the game on the other hand is painful slow paced; ground units move slowly and build very very slowly in comparison to the time it takes them to die in combat
So, you're saying you'd prefer a system where they built maybe a bit more slowly than they do now, but also died a lot more slowly?
I'm not sure that would be an improvement, but that's just me. It'd make it more nub-friendly, which would probably be a good thing... but it would also lose a lot of the charm- everything would be slowed down a lot, range wouldn't matter as much as raw damage output, and it'd generally feel less like a fast-paced game, which I think would hurt it on the maps that it really shines on (small ones).
Does anybody else have strong feelings on that? Making a mutator to double / treble hitpoints and double / treble build-times to compensate would be easy enough, I suppose I could do that.
However, I heard enough whining about how it's so "hard" to raid with a prior version, which I thought was rather off-base... unless by "raid" we mean, "rush nubs completely out in the first 3 minutes", which the game's purposefully designed to make hard. With even basic turrets up, it should be very hard to rush. Porcing early can and should be a perfectly-valid strat, although in the longer term, it shouldn't work vs. units with large enough range advantages, and in fact that's the way it works right now- try, just for giggles, each type of unit vs. each type of turret, and you'll see that, other than a couple of units which are just plain useless for rushing against defenses (the poor Soldier Shells, in particular), that your results vary widely, depending on what you use.
Personally, I like it when things die quickly, like StarCraft and the infantry from the old C&C, and I'm not a really big fan of "you can start firing at my tank, and it will take 30 seconds to die". Real modern combat is very fast and very violent. I like the way that a rush that's not built right to counter what's in place just disintegrates, myself. It's in keeping with the OTA feel of things, where once you had some serious ground-defenses, you'd see rushes get splattered quite quickly, if you didn't build the right stuff.
On the whole AI issue... I'll take a look at the LuaAI for KP at some point.
I still think that the entire reason AI development is moribund is largely because they've been navel-gazing, and not utilizing Lua to do it properly. Nine months later... no new AI development has occurred. AF, you talk about this great reorganization Hoijoi did, and I'm sure it's great.
However, since you then claim, and have been saying for months that AI development is essentially a dead letter (RAI now plays Overmind, btw, yay), why am I then supposed to reveal nitty-gritty details of my game design in public, if it will just be horribly misunderstood, involve arguments about things, and in the end not cause AI development to actually happen?
There's a chicken-and-egg thing here- you're asking me for chickens, but I don't see any eggs. Not real excited about stepping forward, considering that I don't hear anything solid... moreover, much of this is not set in stone, I'm having this little public discussion because game-balance changes are easy to implement, for the most part- it's the mechanics that are a pain in the arse. Since I have some fundamental mechanics built, the question is, do I use them, or not? I'm inclined to try them out, just to see what the larger reaction is, than to just let the idea sit collecting dust, frankly.
At any rate, it's my belief that we really need a general framework AI, built with Lua, that's easy to patch new behaviors into. I just don't think I have the time to tackle that one. A basic cheating AI, that doesn't even pretend to give people a fair fight, but is really stupid, sure.