NCO widget
Posted: 22 Jul 2009, 23:01
The pluggable widgets and the dito AIs in Spring made me think it could be used to finaly realise something that's been missing in RTS games so far - subcommanders.
The idea is simple in theory. Instead of personally controlling every unit like you do in Spring and pretty much every RTS out there, you turn them over to subcommanders and then command them instead, like in a real life military.
To implement this in Spring would be a matter of having a number of AI players that play on your team with your units, so to speak. You actively turn a unit over to an AI, and that unit and every unit produced by that unit (in the case of a factory or similar) is from then on controlled by the AI until you take it back.
The AIs are in turn controlled through some sort of interface, and are given objectives such as "build and maintain economy", "disrupt enemy economy", "air assault" etc. and then be given areas to operate in or vectors to operate on (where applicable).
The AIs already exist, so it would "merely" be a matter of having them concentrate on the one aspect you want them to concentrate on.
It would be extremely nice to be able to set up a lot of this in the pre-game, as well as setting up some variables such as whether the AI is allowed to build new factories, etc. as well as perhaps limiting the percentage of resources they are allowed to use as well as anything else one might like to control. Can't have them running amok on us, can we?
The idea is simple in theory. Instead of personally controlling every unit like you do in Spring and pretty much every RTS out there, you turn them over to subcommanders and then command them instead, like in a real life military.
To implement this in Spring would be a matter of having a number of AI players that play on your team with your units, so to speak. You actively turn a unit over to an AI, and that unit and every unit produced by that unit (in the case of a factory or similar) is from then on controlled by the AI until you take it back.
The AIs are in turn controlled through some sort of interface, and are given objectives such as "build and maintain economy", "disrupt enemy economy", "air assault" etc. and then be given areas to operate in or vectors to operate on (where applicable).
The AIs already exist, so it would "merely" be a matter of having them concentrate on the one aspect you want them to concentrate on.
It would be extremely nice to be able to set up a lot of this in the pre-game, as well as setting up some variables such as whether the AI is allowed to build new factories, etc. as well as perhaps limiting the percentage of resources they are allowed to use as well as anything else one might like to control. Can't have them running amok on us, can we?