You might find folks to help you with that project, but lets work the business mechanics a bit to see if you could get it funded.
$10/month - So how much load does the game put on a server? And what sized server? That's important because if you have a bunch of dedicated AWS instances they can cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars a month, if you put them on demand you will have to figure out the latency issues.
The game is going to change quickly, and as you said its multiplayer and 'persistent maps' so lots of memory? Recovery if you lose a machine in the middle of the game? And a staff of Game Masters who can help angry 11 yr olds trying to get their 'Mom's crappy Dell' to play the game with a decent frame rate.
To put it a different way, I would love to play that game too, and I would pay $10 a month, but could I run it at $10 a month in at least a cash flow break-even mode? Turn based games are easier with their arbitrary latency allowance, RTS gets to be less easy. Especially if one player lagging out freezes the map for everyone? So perhaps the game engine isn't the challenging part, perhaps the backend stack is a harder challenge, or the support infrastructure. I don't know but I wonder about that some times.
Continuous value could be added from a few game mechanics:
1. Games could have a true end. One faction wins, game over, server reset.
2. Different maps. Could be worked in the "game over" scenario or could be running concurrently.
3. Different "ages": the game code could adequately work with past, present and futuristic units, giving users different experiences when they play.
As for AWS costs, I really have no idea the kind of load you would get from that game, but given a C3.xlarge is about $175 a month (or less for reserved), I'd be shocked to hear that you cannot serve at least 175 concurrent users from that server-- giving about $1500 a month profit per server utilized. IMO dev costs, engineer time etc will far far outstrip the infrastructure costs.
Of course you could. Only need 100,000 to be making a million a month and in RTS you use deterministic simulations which require little juice to run. It's completely different to a FPS.
The reason you probably won't get funded is that it's hard to make a fun game which lasts.
$10/month - So how much load does the game put on a server? And what sized server? That's important because if you have a bunch of dedicated AWS instances they can cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars a month, if you put them on demand you will have to figure out the latency issues.
The game is going to change quickly, and as you said its multiplayer and 'persistent maps' so lots of memory? Recovery if you lose a machine in the middle of the game? And a staff of Game Masters who can help angry 11 yr olds trying to get their 'Mom's crappy Dell' to play the game with a decent frame rate.
To put it a different way, I would love to play that game too, and I would pay $10 a month, but could I run it at $10 a month in at least a cash flow break-even mode? Turn based games are easier with their arbitrary latency allowance, RTS gets to be less easy. Especially if one player lagging out freezes the map for everyone? So perhaps the game engine isn't the challenging part, perhaps the backend stack is a harder challenge, or the support infrastructure. I don't know but I wonder about that some times.