Ballerium is a Persistent Massive-Multiplayer-Online-Realtime-Strategy-Game, or persistent MMORTS.
Never heard of persistent MMORTS's before? That's because there aren't any around. Yet. Not even those who claim to be such, as we will hereby explain:
Persistent means that the game and its world continue to run all the time – the game is always "on," with players connecting and disconnecting whenever they want, through an internet connection, and while a player is offline, the world continues to exist and evolve. In most cases "Persistent" means that the game world itself is run non-stop.
Ballerium is developed with an enhanced persistency capability, which means that not only is the world always on, but also that players who wish their in-game units to remain continuously active in the world, carrying the user's previously given commands, can do so.
This also takes care of those cases when players are suddenly disconnected from the internet during gameplay, reducing the chances of a loss due to technical reasons.
Massive-Multiplayer means that a LOT of players can play Ballerium at the same time. How much is a lot? There are no real boundaries. Usually games consisting a couple of thousands of players are considered to be massively multiplayer games, while games consisting of several dozens of players aren't.
Ballerium will potentially support an infinite number of players, with the estimated number being a few hundreds of thousands.
Realtime-Strategy (or RTS) means that the gameplay resembles that of the well-known RTS Genre, in which each player builds and commands a number of units, with whom he or she tries to, well, take over the world (or something like that).
Such a game usually involves the obtaining, management and allocation of resources, and waging war.
RTS games rely on realtime rather than turn-based decision-making.
Ballerium tries to extend the genre by reinventing some of the RTS aspects.
