I think for a game on this scale it would be super awesome to have a way of giving certain bases or planets a local AI to control your units in that location. Maybe build a support commander and give him control of a given planet. He would maintain the base in that area if a building got destroyed or he could manage the army so it would attack nearby enemies to protect the base. He could also control the engineers and other units to carry out his orders in that area. I know this may be difficult to implement but I think it would add a lot to the game especially on large scale maps with many many planets to keep track of.
I really don't think it matters if the AI was programmed in English or Spanish or whatever, as long as your units know what they are doing. It's not like AI can be culturally biased like SAT questions.... .... oh that. Yeah that's been proposed (and shot down) before. The only time I'd want to build a secondary base and hand it off to something is if I am playing a multiplayer match, and I want to give my friend something to do if he had joined a game already in progress.
At some point the game's scale will surpass human interaction. If the engine is built well enough it's pretty much inevitable. Adding in extra players will help make large games possible. Limiting the playing field will also control where the player's attention can be. For example, since the game is centered around a commander, direct orders might only be possible within a sector or two of his location. Anything else outside that field would have no choice but to be controlled by some kind of AI or subordinates. Such a setup would create a player world centered around several maps but never an entire sector. For the metagame it will help locate potential commanders (since they will have to be somewhere local to the action) and may help keep game changing conflicts as the main focus (instead of amoeba'ing across the cosmos). I dunno. Things like this are really tough questions. On the one hand it's a question of how big the game world needs to be, versus how big a game world players can handle. On another hand it's a question of how complex the game will be on the client side. More active planets could very well mean more UI info, more potential bandwidth, and maybe higher specs. Should an AI help along the way? I'm not sure. A compromise on these factors may very well be needed. Any way it'll be interesting to see what happens.
