The below is inspired originally by Bornloser's modular buildings suggestion on the Tuning Thread. The below are three versions of the Industrial Warfare gamemode. With the third being the original fantasy-land concept that I worked backwards from to think of the other two as being more reasonable. This was sorta a mess to write up, since it went through an iteration when it was a humble mechanics suggestion, but then exploded into a full blown game mode suggestion before I even knew what was going on.
||||- Unitary Buildings -
Basically, if building tuning were implemented in this version, you would have your factories produce Manufacturing Credits. These credits would be used in a kind of "store" in which you purchase upgrades on tech trees, unlock new units and more of an unlocked unit (more buildings or more reinforcements). This method has fairly few in game implications. The upgrades you purchase aren't purchased for your fighter alone, but for all of the aircraft of the type. So if an allied squadron has that particular aircraft, they may run with the enhancement. The points the pilot earns for themselves each mission are experience points rather than credits, allowing the player to fly additional aircraft.
As said before core gameplay doesn't require much change. Though it would certainly benefit from optional side missions that progress parallel to the story missions to allow the player to take an active role in suppressing enemy industry and defending friendly industry, like destroying enemy factories, defending your own, or destroying air defences so that bombers can destroy the oponnent's factories. This could easily re-use maps or be much smaller maps. The outcome of these would change how much industrial capacity your side and the enemy's side have. These missions will have pre assigned ally aircraft and supports, but the sortieing aircraft (and sometimes superweapons) may be changed according to the player's wishes and the country's reserves.
Since these missions are optional, and should not require player interaction, the game should also be able to generate a result automatically based on the enemy strength, the friendly strength and the specializations of each unit present in the battle. This can then result in a report sheet for the auto-resolved battle that displays units destroyed and overall effect on industry of either side. Each of these side missions must be resolved before the next major story mission begins, with or without player interaction.
Outside of these side missions, destroying factories in game and having your own factories destroyed will result in changes to your output of Manufacturing Credits.
||||- Assorted Buildings
With this implementation, buildings would produce Industrial Utils instead of Manufacturing Credits. The main difference is that it is used towards making something specific rather than as a currency. An idle Util cannot just sit around and is wasted, unlike a credit which you can choose to accrue over time. Instead, you will have your industrial capacity (the sum of all your utils), which you divide amongst things you wish to use it for.
You could think of this version as consisting of a pie chart, which you then devote wedges of your pie to different things. The larger the wedge, the more quickly you develop that specific thing, but of course, there will be diminishing returns as you make the wedge bigger and bigger. You can devote your activities to research, creating more units/buildings, or retrofitting existing units/buildings.
Each action has a minimum Util requirement. Once the Util requirement is met, the action will proceed at minimum pace. Adding a certain number of Utils will increase the pace by percentages which will begin low, increase as more utils are used and decrease past the optimal point. Multiple production lines can be used when building units or retrofitting units, but not for research, since it makes little sense in reality or for the game.
Every building present in the game will be tied to your industrial capacity. This is where a secondary pie chart would be handy, an Industrial Risk chart. This represents how much risk a given wedge of the pie is in of being adversely affected by the destruction of a building in the played portion of the game. Given that when the player "builds" more buildings to increase utils it would be difficult to automatically add a building to the map, each building will represent a percentage of the pie. When the building goes down, it will destroy the number of utils it represents. The Industrial Risk pie will represent the chances of each particular wedge getting hit when a building is destroyed. Of course, the more Utils put into a particular thing, the larger the wedge, and the more likely it is to take a hit, but one can also modify the probability by upgrading a particular wedge by shrinking it through camouflage and hardening. Other methods of preventing loss to a particular program would be things like over-investing Utils in an important process, so as to better absorb a loss, even if the larger number are not required.
Though the purpose of this system was to make it so the game didn't have to track which weapons destroyed what, tracking which weapon destroyed the building would be interesting if using a precision guided bomb did Util damage only to one wedge while dumb bombs did damage to wedges randomly.In this version, player payout is based on industrial health and performance. The pay may be used for outfitting one's own fighter with researched technology instead of remodeling a large number of fighters on a production line and waiting many missions for the remodeling to be complete.
||||- Individuated Buildings
To be honest, this is what inspired this post, and what I imagined when bornloser commented about modular buildings. This essentially turns the game into a turn based strategy game with flying at each end step.
In this version, buildings provide either units, unlocks or storage. Why storage? Because every unit in the game is extant somewhere in the played portion of the game. If they are aircraft or soldiers or vehicles, they'll exist in a hangar, barracks or warehouse. The ammunition and resources will exist as well requiring depots, refineries and transport. Buildings are also unique and represented in game. That is not to say each building is different looking, but that each building has an identity in the game. When destroyed, they will remain destroyed, when modified, the game will remember which one was modified. This allows each building to be tuned, but also means that each building can be placed manually.
Since this is going into fantasy-land, there-will-never-be-a-game-like-this territory I might as well throw in procedurally generated game cities. Buildings not manually placed on the map will then be placed on lots produced by an L system. When placed, the building must satisfy certain conditions, like having all corners resting on the ground. For an additional cost, these factories may be submerged a certain degree in the ground. The deeper you bury your factory, the more you must pay. In addition, you will take a slight hit to your factory's maximum output. (This is half to give a use for bunker busting and nuclear missiles)
Placing a building mannually would be done for many reasons. One might be for expediency, as building distance from the city/town's transport hub will increase transport time, and placing it on certain maps in the world will also increase transport time of materials to the battlefield much greater. Convesely, a building too close to active fronts will be in danger of being destroyed. One might want to put buildings somewhere out of the way, camouflaged and hardened (this time with in game representation of these features) in order to produce what is needed for a superfighter or for researching new nuclear weapons designs. In a way, this is about balancing logistics and survivability.
In a way, the game would be fairly similar to numerous interlinked instances of Starcraft, where a multitude of factors count towards end effectiveness. However, unlike Starcraft, one does not have to engage every cog of the machine to play the game, and of course you don't need to micro like Boxer to be king.
You defend resources, you build based on geographical advantage, and you undermine the enemy's strategy by playing your strengths to their weaknesses. This also gives us the added mechanic of region capture. Do you destroy, neutralize or let be a building in a territory that you intend to capture? Destroying it prevents the enemy from using it, but it requires a significant amount of time to demolish and rebuild. Neutralizing a facility may be less time consuming, but not bombing it altogether is cheaper still, but at the cost of giving the enemy more productivity in the case of a loss.
These principles then feed into a game type more akin/friendly to MyHat's pseudo open world proposal, wherein the happenings in one portion of the map affect the other regions, and where the same territory is likely to be revisited many times in different battles. Armed forces are not arbitrary, but limited by the production facilities, barracks and hangars in airbases. And so it would be called Industrial War. The key point is fighting against the attrition of your industrial base by building to counteract it, defending important infrastructure and resources, and damaging the enemy's. In a way, I guess this would probably make this closel related to games of the Total War series in addition to Starcraft, though with more complex goals for battles (destroying a specific strategic target in the map to weaken the enemy vs Total War's defeat of an army to occupy a city).
