During the design and pre-production phases of Nuclear Dawn, a lot of care went into distilling the essence of strategy games, the real time kind, and ensuring that we would be presenting players with an experience that would allow them to focus on the tactical possibilities of building outposts and bases, without getting lost in the impulse of dumping a billion building options on them.
In the frantic, merciless warfare that is every Nuclear Dawn game, commanders need to be able to make snap decisions on how to best protect their troops and assets, without being mired down in pointless technical choices.
The same goes for soldiers on the field, who need clear reference points to respond to their needs, and at one point of the design process, in a far too zealous version of the design documents, a soldier would have had a choice of Hospital, Infirmary, Healing Pad (Apple beat us to that one), Supply Station, and Automated Surgical Post to go heal their war wounds. A bit much? We thought so, too.
Read the full story at: http://www.nucleardawnthegame.com/blog/post/97/base-basics-part-two