Battle Plans /Defences Plans /Looping order

I have an interesting game mechanic/idea Battle Plan. The ability to plan and execute basic or complex battle engagement of one base or scale of the galaxy.
Setting up bombing run
setting up priority target
setting what unit attack what (building/unit)

To balance Battle Plans recommend Defence Plans, a default plan (basic or complex) that you base follow when attack, so you do not need to micro every defence and give you time to get back to your base, the galaxy is a big place.


So what do you think remember very basic overview

I think a decent AI that you can issue orders to could take care of this, i.e. set up a defence base here, attack that base over there etc, I dunno... too vague perhaps?

This is so wrong. You shouldn't have an AI building things or executing attacks for you... These things should depend on the player's skills, not on who can execute the most simultaneous AI attacks.

every RTS game i played starting with CnC has one thing i common your unit are idiot, the unit chase the enemy back to base and die or sit their being shot not moving.

Example defence Plan
On enemy attack
spy plane scout area
bomber attack long ranged units (artillery)
tank engage enemy Do Not Move (beyond Turret range) rebuild any destroy units.

Hope this is less vague, it's 1am here ZZZzzzzzz

Why not? Not sure if it really fits with this game, but I don't see it as being wrong in any way. Actually, it would be the next logical step in the macro-fication of an RTS: giving orders to "generals" that do things. I'd really love it if I could do something like that in SupCom. For mass points further away, be able to tell an engineer "make defensive base here" like Sorian's AI does.

Or, tell the AI to build units for an attack and leave you to build the perfect base yourself, or any other stuff. And of course, you could still have direct control, but as an option I'd love it.

Are there any games out there that actually implement this kind of control that I could use as a reference?

I think what you want is best achieved by implementing this

I was just thinking about how many bases you would have to manage over multiple planets, you would need a little help, and it should be less efficent than if you did it yourself so you wouldn't gain an advantage.

But if it's a bad idea, so be it.

Edit:

Yeah, i agree with this, gives you more control but still automates the ordering process.

Something like that is a great idea!

One of the best things about TA was it's intuitive UI... Why would we want a bot doing everything for us. I'd actually like to PLAY this game you know.

Distant Worlds is a real time space 4x that has something *like* it. In that game, your side has a full AI in control, bits of which you can turn off or say "don't touch". If you wish, you can let the AI take over *everything*; it will colonize, build resources, build military, do diplomatic trades, and if you let it, will even declare war and stage invasions!

In some areas, the AI is better than people simply due to attention and its existance is critical to entire game despite it being singleplayer only and pausable. Distant Worlds is the kind of space 4x that is like an RTS with a 2048x2048 map. Past the first couple of colonies, micromanagement of even 'important' things like colonization gets impossible very rapidly. By the middle of my exponential colonization phase, I was colonizing a new planet roughly every ten seconds, a new resource point every few and about 10 ships / second or so. In a full galaxy, my empire had roughly 4 thousand individual military ships, with their own patrol routes, home bases and collectively responding to pirate activity and various threats.
The AI would take a fleet and go stomp a pirate base without me telling it to, an action that I would micromanage the hell out of at the start became a "oh, that again" action towards the end because one happened every in-game month (roughly a minute or two IRL).

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However commands and goals to the AI are few and far between, though myriad options for customizing behaviour exist.
They have this thing called stances and goals, which is something like you request. There is an option to take a fleet and tell it, protect this territory or capture this planet and the AI would find a way, including repair/refuel and call reinforcements. It is a very limited sort of control however, due to a very short and simple goal list (basically attack/defend and the engagement range)

Googling Distant Worlds look good

Bringing up the AI in Distant Worlds as a case study is very interesting. The gameplay itself was wonderful, but it felt like the game engine wasn't able to fully meet the challenge of large-scale 4X. In DW, the AI was able to automate many many things for you, but it was often impossible to configure it to do what I wanted. (Maybe I just didn't know how to play the game right.) The UI allows you to manually control everything but it wasn't optimized enough for large-scale games. In any event, this left me very unhappy because I liked playing large-scale games but they always grew into micromanagement hell. Being pausable, I could still do everything that I wanted, but that involved so many redundant UI actions from the user. Having user scripts would have solved many of my problems, but obviously that would have serious complications for a multiplayer realtime game like PA.

I know, the AI in DW lacks a certain something and a human micromanaging anything at all will perform better than the AI. Whether it is colonization priorities, facility and troop building, locating resource mines, diplomacy, battles. Anything at all, even a relatively inexperienced human will do FAR better than the DW AI.

The AI needs improving.


However, I would argue that in DW, there are many areas where improving the AI's behaviour would solve the problems. The AI is probably never going to do diplomacy correct but colonization priorities (including managing the construction queues of the assigned C.ships) and building mines is a solvable problem with only a few small ranges of optimal behaviour. (player defines construction nodes, AI finds good resource points nearby; luxury goods usually take care of themselves)

There isn't much need in those areas for the player to intervene beyond dictating general things like "play defensively" (prefer to build mines in same system as friendly colonies).


Still, the huge scale of the space 4x/RTS that DW is makes it impossible to micromanage, like you found, so most players just give up and accept the AI's inferior management.

Allowing user scripts seems like the solution, and given that ZK and BA from spring RTS allow it, I would say the concept has been tested and can be accepted even for multiplayer RTS.