[Idea] Strategy game to build and design AI units Thread

Hi everybody,

I wanted to present my idea of a strategy game based on some thoughts about resource harvesters in C&C and Co.

Story is, for the moment, less important, but imagine manking is sending machines to prepare for colonizing planets like Mars. As the leading commander of your mission you are building a base and create your own units to explore, to build, to harvest/mine and to fight. So instead of building and controlling directly, you create units for different purposes and add some commands for their AI like "if ahead road is frea, move forward, else look around". Every unit can be individual and follow another strategy. It can be updated every time you researched something new or add new parts like wings and rotors to fly.

The goal should be a domination on a planet or a region, capturing resources or finishing a construction or else. Or maybe an AI-unit has to recover a capsule with astronauts.

No doubt, I have some influencers like Besiege's crafting system, Creatures for the autonomy of the animals. And yes, everything should be rather simple than complex or offer both, simple for non-coders and a coding-interface for coders.

What do you think?

nucky

I'm still not sure about this AI design thing. Would it be detailed like "if ahead road is frea, move forward, else look around" or generic such as find and kill the leader ?

And also would the game be in real time like C&C? I can't imagine how hard it would be setting AI to multiple units in heat of battle

Or would the game be a puzzle game i.e design AI to multiple units once then press run to run the simulation ?

There would be different approaches, but they develop with the player's progress. At the beginning you'd have a limited number of generic orders. Later you get access to more options (scripts) and you can use the "puzzle pieces" or get deeper into details and make detailed orders. Detailed orders would give you other approaches. You create a script and this can later be added to a unit (remind yourself that the scripts only work if your unit has the right tools - it can't fly if you have no wings or a rotor). Maybe you let it happen like in Scratch.

So you may let build a unit, let say a hover tank in a factory. You select the unit and the script from a list like you did earlier in strategy games.

If you build a unit, you select the script to add. Here I would let users add the script to a virtual chip with limited space to prevent overmighty units. So you have to consider which functions it should use. You can create a legion of multiple units, each has different scripts and they work together. Sure, you'll have ways to interact. But the biggest part of the game let you create or write, refine and assign the character for multiple units. But you have to react with your scripts on challenges in your environment.

I'd like make see it as an RTS, but, if not in multiplayer, you can pause the game.

Maybe it would be a niche game, but it would be interesting I think.

Little update: Human Resource Machine has the approach to "program" employees.

Update 2: A game called Zetawar will use the AI-programming part. And a similar system works for Human Resource Machine.