I'm considering starting up a Kickstarter Campaign of my own...

Well I wasn't aware of that you see until someone here told me, I'm not a greedy person, nor a liar, but make whatever assumptions you want. Now that I know of the free version not being as limited as I thought I probably won't even do a KS. :S

What about the 5% that can't be done? squishy's just meant to drop that?

How are you defining "greedy" in this instance? Because I'm pretty sure commercial licenses favour the product owner.

Never said you were are greedy person or liar in general, in fact you're being honest, which is totally the opposite.

No, didn't say that either. I'm sure squishy'll purchase it eventually.

Greedy because squishy didn't try out the free or the trial version, immediately wanted to get a pirated version of the full engine, without actually knowing the features that comes with the payed version... Greedy because getting all the features immediately, without knowing that the free version isn't actually that limited. Greedy because squishy didn't look up anything about the free or the trial version at first, and immediately decided to things... the pirate way.

Commercial licenses do favor the product owner, when it's legit.

@stonewood1612 that's not entirely true, I just misunderstood how the free version worked.

Fun fact: when you call someone all of that, you are, in fact, calling them a greedy person

(yes, your defense was a poor attempt at disguising the insult in your words)

That isn't what greed is. Not trying something out doesn't make you greedy. Wanting more than you need is being greedy - but there is no knowledge here for what squishy actually needs. You're judging a poster despite knowing sweet sod all about their requirements.

So please, judge less.

I was in a hurry. Excuse me.

First, I think you misunderstood this:

With that I was talking about "dropping the 5%" you said. I'm just pointing out that 95% of your work can be done in the free version.

Absolutely. But in this situation, trying something out would be trying out the free or the trial of the pro version. Here, the full-feature and expensive version was acquired illegally immediately without trying things out legit, so that's kinda greedy when you can have a lot for free and legit. But ok, squishy misunderstood how the free version worked... should have gathered more information before attempting stuff like this. Sorry it's not greedy in this case, yet a case of being too fast. I don't mean this as insult. It's rather a bad habit, if you do things too fast without getting information first.

The thing is, this full version comes with everything. Do we know squishy needs everything? We don't. I'm afraid squishy doesn't know either. So in this case, squishy is probably grabbing more than needed, which following your definition, would be greedy. But that's another assumption of mine, and as you said, I don't a "sweet sod" about their requirements, so... (fill in for your self, I'm out of inspiration )

I forgive you. I hope this is a lesson for the future (of some sorts)

Also huzah for @tags giving alerts properly.

Also, I just got an email announcing that a new survey about Unity has just started. If you participate, you can win a pro license. Good luck!

Saucy sauce? :>

There is a lot of stuff that the Pro version contains. Important things would be global illumination, LOD support, GPU skinning, deferred rendering and a few others. I also know from experience that the free version of the water package was . . . . limited. I've heard they improved it since I last used it, but I don't know what extent.

Also, your comprehension of English is only a talking point if you concede that you were, in any way, wrong. You even condescendingly "forgave" squishy - how egotistical can you get? Your forgiveness has no power over the poster. Jesus.

This is what I take issue with, and you don't understand it so I'll just leave it here, no worries

Would the pro version be the one worth getting started with as it contains vital features?

Also, have you got any opinion on the Unreal Engine and how it compares to Unity?

Bare in mind we're talking about mobile games. Is it vital, not just good, to have the stuff in the pro version right away to start off? Only squishy can tell us, not me or you.

And why am I being selfish in your eyes? And are you 100% I don't understand? You told me not to judge, but now you're judging me. edit: I honestly don't want to discuss this anymore.

I only meant that to give one reason why my defense was poor.

True, but should it be better to not say anything then? I just meant it as an apologize. :/
Please, you keep biting my nose off whenever I say anything. You're taking my words too seriously, this is a forum, it's hard to express your emotions exactly and how serious you are looking at the situation, and you never really know how a person will understand your post, they usually won't in the way you exactly pretended. You think I'm wrong, and you want me to concede I'm wrong, but you understood me wrong, partly because you took it a little too serious. But maybe I should have kept it more simple and just said "Well I don't like pirating, so I don't trust this", instead of mentioning that I found it an act of greed, to make sure it would have been understood properly. This wouldn't have happened otherwise.

Can I call this conversation full stop, please? I need to regrow my nose.

I'm of the opinion that if you want to make a competitive entry of a niche genre in the mobile market, you need to stand out. You need everything you can possibly leverage.

For messing around? Learning to build a game? Building something casual? Building a free game with microtransactions? It's not vital that you use the Pro version. But in an environment where every advantage counts (especially as you can market those points individually)? I'd definitely recommend the Pro version.

I really don't have much UE4 (or UE3) knowledge. From what I know, it's possibly a more solid/advanced engine (it used to be definitively better, but Unity 4 has brought significant improvements to the product - not sold on Unity 5 yet), but the learning curve is somewhat higher.

See above; I explained why I think some of the features are useful.

Mobiles games in themselves aren't second-class products. In order to break public perception of mobile games being second-class, the games themselves need to be developed with quality in mind.

Only squishy can tell us what's useful with regards to the game being designed. But the features I highlighted will be useful for most games; I deliberately avoided very subjective choices. I'd pick them myself.

It's quite a bit cheaper though.

The new pricing plan is pretty swish; I've been tempted by it myself!

That said, that implies continuous development. If you don't work on it for a month or three, you're wasting credit, or you should cancel the subscription.

I have no time for serious project work though at the moment. I stick to building stuff in Java whenever I can. Recently re-installed Unity, might play around making some scenes in that.

For this project, it would be useful to start with open-source projects that could either be used as a starting codebase, or to help to explain how the essentials are done to coders who don't have much experience with game programming.

Don't burn yourself on KS if you are not 100% sure of the viability of your project.

You ask money for a computer and software licenses. That's 5% of game costs.
How will you live during the development time? If you don't need money it means you won't be working fulltime on this, so this means it's a hobbyist project.
I won't fund anything half baked, rushed, without a clear schedule, too good to be true, or a game that just will buy all from Unity's store. It's too risky to invest on it.
Just use Unity free to make some alpha first, don't rush into KS because it's not the right time. You don't need Unity Pro right now. Once you get some working demo, you can tease on forums what people thinks about the alpha. If it's favorable, then yes, go to KS with a solid project, working alpha+solid schedule. Only then buy the pro tools.

You need to have a clear view of the amount of work, both in time and money.
Split the work in smaller parts, and try to account how much it would take any of these.
-Programming: Units behaviour, AI, buildings, victory conditions.
-Music.
-Visuals: Main Menu, UI, graphic effects
-3D Models (graphics, sounds, animations): Try to measure the time it takes each model. I don't think 1 single model would take less than 2 weeks of work. You need to model, add skeleton, add textures, animation, sounds,....
-Balancing.
-Multiplayer? You'd need networking, sync's, some social stuff, anticheat, cloud info, etc.. This is really hard and costly.

You can save time by buying things on asset store, but that costs money.

I'm not sure how far you've gone through this thread, but I agree that using the free version- at least to work on an alpha would be a very good plan to go with before asking for anyone's money. I don't need the money to live off of because I'm living with family at the moment.

Though I'm glad you realize KS money doesn't just go into the engine and the game specifically, and that it also goes into things like bills and the like.

Of course KS money is to fund a project, at many levels (not just the obvious game). People need to live, and if they are working on a project they won't have any other income. Otherwise that means it's a hobbyist project, and those have high chances of failure (more as a lone wolf programmer).
I just want to point out that developing a whole game it's a lot of work, be sure to measure all the time it takes to make it. If you are sure you can spend hundreds of hours on the project (maybe a whole year of work), then go ahead.

I think your idea of getting a start together first is a good one.

I personally would *love* to get a real RTS game on android, though be aware the power of phones and tablets these days means you could probably run TA just fine (e.g. just take a look at 'Open TTD' on android- it's the full game and performance *isn't* the problem)...

The real issue with a game like this on android is simple- the interface.

Open TTD on android *totally sucks* unless you plug a mouse in (fun fact most people don't know, if you have a micro usb- to usb adaptor you can use a real mouse on an Android phone or tablet ).

The issue is though, when I have played it on my phone, I don't have a mouse to hand. It *needs* to work on the touch screen. Now the strategy games you get on android (or IOS) currently are all limited to simple operations, basic management. You can't individually select units and move them, or group select, or anything like that. RTS requires precise controls.

Now *if* you could come up with a control scheme that would allow you to play this type of game, on touch screen, without removing all the fun game-play then you'd have my support. This *isn't* a small undertaking though.

As a starting point I think it would be at least partially possible if you simplified the UI massively by *turning most of it off most of the time* and used context switching. So if you have units selected, *only their controls are visible in large buttons* leaving the rest of the screen real estate available for units. That would give you the basics. The next issue is how to you deal with navigating the map? I guess gestures but when I've tried games that do this the results are less than ideal.

Pacing will be a real issue too- basically numbers of units and performance aren't the issue (modern phones are actually a lot more powerful than the machines that TA ran on when it came out- a Pentium 100 in my case). The game will need to be quite slow, to allow people time to deal with the slow interface.

Essentially if you want to run a successful KS campaign, you'll need a definitive and well thought out plan in place. It's a lot of work. If your serious enough about it though, well I think there is a market there waiting to be tapped into.

@cdrkf I think I'll work up some concept images of ui and show them off here later.