GENRE: old school RTS
PREMISE: Warmidgets is, pretty straightforward, a classic rts in the vein of warcraft 1 & 2, with a couple of twists, first of all, the playable factions, 2 for now, are the dwarves and the goblins, hence the "midgets" in the title, secondly, the entire game or most of it is set underground, as the factions fight for the control of a mountain
GAMEPLAY: gameplay is gonna be pretty much like old warcrafts and many other strategy games from the early 90's, but i do want to have some twists.
First of all, the early warcraft titles had the 2 factions way too much mirrored to each other, i want the dwarves and the goblins to be more distinct from each other.
As the game is gonna be set underground, the resources are gonna be mined from the cave walls, from plain stone to ores, and while there are some renewable resources, these will be not as efficient nor as fast as digging them up from the cave walls.
Cave walls also act as early defenses and could be mined to open new paths, maybe also having the option to turn cave walls into reinforced walls, which make them much stronger but give no resources.
The resources would mostly be mining products, so we will have:
BUILDING MATERIALS: (shortened to BM from now on) these can be stones, they can mined once but gives a fair amount of BM, or from cutting underground trees/mushrooms, these give less resources but they grow back, BM is gonna be the main resource to build structures and basic units
ORES: cave walls may have veins of various metals, ranging from the simple copper and iron to precious ores like silver and gold, higher tier ores give more "ore", (either by being mineable more times, or giving more ores for a single load) (if you are wondering that silver and gold don't make good working metals, just imagine they are being traded for more useful ores).
Ores are gonna be used for almost anything, to create advanced units and buildings as well to research new technologies and upgrades.
An alternative to mining ores from walls would be by using "mine shafts", they are basically the classic "gold mine" from the warcraft games, they have a virtually endless amount of ores, with some caveats, they are very slow compared to digging and there's a limited pool of ores to dig up, more ore can be made available by using BM to "expand" it, an interesting gimmick (or pain in the ass) could be that, after a certain amount of expansions, there's an increasing chance that the shaft will spawn hostile mobs of increasing severity, from annoying cave rats to deep demons, just imagine that they dug too deep.
Mine shafts would be present in limited numbers in maps and cannot be build
MITHRIL: Mithril is the rarest resource and is mined from crystal outcrops, Mithril is gonna be used to for the latest technologies and elite units, possibly even magic.
Mithril will be the least renewable resource, a couple of ideas for acquiring it out of digging would be to either trade BM/ores at very bad rates, something like 100/10 to 1, respectively, or use some form of alchemy to slow turn ores into mithril, still at a bad rate, but slower.
Another possibility could be that the crystal outcrops respawn, either in fixed positions or in random places of the map.
Another possible source yet could come from hunting dangerous neutral mobs
