So, I was thinking today... the purpose of the AI commanding an individual ship is to automatically do what the ship does best. Let's use a Garda Flak Frigate as an example. We are fighting a battle in which we have a star base and our opponent is sieging our planet, and we're sending ships in from a nearby planet to help turn the tide. If we send our Garda Flak Frigate in, it will auto-target some strike craft. But perhaps we don't want that; maybe we want our flak to shoot over to our star base and defend it because we anticipate a large strike craft presence in the future and we want to be ready. Currently, there is no way for this but to select each Flak Frigate that we want to use for defending our base, manually place it where it's needed, and then set its engagement range to not attack. What I propose, is to create an option to manually set the AI's responses to various situations.
So, keeping with our past example, let's say we use our new tool to change a selected number of our frigates to, upon entering a contested gravity well, fly to the defense of a friendly star base. This will continue to apply until we change it again. Therefor, we lose no time in awkward flight paths when we enter the well and increase our efficiency.
This applies for all sorts of ships across all sorts of fields. For instance:
- We're building two fleets in the same gravity well. We may set one frigate factory to assign its creations to one fleet leader, and the other to assign its ships to another.
- Setting fleet leaders to take their components with them in pursuing a certain ship or ship type out of the gravity well.
- Setting that we want a certain enemy ship (maybe scouts) to be ignored in favor of holding our position, while any other ship would be followed throughout the gravity well.
- Dictating the creation of a certain building by programming the AI of a constructor to automatically build a certain number of specific structures when the resources become available.
- Setting ships to patrol between planets by having them jump to a given place once they reach another -- this could be looped by setting "If at planet A jump to planet B" and "If at planet B jump to planet A" at the same time.
- Having certain ships join fleets while others do not -- for instance, if we have auto-join fleet activated, and we build a scout at the gravity well, it will by default join. But we don't want this, so we'll have to manually remove each one unless the fleet leader is set to only accept a given kind (or even number) of ships. Conversely, we may be building a fleet consisting of a bombing capital ship and a large number of bombers and anti-structure ships for the purpose of sieging an enemy position. By default, if we place the capital ship on auto-join fleet, most ships built in the well or stopping there will join the fleet, not including anti-structure. If we change the capital ship's programming, we can have it only accept bombers and anti-structure ships to build the fleet we want without some absurd amount of micromanaging.
- Setting the default targets of ships to other potential targets without micromanagement. As an example, consider a Vasari fleet of 1 capital ship and 10 Assailants, meeting in battle with an Advent fleet of 15 Illuminators and 2 scouts. By default, the Assailants will ignore the obviously more important LR Frigates in favor of the useless and insignificant scouts, while the capital ship takes all of the Advent's fire and may put the stronger Vasari fleet at a large disadvantage. Simply changing the default target could change the tide of a battle.
- Setting the use of abilities to more specific moments. For example, the use of the Scramble Bombers ability of the Vasari Carrier capital ship versus the use of the Repair Cloud ability on the same ship -- we may want to use Repair Cloud in favor of Scramble Bombers for reasons currently not considered in the AI, such as perhaps number of ships Repair Cloud would target or the potential bomber use based on the number and type of ships in the well (or vice-a-versa). Or maybe for some reason we even want to auto-use Scramble Bombers even when there are no enemy ships in the well in anticipation of an impending attack. Another pressing use of this may be the setting of the Auto-Scout ability of scout ships to avoid or favor certain wells, such as taking slightly longer routes through enemy territory or avoiding the pirate base (because as every player knows, scout + pirates = sad).
These are rather dramatic changes, relatively, but I think they're key to increasing realism and fun, as well as dramatically increasing the strategics of the choices that would, in real war, be made by officers ranking lower than the player, who is apparently currently expected to fill the role of every position from Supreme General to Private First Class.
I realize that it may seem to some that this would decrease the stress on the player and thus make the game less fun -- I disagree. The stress on the player in an RTS should be in strategically deciding what to do to overcome the enemy and win the game, NOT in telling each individual ship what to do every time anything on the map changes. Besides, in dynamically changing the AI, there would still be more than enough to do at any given time.
On an unrelated note, can we PLEASE see an option to, upon turning off the pirates in a game, also see the removal of their base from the map? They're nothing but annoying and a large disadvantage to whoever has to deal with them.
Thanks! I'm glad to play such a game where I feel that what I say may be seriously considered by the people that count, as well as by the people that will help shape it into something truly usable.
