Note:
This is a high-level game concept (introduced at later stage)
Castle Age and Gangster War got a very similar army building methods, where you invite other players to join you (thus increase your army size). Your army strength is determined by your army size and total equipment (each army member to take up the best equipment available), and perhaps your personal stats as well.
The concept of army building is interesting (besides personal strength building), but the process of asking other players to join your army is pretty pointless. It doesn’t foster relationship or cooperation, which everyone just tries to mindlessly increase the army size as fast as possible by utilizing forums, Facebook or world chats (posting your id and ask others to add you). Those who didn’t figure out this trick will lose out drastically.
Another thing is the calculation of Army Strength is not transparent (some logical hint, but it doesn’t always add up), thus all we could do is to continuously increase the army size and equipment (which is not very satisfying).
RPG is always about personal development and fighting (active fighting, where your control is required) based on your personal stat and equipment. Army building adds another layer of strategy twist to the game, where to recruit other players (or NPC) to perform a passive fighting (no physical control is required – player can be away, and stat plays an important role). In a space themed game, the RPG-ship will perform mission (active fighting), while the Strategy-army helps to defend city or play offensive (passive fighting) in a fraction’s missions.
What is the better way to recruit army? There are 2 approaches, either to recruit Player or NPC. To recruit player, we should not allow it to recruit just anybody easily. We need to keep track of Player to Player relationship score, where the score will increase if we perform mission together, assist, donate, defend, etc. It helps to really appreciate and know our friend list (and motivated to help them as our own interest), rather than just party with new people every day and forgotten who we played with yesterday. Once the relationship had reached a certain level, army joining is allowed.
Another approach is building relationship with NPC or specific races, where they shall provide us with certain number of army once our relationship score reach a certain level. We accomplish missions provided by the NPC and wouldn’t attack them to very tempting short-term benefit.
As our character level, we shall be able to recruit more army. Each army could be equipped with certain equipment. Some depth could be interesting, but it should be kept simple to avoid nuisance once the army grow in size. Perhaps the army is like a Mech, where we craft special Mech machine for them.
The next question is should the army or the equipment usable in RPG mode (personal mission), or it should be a totally separate matter? We could make the Mech usable as drones on the main ships, thus we can choose to leave the Mech to perform missions on their own (passive), or bring them on board for our personal missions. To avoid over complexity, the Mech should not be customizable like the main Ship, but we have Schematic/Blueprint to craft a better Mech (good Modules can be sacrificed as raw material for a Good Mech?).
So each army consists of a soldier (Player or NPC, passive representation) and a Mech, where extra Soldier without a Mech is useless, while extra Mech could be used on board the main ship (or different Mech for different purpose, e.g. Mining, Repair, etc). The army should be kept to be a smaller size (max 12, average 2-6) to allow more personalization and appreciation. Each soldier would have a certain stats (no experience though), as well as the Mech.
