I just thought of the best idea for a squad level strategy and business management game ever, Manager your own SWAT team! Options

[Wounded Ronin]

This morning while I was drinking coffee and feeling groggy the best idea evar came to me for a combination squad level strategy and business management game. The basic idea would be that the mafia or terrorists or someone come to a small US city without a lot of resources and initially the SWAT team is under-funded, under-equipped, and staffed by mediocre operators. Until the bad guys came to town the SWAT team never had any missions for the most part and existed mostly as a formality.

The squad level strategy aspect would be obvious; defeat the bad guys in various scenarios using the SWAT operators in a turn-based or real-time format such that you can have operators cover various fields or clear rooms and so forth in a coordinated manner. The more unusual aspect would be the business aspect; the player needs to manage the SWAT team, purchase better equipment, hire more operators, and so on.

However, there would be more complexity in terms of expenses. If a SWAT operator is killed or injured the player must cover the medical bills or death benefits from the available budget. If a civilian is injured there's a certain random chance the civilian would sue, which would cost money for legal defense, lawsuit insurance, and so on. Even if bad guys are killed as opposed to arrested maybe there's a random chance the ACLU will get pissed off and try to sue your SWAT organization as well. Each SWAT operator would have a "charisma" score that would affect how likely lawsuits or criminal charges concerning that officer could "stick" in court. So for example, maybe one of the crappy operators you start the game with is a petite blonde white woman with mediocre skills and attributes. However, because of her nonthreatening appearance and her being pretty everyone gives her the benefit of the doubt in the courtroom so her one redeeming quality is she'd have a high "charisma" score. As a counterexample, maybe one of the potential operators is a massively overweight Texan who wears a cowboy hat and uses lots of politically incorrect language. He's tough as hell and has terrific firearms skills but in the coutroom everyone thinks he's racist and trigger happy so he has a poor "charisma" score.

The way I see it, the game could be like a more complex, less retarded version of Deadline: http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/deadline_

That Deadline sucked because it was extremely unrealistic and the controls were probably the worst I've seen ever in a RTS game. But it had the idea of combining a little bit of administration and politics with RTS squad level combat.

I'm imagining something with a more simulationistic RTS aspect but also some humor, and a well developed business administration and legal/political angle.