Individual / Group unit AI, and a helpful UI.=

First of all let me get my blasphemy out of the way. I've never been the hugest fan of multiplayer RTS, at least insofar as "Warcraft"-style RTS games go - Warcraft / Starcraft / Red Alert 2 / Generals / etc. I don't like memorizing build orders, I don't like how gameplay effectively degrades to rock/paper/scissors and that - graphics aside - it's more like playing a spreadsheet than anything. I've enjoyed TA and SC over the years specifically because their design tends to be a bit more casual-feeling a free-flow.

I've also never been the biggest fan of micro, probably because I'm bad at it. I'm male, I can't multitask for ****. I don't find a lot of fun - and while I totally understand where the 'skill' comes from - in babysitting everything and clicking wildly all over while the screen teleports around the place. So take what I have to say here for what it is.

I played TA Spring for a while as well, and Spring really did wonders for TA. I always thought TA had a completely impenetrable interface. It was fine for the time, but the years have not been kind to it. Spring let you do lots of amazing things in terms of making certain tasks much easier.

- Mass building. While SupComm allowed you to click-and-drag to drop multiple buildings, you didn't have a lot of flexibility here. Spring let you change the shape of your click-drag buildings (from a line, to box, to box fill) as well as change their orientation (important when buildings like the KBot lab only have one exit) *and* let you adjust the natural spacing between buildings. If you wanted to drop a bunch of laser turrets but wanted to space them out evenly, you just had to hold shift, click-and-drag a wall, and press your mouse 4 and 5 to change the spacing until it was as you wanted.

- Scripted unit AI. I'm not sure if this is the case right anymore (doesn't seem to be in the copy of Spring I just downloaded), at one point you could install custom AI files for specific units. I'm not saying we need to be able to build our own AI, but these files were excellent in minimizing the amount of micromanaging you had to do in regards to the more inane tasks. For example, if you wanted to build on all the metal sites, you'd activate the metal builder AI and then band-box a chunk of land. It would then automatically go build metal extractors on all the metal points in the area, saving you some inane clicking. There were also AIs that would handle some of the housekeeping details without being as clumsy as the patrol system (which had some serious faults).

The point I'm making here is that it's 2012. Me, personally, I can do without the hand-holding of my units. I would very much like to see some sort of simple AI routines in this regard that will let me tailor my support units to make sure they keep doing what they're supposed to do. One team of engineers could be set to roam an area and assist in building. Another could be set to assist the economy, and travel out in the field to vacuum up metal when it was needed. Metal makers could be told to gradually shut down when the energy economy stalled. Tasks that were unnecessarially obtuse before could now be handled with better efficiency. There is even a feature where I can change the build rate of engineers when the economy stalls to free up resources by building lower-priority things slower, as opposed to the 'all or nothing' of SupComm and TA.

Maybe I'm "missing the point" of this, and maybe some people find it fun, but I think I'd enjoy it more if I could manage BEHAVIOR instead of tasks and - while a human could probably do things better - at least rely on the AI to look after itself.

- Group unit AI. One of the most frustrating things of TA and SupComm was the unit combat AI. If there's any ire to be directed towards me in regard to my distaste for micro, here's where you can let me have it. The singular flaw these games had was what your army would do when you went to attack. TA was infamous for having some pathfinding issues where your units would all ram into each other until they formed a single line of units, which would march straight into defenses unless you stopped them constantly to spread them out a bit. SupComm let you manage formations, but formations had their own faults. Watching a formation change directions was painful, as your units would engage in a huge traffic jam and run into each other. Even still, there were irritating problems like shield units - which had no weapons - simply breaking the lines and running up to enemies, because when you told your group to attack someone, you accidentally had the shield units selected too - so they go to give them hugs and then ruin everything.

To beat on the 'it's the FUTURE' motif, some sort of advanced 'army management' would be nice, maybe based around the concept of self-sorting squads. Obviously this should be a toggle so my units aren't doing things without my permission (and thus the AI getting in the way), but I'd like to see a compromise between the 'every robot for himself' of TA and 'giant colonial army' of SupComm. What I imagine is the ability to tell a unit to form individual groups, where a horde of 50 PeeWees, for example, would group themselves into 5 groups of 10. The individual units in a group would all stick together while the individual groups were free to move around some. And the groups should form up units within them in a way that maximizes firepower and minimizes damage - a star formation or something. Point being, I am the commander of multiple planets. I should be able to tell my armies to attack and the armies should tell their units to attack, and the units should fight as one would expect a unit to.

A sufficiently advanced army AI could also be smart enough to (based on settings chosen for the particular AI) sort specific units as well. For example, if I have Bulldog tanks and Flash Tanks together, I could select my group, assign a 'squad-based' battle AI, pick the 'small squads' and chose 'smart formation'. Eight bulldogs and thirty flash tanks would then sort themselves into four groups - the Bulldogs would stay in the front where their thick armor can absorb the shots, and each group would have six, seven, or eight Flash tanks behind it. Based on the 'maneuver' range, these tanks could break formation and move ahead of the Bulldogs when close enough, but should generally keep pace with the Bulldogs, so they aren't getting far ahead and getting slaughtered.




I ask for these features because I'm playing TA and SupComm again, and I've noticed that the more units and the larger a playfield you have, the gameplay merely scales with it. On a small map, you'll have a couple medium-sized engagements. On a large map, rather than five or six medium-sized engagements, you end up still just having two engagements, but they merely involve more units. I think this problem arises from (and this is just based on my own playing and observations) the overwhelming scales, and with limited hotkeys and so many units, it's easier to just have a giant horde. Allowing player units to act with some intelligent autonomy as opposed to simply rushing where you clicked and occasionally shooting, you may actually be able to tell a group 'attack from the north' and forget about them while focusing on an attack to the south and managing a defense, because you can rely on the units to PROPERLY behave and engage enemies, instead of simply running to their death single-file because you weren't there to babysit them.


Anyway, that's my take on that.

Way waaaayyyyyyy too much automation for my tastes, seems like I'd be bored half the time.

But in particular the idea that Mass Fabs/Metal Makers should auto-shutdown if your eco is going to crash is ridiculous, the would idea is that you risk crashing your eco in exchange for more mass.

As you said, SupCom(and TA but less so I think) already does so much to focus the micromanagement needs compared to most RTSs(in particular SCII) that I don't think more Automation is needed, some optimizations maybe, but everything that can be done with automation can be done better and often in a similar time frame as an automated feature would.

Mike

I enjoyed UI mods to customize my automation and information.

Even if i mostly forgot to use them they made me feel as though it was MY commander. Having it done for you or worse turned on by default takes all that away.

I'm not sure what you mean. TA had almost nothing in micromanagement elimination which is why the advanced features of Spring were so awesome. Your units were morons and would march single-file to their doom, your support units on patrol would constantly get distracted by a damaged unit running by and chase him across the map, and building metal extractors was a hugely time-consuming process.

SupComm helped it with the sticky-extractor placing and unit formations, but even those had frustrations. I enjoy SupComm and TA for exploding robots, not because I enjoy the process of herding cats that was base management. We're also talking about managing multiple maps, not just one.

Let's say you take over a new planet and there's nobody else on it. You want to dump metal extractors on all the points. You can either hold shift and madly click all over hoping to get them as fast as possible, or click on your construction unit, select the routine to build extractors, and drag an area (or select the whole planet) and let him get the work, allowing you to focus on the important part - making sure things are exploding.



We're talking about an unprecedented scale here. Even Sins of a Solar Empire - as slow-paced as it was - still had automatic building placement specifically so you didn't get bogged down zooming in to every planet, clicking the appropriate buttons, choosing a nice space, and then going on to the next one.

Once upon a time we had effectively zero control outside of direct interaction of our units. Then we had formations. Then we had smart formations that would put pikemen in front, archers in the middle, catapults in the back. Then we had smart formations and combat AI that would keep support units around.

Every time the unit AI has improved, it was done alongside an increase in the scale of the game, from Starcraft to TA to Age of Empires to Homeworld to Sins of a Solar Empire. Some level of automation has to be done if you want to keep the game playable. I see no reason to arbitrarily draw the line now.

I don't think the game should play for you, I should still have to direct my units and give them orders, but when I tell my Space Marines squad in DOW to get to cover, they all move in a fashion that gets them all in cover for me, and they set up their heavy bolters facing the correct direction. I don't see a reason to pooh-pooh that game because I didn't have to / get to direct each marine individually to cover.




Like I said, when we moved to the super-huge battles of SupComm, all you did was increase the size of engagements, not the number of them. Lack of some form of automation forced most players into a playstyle that involved - rather than multiple battles which is what I imagined when I first heard of SupComm's massive scale - but instead singular HUGE battles... mostly because it was easier and more effective and less stress to simply smash all your units together and hurl them in a huge wad at the enemy.

In my eyes, if you want the keyboard-only hotkey-smashing Red Bull-fueled Korean method of playing RTS to be the only way to play RTS, that's why there's Starcraft. And there's no reason why extreme micro like that wouldn't still be more effective than some intelligent AI handling that ensures the fast units aren't running off without the slow, and making sure the armored units aren't in the back for some reason.

It depends on the level of automation and on the parameters you can set. The units in Sins of a Solar Empire would pretty much act on their own once you gave them a general outline of what you wanted to do (IE, go to this planet, or attack in this general area), but it certainly wasn't boring. It was more about grand strategy and less about tedious micro.

As long as we have a flexible system that lets us choose the level of automation I can see it working. Maybe something along the lines of more advanced patrol options.

But I didn't say micromanagement elimination did I? I said FOCUS.

Micromanagement in of itself isn't bad, and just because you have to give orders doesn't mean it's Micro, it means you're playing an RTS ;p

I had a really good post about comparing the Micro form SupCom and SCII, but I don't remember what thread that was, the TL;DR version is that SupCom lets you focus where you micromanage to the funner aspects like combat while SCII requires consistent micromanagement in more or less all aspects of the game.

If you don't want any micro at all, I suggest you check out Gratuitous Space Battles.

Mike

I think having the AI play for you isn't bad, as long as you still have things to do, like in Globulation.

:/

So let's go back to my example.

The enemy has a base. You want to blow it up.

You have three groups - bombers supported by air interceptors. Lightweight chaff units backed up by artillery. And a tank group of Bulldogs (slow, heavy hitters) with their opposite, Flash Tanks (fast, rapid, light damage).

In a normal game, band-boxing the Bulldogs and Flash Tanks would be a disaster. Not only would the Bulldogs probably get left behind, but as soon as you make contact with the enemy you'd have to engage in massive micro to ensure your heavily-armored bulldogs were pushing forward and not allowing the Flash Tanks to get chewed up by getting too isolated. In addition, you'd have to ensure that the Flash Tanks are constantly moving around the enemy, while Bulldogs have very slow turrets and are better off stationary, and should be firing at tight groups of enemies so their huge explosive shells can knock out multiple in one hit.

In one battle, this would be fine. But we're talking about a whole planet, to say nothing of any battles happening elsewhere. So when you want to bring air interceptors into it with bombers and a totally different type of ground unit from somewhere else, you start hitting the limits of ANYONE'S ability to micromanage.

So my options are to really focus on the tanks, focus on the aircraft (because attack-moving with bombers usually just means they all drop their bombs on the first power generator they come across and waste their bombing run, and thus they too require micro), or focus on the artillery / KBot frontal assault, or to spread my focus across all three and have very lackluster performance. Spreading focus across all three would generally mean mass-movement orders, and things would quickly go tits-up. Directing bombers to individual targets is almost impossible without pausing the game.



Or, the alternative is to COMMAND my units. I take my tank group, and assign them a group AI (similar to SOASE's fleets) so they all know that they're to work together. I can then pick from a few group AI types, from freeform (run off and do whatever) to hard formation (SupComm style), large squad or small squad. I assign them small squad, and then my Bulldogs and Flash Tanks split up into various squads that still function as part of the same group. The group will stick together, but as opposed to the idiocy that occurred with big formations in SupComm when you ran into tricky terrain, your squads are free to move around, but still stay together as their squad. The Flash Tanks are given a 'fire and maneuver' behavior that will try to keep them moving instead of standing still when in combat, and the Bulldogs are given an aggressive 'hold ground' behavior to make sure they're not worming around like they do in TA when things get cluttered. These specific routines could be default AI behavior for a given unit.

In this way, I have set up my orders for that group. I can then (as Zero-K apparently does), order them to attack by dragging along a line, and they will attack ALL across the line. They will try to attack as a single group that is broken up into small squads, and the Bulldog behavior will keep them at the front absorbing damage, while the Flash Tank behavior will let them swarm out when engaged in close range. All I had to do was DIRECT the behavior, not explicitly order every single movement.



While they are doing this, I can then go to my Air Force. I again give them a group AI tailored for air combat based on the mix of fighters and bombers. Rather than give them squad behavior, I tell them that they're on their own and free to move around some. Because they're a group AI that involves fighters and bombers, the routine will automatically know that the fighters are supposed to guard the bombers, without me having to go through the impossible task of assigning each of them an individual 'guard' command (seriously, this is almost impossible to do). Because I told my bombers they were free to spread out, the AI will make an effort to spread out the bomb damage and try not to target things another bomber is targeting. I could even go so far as to assign them all a defensive behavior, and there could even be an optional rally point, so that when they run into anti-aircraft or start taking heavy damage and losses, they automatically return for repairs or regrouping (much like the air repair pad behavior in TA).



Finally, my artillery and infantry. I assign them as a single group again (so I now have three groups). This group is given the order to travel in large groups, so I have only a couple squads with masses of light units protecting the artillery. Artillery unit AI is designed to, by default, do what artillery does - stay behind, and hit the defenses. There could even be an option to chose target priority - ground defense, air defense, or units. The PeeWees are set to roam offensively, so they basically smash against the base, while the artillery is smart enough to stay back without running in with them (like it would in SupComm).


I can then tell my three groups to attack as I see fit, and watch the battle, and can focus elsewhere or oversee it ready to take charge personally if I need to exercise direct control. In all three cases I gave them orders and told them how to attack. Hell if we wanted to get fancy, we could even expand on the 'combined attack' feature from SupComm and allow a general area to be given order timings, so they all strike at once (the SupComm feature unfortunately only worked on a single target, and thus I never used it).




The point is, look at the way professional Starcraft players play. They almost all fight with homogenous groups of units fighting singular battles. The kind of dynamic combat we have in TA / SC isn't really in Starcraft which is a very rock-paper-scissors game.

I'd like to see the game move away from the concept of massive singular battles (which is what I envisioned it doing in SupComm, but it really didn't), and on top of that being a necessity if we're going to fight across multiple maps, I don't see any other way to do it than to really drive focus on making sure the units themselves can be relied upon to some degree, or at least attempting to change it from 'specific orders' to 'overall orders'.

There's one more specific example I'd like to point out from SupComm - the heavy artillery units.

Normally, if you had a big group and you attack-moved them into an enemy base, they would move into range of the first thing they saw, set up, and start firing. Once that thing was destroyed, they probably would have to pack up again, move, and then redeploy at the next thing. You were forced to tell them to move CLOSER to the base manually.

Why? Is this fun for you? If I tell my artillery to attack, and they require a ridiculously long set-up procedure, I should expect them to not only *NOT* all undeploy to collectively shoot at the very first unit that comes in range (logically they should all be engaging their own targets, spread out... otherwise it's a waste), but I would hope they would move close enough that they wouldn't have to pack up and immediately move two inches closer just to undeploy and start firing again.

Personally I don't find babysitting retarded units fun. I prefer the fun in the strategy of attacking with the artillery, not in the act of having to tell every damn artillery unit to move to a specific point because it's too dumb to get the perfect distance away, and then have to tell each unit individually what they need to be shooting at. At that point, it's no longer Supreme Commander, it's Supreme Why-Don't-I-Just-Drive-The-Units-Myself-And-We-Can-Call-It-Battlezone.





EDIT: Interestingly, nothing I've said here is foreign. I've just recently joined this forum to say exactly this, so now I'm reading others. Many people are asking for what I'm saying here, but they are using different language.

viewtopic.php?f=61&t=34981

This thread, for example. One person is suggesting that tabbing every single bomber in the group and assigning him to a specific target is the way to go about doing this. But I don't find that fun, I think that's inane and frustrating. I'm probably not the only one.

If players want to assign individual unit attacks, by all means, go for it. A player will always play better than an AI. But in the case of that thread, I don't see why it shouldn't be possible to forgo the micro (which I hate) and let the AI set up the mass bombing for me.

Please make your topics more readable, all your posts in this topic are quite tl.dr for me and probably the most of the forum users.

Wait, what? Heck, I read every single post in its entirety. I would think most of the forum users would too, since this is how you provide feedback for a game trying to figure out what its identity is still going to be.

If all you want are posts like "I want units with the CLOUD SWORD RAWR", then you might be in the wrong place.

I think there is a thing such as too much automization, such as automatic shutting down of factories when your energy doesn't quite meet up. However, I think that there should indeed be some kind of smart underlying AI that can do mundane tasks and high-maintenance strategic tactics (when told/set to behavioral stance) on it's own. Positioning bulkier short range units in front of the squishy snipers for example, or having your AA units cover the entire group, retaining a decent formation when engaging/being told to split up.
You should still be the one commanding units what to do, where to stand, etc. but AI should make sure you don't have to babysit every no-brain robot in their mindless voyage to the movecommand. Certain behavioral options such as Scout, Defend or Escort could then take care of itself.
Respectively these examples would be: covering a large area around the targeted location and retreating from enemy units encountered; Holding position unless harassed from long range then returning, while also rerouting damaged units to the middle of the group, and repair if possible; guard a specific unit, and then be commanded to go somewhere while retaining their original behaviour, retaliating fire against anyone who attacks the (group of) units being escorted.

I try to read all the posts in this entire sub-forum, if you want the devs to do the same, smaller posts (ideas better compressed or divided over mulitple topics) have a much higher chance of being read.

People seem to think that automation means letting the AI take over and then having the player sit back and twiddle his thumbs doing nothing.

I'm sorry, but I have yet to see an AI that is anything more than a semi-idiot when it comes to strategy (Sorry Sorian ). There's a darn good reason AI's cheat in most RTS games - it's because they need the advantage because they're too stupid to win on their own.

The focus here should be on player AUGMENTATION to deal with SCALE. Make each click worth a lot more in terms of controlling gameplay, because you have a limited number of clicks you can perform, and the scale of the game is so much larger.

It's like moving from a 'buy up front' to a streaming economy. Buy up front works - until you scale it up. Click to give individual unit orders works - until you scale it up.


Take the metal maker argument for example. Right here in this thread people are arguing that it's better to require the player to manage mass fabs manually - and yet one of the most popular supcom mods was the Mass Fab manager to automate exactly that. Not to mention Zero-K removed the need to worry about mass fabs entirely and made energy and mass extractors work together without the player having to worry about it at all.

i disagree with this. yeah i know its a generalisation but still. the primary influence on the number of engagements was the design of the map. you would almost always have 2 engagements on finns revenge for example. 2 or 4 on 4 leaf clover. a minimum of 3 on open palms etc.

It's also generally a bad idea to have too many engagements because it splits up your army, and the larger army is going to generally have the advantage, barring a major unit composition mistake. The only reason PA might have more going for it for having multiple fronts is the existence of multiple planets, but on any given planet I wouldn't expect more than 1 or 2 fronts total.

One thing you should keep in mind is, that all the automation can also screw you over.
A Unit-AI only plays according to its own rules, it doesn't check, wether the action it does is actually wanted by you.

Something simple like having every unit in a selected group move at the same speed (the speed of the slowest unit) can screw you over if you box a group and a really slow unit happens to slip in.

Also decisions, like which units are in front and which in the back are in my opinion decisions, which are the job of a commander, in other words the role you are playing in the game.

Also, you should make sure, that you know who is babysitting who: You your units, by looking after them now and again, or the Unit-AI you, since you are not grown up enough to keep the valuable units safe.

I'd be in favor of this as an option - it could be very useful, and it could be very frustrating for others. Personally, I think I'd use it a lot- it'd be awful nice not to have to spend every minute of a 5 hour game giving micro orders for everything

This game is going to be on an epic scale- that's what's going to make it awesome. And not everyone will be able to manage that epicness in scale properly. So making an option to make it simpler/easier would be great.

Thus why the AI units are managed into AI 'groups' and not 'what do you have selected', and also why you have to assign the AI its orders. If you don't want that, you just turn it off.

All it is is the next logical step up from simple formations.

Ultimately, this is the mother of all RTS games, not RTT. I'm kind of tired of tactics being the more important aspect of winning strategy games. It's been that way for a long time..