Multiplayer

I am not really intending to support multi player in the Mandate Engine. Multiplayer is the big contributor to the e-sportizing of RTS games and of the games in its related genres. I expect my first game of 50 campaign missions to take something on the order of 400 hours to complete. The time scale is there for a lot of reasons that are critical to my vision. This means that the game's main 2 factions, player and enemy, not the actual names, will have tech curves not really suitable for 30 minute multiplayer matches, although I suppose you could play them that way if you really wanted.

Multiplayer is also quite difficult to program for, both the game data and security and isn't an area of programming I particularly enjoy.

Mandate will have powerful campaign creation tools as well as the initial 400 hour campaign as well as the campaigns for the other 6 games. In addition there will be some high quality random map and freestyle options going on as well as one off scenario tools.

I know the majority of gamers prefer multi player but it makes getting really deep systems not based on human interaction difficult by adding significant dev time per new feature.