ground Force, and upon achieving Brigadier General can move on to 2nd Officer of the Air Force, and upon achieving Brig. Gen. in the Air Force, finally on to the Naval Force.

Matchmaking
The objective of matchmaking for most game modes where clashing armies are the basis of the match, is to make each army equal in power. To do this each Unit is given a "Power Points" count, or PP count, which is a numeral ranking. A simple man part of your army (w/ no Equipment or Ammo), is worth 10 PP. Added Equipment and Ammo will increase the PP count of the soldier. This also applies to Vehicular Units no matter how many BUs they consist of. Skills and Perks will not effect PP count. BUs (a soldier) have a basic PP maximum of 50, but through progress players may train soldiers certain Perks that extend their PP maximum (available by ranking up or completing achievements/missions, etc) to allow them to carry more advanced equpment. Additionally, in many cases Equipment and Ammo can be placed in an area or in shipping vehicles and then shared among other Units: this will not add modifiers that affect total PP.

Game Modes
While the battle mechanics are similar in all games, the scale, reward bonuses, and other factors outside of control and simulation differ between game modes.

Blitz Mode
Blitz Mode is a 1v1 PvP Ground-only Battle Mode built and recommended for new players. Blitz allows a total of 100 BUs and/or 6,000 PP per side of battle on a virtual 400mX400m map of a randomly selected location on the War On Earth Globe. Each side is distinguished by color: Red v Blue. Each player will be able to observe the map's terrain features for 30 seconds before the battle begins. Blitz Mode provides free-healing/repairing for damaged Units and non-bonused/multiplied paybacks for all Units defeated in combat after the battle is finished. It also covers lost Equipment and Ammo. This way Blitz players will NEVER lose anything from defeat, but on the other hand defeated players will earn very few from a defeat. However due to the small scale of Blitz battles, players who are not new to the game may find the reward proportionally small, making them more likely to play other modes where results are comparatively more rewarding in proportion to their average wealth at their stage of experience.

Unlike other modes, when you begin a Blitz Battle you recieve access to all the Ground-based Units in your army (the army is organized in the army interface via the lobby, which will be explained later). However you cannot go over 100 Basic Units and 6,000 PP (there's an automatic filter which will show you how many Units of each available type you are able to deploy at any moment of the battle), so players will need to learn to work with the limits. You will also be able to recall Units/Equipment/Ammo from the battlefield in this mode.

Units can be spawned starting from any part of your border side of the map, but if an enemy Unit is at most 15m away from every part of the spawn zone and you have not a single surviving Unit on any part of the map, you will not be able to spawn your Units anymore and you will lose the game if that situation goes on for 10 seconds. If you do have surviving Unit(s) you have 5 minutes to use your remaining troops to reestablish the spawn zone.

The objective of a Blitz Battle is to capture more flagged zones (small defined areas scattered all over the map) than the other side in the Battle. To capture a flagged zone for him/herself a player needs to keep his/her own Units within a flagged zone while keeping any enemies out. If at least one Unit on each side (no matter if one side has more than the other) is present within one flagged zone, no progress will be made. Each flagged zone is circular and in 20m in diameter and will go through three phases during capture process: Blue Phase, Neutral (White) Phase, and Red Phase. If a Red/Blue Cap is incomplete, the flagged zone will slowly strive to become Neutral again, or back towards the original color or to the new color depending on who reclaims the cap. The speed of neutralization from a full Blue Phase to Neutral Phase takes 5 seconds. If one Basic Unit is capping it takes 20 seconds to pass through one full phase, and every extra Basic Unit capping decreases the time by 5% per Basic Unit. One a Red/Blue phase is complete, the capturing side no longer needs to stay in cap to prevent neutrality. Unphasing (Red cap in a Blue flagged zone or Blue cap in a Red flagged zone in attempt to change the flagged zone's capture color, follows the same calculations,

In every Blitz Map there are 11 flagged zones, but each side already possesses one flagged zone at game start, leaving 9 neutral zones. The Match is 15 minutes long and at the end of 15 minutes the winner is the side that possesses the most flagged zones. Draws will occur if both sides have an equal amount of captured zones of their color at the end of the battle. Other ways to win is if the other side surrenders (by surrendering in Blitz you gain nothing from battle and lose 100 Credits and 100 Experience multiplied by your Rank number), loses 10,000 PP worth of Units/Equipment/Ammo, loses all his/her flagged zones to you, is neither able to respawn or reestablish a spawn zone within the given time limits stated earlier, or does not have a single surviving unit on the map for 100 seconds even if a spawn point is avaiable.

Clash Mode
Clash Mode is a 3v3 PvP Ground + Air Battle Mode built and recommended for players who have experienced the game long enough to excel at the basics and start playing more competitively but has not yet mastered the game entirely. Like Blitz, teams are distinguished as Red vs. Blue. Clash allows a total of 200 BUs, 175 Ground + 25 Air, and/or 15,000 PP per player on a team out of three players; this accounts for one side of the battle. Clash battles take place on a virtual 1200mX1200m map of a randomly selected location on the War On Earth Globe. Each team will be given two minutes to observe the map and coordinate through chat before the battle begins.

After battle, only 50% of dead Units/Equipment/Ammo will be restored according to their type...

(If you used and lost fourteen soldiers + fourteen tier 8 semi-automatic rifles, eight tier 4 heavy tanks + 80mm howitzer loaded with Armor Piercing (AP) Shells, twelve fragmentation grenades, two-hundred semi-automatic rifle rounds, and forty-two 80mm AP Shells, you get back: seven soldiers + seven tier 8 semi-automatic rifles, four tier 4 heavy tanks + 80mm howitzer loaded with AP Shells, six fragmentation grenades, one-hundred semi-automatic rifle rounds, and twenty-one 80mm AP Shells. If the number is odd, the larger portion is recieved)

Rewards in Clash Mode for winners are generally a lot greater than in Blitz, and losers can still win a satisfactory amount for good performance, but in occasions in the typical "epic failure" scenario, team players may, though unlikely, earn very few. And because you do lose 50% of your lost Units/Equipment/Ammo (which are all paid for in Credits), things may come to waste as the amount you earn in battle may not compensate for the value of your losses. However the reward system has been tweaked enough so that, with a little sense of things, players will not "lose wealth".

Unlike Blitz, before entering the matchmaking queue for a Clash battle players will have to select your Units beforehand (maximum 175 Ground + 25 Air and/or 15,000 PP). Since some Units/Equipment/Ammo have terrain advantages over others, the Clash Battle Map's name will be visible to all players prior to entering the queue for a Clash Battle; the Clash Mode map changes every ten minutes, but it will not change while the player awaits the match in-queue. Most players can then recall past studies and experience of that map or consult online guides before deciding which troops to pick.

What all Clash maps have in common has to do with the basic objective of all Clash battles. On each map there are 5 Checkpoints, which are just like flagged zones in Blitz with the only difference being that each Checkpoint is 60m in diameter. Also unlike in Blitz one team can continue capturing/unphasing a Checkpoint if they have more BUs in the Checkpoint than the other team. Red BUs in cap will cancel out Blue BUs in cap and vice versa.

At the start of the match each team starts out with 1,000 Control Points (COPs). For your team to win either the number of COPs on your team has to exceed the amount of the enemy teams COPs by the end of the battle (battle is 45 minutes maximum duration), or the enemy team's COPs has to reach 0 first. By taking control of one Checkpoint for your team, the enemy will lose COPs at a rate of 20 COPs per minute. Excluding the planning period, a Clash battle takes up to 30 minutes. The victory goes to which ever team has the most COPs at the end of the 30 minutes given. A team will also lose the battle of the team's COPs reach zero.

Campaign Mode
Campaign Mode is War On Earth's PvE mode featuring a huge variety of PvE missions of differing scales. Various campaign missions can be unlocked via earning certain awards or obtaining the required reward set, researching

TBC

Army
Your army is your total available fighting Units, Equipment, and Ammo which is at your disposal in battles. The player menu also consists of an Army section where the the player can see his or her army and recieve thousands of filtering options that allow the player to single out certain troops and then provide them with any changes including adding Equipment, Ammo, Skills, Perks, "upgrading" Units or Equipment, selling or trading Units/Equipment, etc. This section will provide the many details on your army.

Units
Units are the "board game pieces" of the War On Earth battlefield: Foot soldiers, Cavalry, Military Trucks, Fighter planes, Bombers, Artillery, Guns, Cruisers, Aircraft Carriers, etc all of which of course manned either as oneself (a simple Basic Unit footsoldier) or a crew on one of more (for manning a vehicle or manned weaponry). What sets Units apart from Equipment is that Units are, given a crew if necessary, mobile. They can be guided/positioned by the player on the battlefield and change those positions at the will of the player in real time.

Again there are three main branches of the Army: Ground Force, Air Force, and Naval Force. The Ground Force includes Ground-based Units, the Air Force includes Air-based Units, and the Naval Force includes Water-based Units.

There are nine tiers in every Rank on the line of Rank XP which the player passes through until they can Rank up. Reaching each tier, the player will be able to unlock new tech branches of Manned Units, all of which can be unlocked using Experience. Each tech branch starts from the most primitive Unit in the tech category, for instance a naval dive bomber tech branch. This is also called "Upgrading" because it is cheaper to replace Units in your Army with their unlocked, tech branch successors rather than purchase them anew without replacement or "upgrade". As the player proceeds through the branch, he or she will unlock more improved Units, each more improved than the predecessor.

Every Unit has its own Stats and can be weighed by PP. For vehicular Units like tanks which have multi-man crews, the death or injury of one crew member can decrease the performance of a Unit significantly and in a special way depending on crew roles. All Units have a certain amount of health and damage modifiers. For instance a footsoldier without any Equipment with armor values will be prone to 100% of the damage (assuming that damage variance factors are already calculated) from a given enemy's machine gun attack while a High-tech tier Heavy Tank may be impervious to any affect from the machine gun (absorbs 100% of the damage). Stats solely for Units (without effects of equipment values, skills, or perks) include Health (the range and basic measurement of a Unit's survivability), Speed (how fast a Unit can move across terrain or water; subject to modifiers based on the type of terrain), Acceleration (how fast a Unit can increase its speed), Dexterity (how fast the Unit can reload his projectile weapon, draw out a melee weapon into fighting position, or prepare a throwing explosive like a grenade), Morale (determines an individual Unit's overall performance in all Stats, or temporarily modifies stats, which changes based on a Unit's situation in the battlefield= for vehicular Units, Morale is the average Morale of each crew BU: Low Morale = decreased full performance in all stats, High Morale = increased full performance in all stats), and Charisma (how much a Unit can increase or decrease the Morale of others, both allies and enemies).

While purchasing Units comes out directly from your virtual pocket, when researching Units, you can place a "Bond" on a certain type of Units, usually the next on every tech tree. For everything you have a Bond on, a certain portion of Experience you earn (you decide the portion, which can be altered at any time with access to your player settings) will automatically be evenly distributed into each of your Bonds, until you gradually fill up the Experience price which will automatically research the Units.

Equipment/Ammo
Equipment vary from certain handheld weapons for Basic Unit footsoldiers or cavalry, mounted weapons (for vehicular Units), or manned transport weapons (mortars, AA guns, cannons, etc). All Equipment are marked by Stats which PP is correlated. For instance, firearms may have a Dispersion which is a factor that effects the chance every shot a firearm makes when aimed at a target will be accurate or inaccurate (Dispersion changes depending on the distance between the firing position and the target). They may also have damage per shot, or DPS, as well as rate of fire. Various weapons will also have status effects, for instance any gun can inflict a "Wounded" status on enemies which will impact the victims' performance negatively, while a flamethrower will inflict a Burning status.

All Equipment will also have a certain amount and type of ammo to hold, which includes but is not limited to bullets for firearms, mortar shells for mortars, and tank shells for tank howitzers. Ammo also includes gas for flamethrowers, landmines, grenades, etc which may not necessary be defined as "ammunition". Every Unit has carrying limit and thus when a Unit runs out of supply Ammo, on the map you may see orange icons; you can order them to retreat in order to get new ammo at a supply zone which you can establish on land you have captured. A supply zone is where Ammo that is needed is delivered, as long as the "supply beacon" remains on supply craft will continually drop supplies in the area. When setting up a supply zone you can choose the type of travel for Ammo/Equipment to arrive, including by plane, ground vehicle, horse, or by foot. According to supply zone mechanics, all Ammo that is used or lost on the battlefield is replaced at a supply zone; on the other hand, all delivered ammo comes from what the player has already purchased at the lobby, so when a certain type of ammo runs out in your bank account, it will no longer be delivered until after the battle in which you need to purchase more according to your needs.

Of course the player can always choose to clean up a supply zone or turn off the "supply beacon", usually if they fear that the enemy will capture it. And indeed, your army can steal equipment and ammo from the enemy if you capture them, which does tend to happen often as there are options of having your soldiers take Equipment and Ammo from the dead and/or the enemy on the battlefield. However, you cannot take Ammo that you have not yet researched along with the Equipment.

Researching Equipment/Ammo also uses the Bond system which is described for researching new Units.

Skills
Skills are special abilities that effect the performance of Units (often depending on the Equipment they are armed with) they can apply to. Once Skills are purchased (with Experience) all Units w/Equipment that they apply to will recieve that Skill. Because there are so many Skills, here are some to take note of as examples:

Custer's Last Stand : (applies to all footsoldier Units with firearm-type Equipment) When Health reaches below 20% and the Unit is surrounded by enemy-controlled territory no more than a 10 meter diameter in all opposing directions, Increases Reload Time by 50%, Decreases Dispersion by 50%, Increases Charisma by 50%, and Decreases Morale of Targeted Foes by 25%.

Spirit of the Air : (applies to all footsoldier Units) When a friendly plane flies over ground except for in all forest-type terrains or foggy swamp terrain, all friendly footsoldier Units directly under the plane in its route in a 25 sq meter ground circular area parallel to the plane at all moments of its flight path will increase Morale by 50%, while enemy footsoldier Units will decrease their Morale by 50%.

Purchasing Skills through the skill tree also uses the Bond system which is described for researching new Units or Equipment/Ammo.