I'm currently working on the AI code to make CPU players attack the cages and go back to their drop points.
After that I will add some randomly spawned cage guards to protect some of the cages.
That's my plan so far and I don't know, if I will do somewhat more.
So to let you know, what features are done so far:
- The cages are spawned randomly over the whole map, but not on impassible terrain and also far from each players drop point.
- The prisoners are selected randomly from a list, when a cage gets destroyed, and then spawned as if they were caught in there. Every race can have more of these lists of prisoners (most of them have 3 or 4) and on startup one of these lists is picked randomly for each player. E.g. you can gather an army full of Wyches and Warp beasts with some of them being elite units from the single player campaigns. Or you can have an army of Hellions and Incubi.
- Also at startup your troops get landed, deepstriked or teleported ingame with randomly selected transports, deepstrike animations and teleport effects. Necrons even stand up from death. And at the end they are teleported back with random effects.
- You can easily modify all this accomplished by an easy setting interface. Every race has its own file, where you can add or modify prisoner lists and the starting squads. You can add new spawn effects, deepstrike and landing animations.
- This interface also supports more complex adjustments. For example Orks get a higher population, since they can't build waagh banners. And for most races I have adjusted the chances for each prisoner list, so you get the default armies more often.
- There are also global settings you can easily change like how many cages should be spawned per player and how many prisoners have to be rescued.
But there's also a big "problem", that I can't fix: You have to play with at least 3 players, since one player has to control the cages. But if you play with only two players, then your game doesn't crash.
In this case it selects just another wincondition randomly and launches it. And what I also have to say is, that you cannot play it, while you have assassination, destroy hq or annihilation running.
