Someone close once told me that a reason they don't like RTS games is because you always build everything just to start over again. I remembered that as I was thinking of an idea for MG earlier today. I doubt this would be possible to do in practice, but still wanted to comment the idea.
When you destroy all enemy players, you get a message saying "You have won, press OK to quit". But what if there was a way to have a game that never ends? Whenever you defeat your enemies, new ones appear, who also develop and eventually fight you. This could be achieved by having each defeated player start over again instead of being booted from the game, with the default units and resources. In single player, people could save such games and play them for as long as they want like a story. In multiplayer, people could fight over conquering a map for weeks, each defeated player having the ability to return and build a new nation which will fight the victorious player again. Unfortunately there are at least two major issues which likely make this impossible:
First one is that a new player would be severely underpowered on a map where an evolved player already exists. We couldn't simply have a faction with one castle & 3 workers appear, when a player which has an army of hundreds could simply walk to them and wipe them out in a second. There would need to be some way to keep the victorious player from harming a newly created player until they're strong enough, but any way I can imagine would be an ugly hack.
Second issue is resources. Supposing the defeated player already mined all the gold at his spawn location, the new nation taking his place wouldn't have any gold to mine. So the only way would be all resources getting reset whenever a new faction "arrives" to the map. But what if a building or unit is standing where a forest that was harvested used to be, when attempting to place the trees back? Once again, likely impossible since any solution would be weird.
Still, I'm hoping the idea might be inspiring and someone could think of a system for a "continuous mode". In real life, every empire that fell had another taking its place. Either a larger empire divided itself, or new people came and made their own. Being able to simulate this in Glest games would be pretty neat
