@sivan, yeah people suddenly leaving out the team is very common (I heard it alot with big teams/groups on e.g. moddb). I just have seen it to much, big mods/games with lots of potential and already some quality work made that went dead. As a lonewolf, I have also had some dead projects (less with modding, mainly with gs3d ) but in those instances/cases I still have access to all code and models for recycling purposes and time is not wasted since the time invested was mostly in content/code learning or debug experiences which is always usefull for lateron.

Building up pure "online" teams is ridiculously hard.
I can tell from a project where I was part, that communicating via Teamspeak or Netmeeting (and the like - it was back in 2004) can be very exhausting and contra productive for getting some sort of "team feeling".

And this one was pretty well thought out. A lead developer who already had worked on successful projects, picked specific people for all the different roles to be filled, prototypes, task management, gameplay videos... completely different to "hey let's make a team and the next big MMORPG - who's in?"

It is due to the reasons already mentioned by HeelX and the fact that online conversation simply cannot replace or even out do the classic worker room where you meet all your team members real life.
Yeah there are successful online collaborations, I know - but it for sure doesn't make things easier.

Ask George Pirvu about the AUM project which started great and then it all of sudden disappeared. And he had some pretty good guys on this project.

And hopefully this explains why we manage to be productive when we meet real life at AckCon but the rest of the year we sort of fall asleep (or work hard on other projects)

yeah, next time I should probably find some people through friends locally, or I should be picked by someone if once I can make a cool little game demo... fortunately I have a friend working in the industry who might know people who know people who want to do similar crazy stuff in their spare time as me.
unfortunately he found my early works (MapBuilder1 era ~3 years ago) having very basic graphics, and asked me why I don't use UDK instead? the answer was simple, it was too difficult for me.

moreover, good artists (even if doing as a hobby) would not prefer 3dgs over other newer engines, despite 3dgs is suitable for RTS games, as this genre does not require so high graphics details. and I will mainly need artists.
probably if I would do exactly the same with UE4, they would find it more attracting and promising, despite it should miss some features currently impossible to implement with UE4 (e.g. runtime terrain deformation), but would look visually nicer than what I could ever create with 3dgs (e.g. terrain, vegetation, and lighting in general).

I had no success of being hired either
But I had some talks to people who left the industry and it surely didn't sound like the holy grail. So I'm very unsure what to do. I like what I can do with private projects which usually turn into non designed hack almost instantly, but working in the industry is not like this (for very good reasons).
All I miss is a small team. Doing all alone sometimes leaves a dull "I didn't arrive yet" feeling. If you know what I mean.

to be honest I want to keep it as a hobby, but a serious one. I worked a lot with my editor and the corresponding game, and now I can see my future of development (most things are planned step by step), so it would be great to make a completed game within a few years, but I can't do all the graphics and programming... without a team I need to do a lot of simplifications and should use stolen graphics

I started with stealing by using free mocap animations. Now after setting up the movement animations in Unity I found out, the walk anim I grabbed is some girlie walk... argh

, if it's only artists you need I would say just build a simple prototype/demo of your rts and use placeholder models (free/stolen whatever just so long your project is still non-commercial). Place it on some sites with some pics and videos (or only pics and videos). Than I think you will have a larger chance attracting modelers/artists since people already see that progress has been made (compared to asking people to join right from the bat).

I don't really see why it is a big deal than to work with GS3d. Stuff like interface can be kept simple with mainly some icons and bars. And graphics can still be good as long as the models and textures are decent. Lots of flashy shader stuff etc. is irritating anyway in rts games (it mostly distracts and makes everything so unclear), just some good hdr and good shadows (and perhaps gore) would be suffice I think. Just keep the camera fairly high with screenies and videos and I think it will do fine with a nice clean and clear graphics style.

Speaking as someone who actually DID put together an unpaid team to build a long-term project (2 years), I can say in my case, it required several months of prototyping work to set a firm foundation of the game for everyone else to go off of before I started looking for a team to help develop the game. Most people take the opposite approach and try building a team before there's a firmly established look and concept. At least on the internet, this does not work.

But once I had those prototypes and prealphas, all I had to do was locate interested individuals with free time on their hands. This was not hard to do.

Once I started bringing on more team members I was required to write a fairly extensive design document that covered as many mechanics in detail as possible, and the team did rely on this to some extent to figure out where the game was going and what needed to be done to get there. Still, the usefulness of this document lessened as the months passed and everyone on the team got a feel for what the game was about.

The other thing is: we kept in contact all the time. As a team, we never met in person, but the fact that we all regularly used skype was invaluable in keeping the team in touch.

What some people don't realize is that being the leader of a team, particularly one that is underpaid or undermotivated, you HAVE to be the one who performs the brunt of the work on the project. People are motivated when they see things getting done, and this is where Barony's design was key: aside from the music, I had made the game such that, if necessary, I could build it entirely by myself. And when team members were sick or lacked drive or were too busy to contribute, I picked up the mantle and did the work myself.

That's not to understate the contributions of my team members, because they all contributed greatly to the project in various ways (my programmer ended up putting probably 20,000 lines to the finished codebase, my composer wrote nearly two hours of music, my modeler created a dozen different voxel creatures... this is hard work)

BUT, all that being said, I'm still responsible for probably a good 50% of the finished product. Other than music, I touched everything, from models to sounds to textures to code and so forth.

Barony got a lot of help from others but it is very much my game.

So in the end, the strength of a project and the strength of a team really boils down to the capabilities of the one who's leading it. If you're having leadership problems, the likely cause is that the person who is meant to be in charge isn't doing their job and isn't working hard enough. I really can't stress that enough.

Of course that means you have to be well-balanced as an individual to do all these things... and I am not claiming in the least to be perfectly well-balanced. For example, I don't have a lot of skill artistically, which is why I chose to go with a low-res voxelly style for my game, only now my game gets a bad rap for looking like Minecraft. During the last 10% of development we put an easter egg in the game lampooning this criticism, but that is absolutely our biggest weakness and it is something I'm going to work very hard to not repeat in my next game.

The bottom line is: leading a team requires you to be honest, to take responsibility, to work harder than anyone else, to have a clear vision, and to have no question that you're going to finish the game. If you don't have those things you're better off just working on little projects by yourself, or joining a team that has good leadership and doing the little work that falls to you. That's about all there is to it...

@Redeemer Thank you for the information and relaying your experience. I didn't want to rip a bunch of quotes, but your advice is very welcomed by me.

probably it was my 1st big mistake.
the 2nd is the email only communication (I couldn't solve skype from job and no time at home).
so decided to do it again if will have something working.