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[Radica1Faith]

I'm working on a simple browser based MMO RTS using PHP + mySQL. www.jetpackfandango.com
It nothing exciting yet, just plain text, and the ability to build one type of unit, gain income overtime etc. And I was wondering (forgive me if this is the wrong place to ask) if anyone had any examples of simple mass battle systems I could look at to get inspiration, like the ones used in other MMO browser based rts's.

[Radica1Faith]

found a good one, if anyone is interested.
http://www.farlandworld.com/battle.html

[bateleur]

I've not looked into this sort of thing much, but one piece of advice I'd give you from when I used to play tabletop wargames (really quite a lot) is to make sure you leave your system flexible enough to adjust in response to playtesting.

Any game with multiple unit types needs weeks and weeks of playtesting to get it reasonably balanced. During this time things will go wrong and if you have no way to adjust the game in response then you're stuck with something that won't play well. (And not everything can be fixed with stat tweaks.)

[Matt Thorson]

Just something I noticed: You game probably isn't an RTS if it's being coded with just PHP and MySQL.  RTS stands for 'Real Time Strategy'.  You're probably looking for 'Turn-Based Strategy'.

[Radica1Faith]

Just something I noticed: You game probably isn't an RTS if it's being coded with just PHP and MySQL.  RTS stands for 'Real Time Strategy'.  You're probably looking for 'Turn-Based Strategy'.

I call it an RTS since you don't have turns, you can send your units out at any time you want, without having to wait for another persons turn.

[Radica1Faith]

I've not looked into this sort of thing much, but one piece of advice I'd give you from when I used to play tabletop wargames (really quite a lot) is to make sure you leave your system flexible enough to adjust in response to playtesting.

Any game with multiple unit types needs weeks and weeks of playtesting to get it reasonably balanced. During this time things will go wrong and if you have no way to adjust the game in response then you're stuck with something that won't play well. (And not everything can be fixed with stat tweaks.)

Don't worry I thought ahead for this one. I made sure that to do any balancing, all I have to do is simply edit the values on a stats table that contains the stats for every unit.