Sub-Commander

The primary goal here is to draw the game from the micro intensive direction it is heading in.

Sub- Commander is an expensive T1 fab unit that moves very slow and has a lot of health. After being built you designate an area for them to "patrol" and build their own base they control and operate. You can set them to be aggressive, defensive, air-only, ground-only or sea-only. (This would come in great with taking a planet while focusing on your base or not wanting to deal with your base's defenses and assigning a sub commander to a defensive around your base.

This idea has a lot of foundation to build on too:
1. Sub-commanders can open up intra-team AI coordination: Select a sub-commander and assign him to assist another commander(who is set to aggressive). Direct the aggressive commander to attack an area and both AIs will send a coordinated attack.

2.Sub-commanders could have a scaling AI as they build up their area. Allowing them to build higher tech and control fabbers of their own

3.Sub-commanders could expand resource production as demand rises. This would get rid of the needless micro grind and allow players to focus on the aspect of the game they enjoy the most.

Just an idea. Opinions?

Building templates would be easier than trying to craft some kind of mini AI and would give players full control over everything.

Mike

Dislike the T1 part for sure
sub com sounds pretty specialized to me

It's a cool idea, I don't think the implementation would be worth it.

What exactly is this supposed to make easier? Seem like your controlling more smaller armies with this. If it's for building then templates would be better

How would the building templates work?

The purpose was to have a "set it and forget it" type mechanism. Send a sub commander to another planet and he will expand over there under his own AI.

I do agree with you on the T1 part. My initial idea was to have this as a different means to play the game. It would make sense to have it as a high tech option.

They already inplemented this, its called team armys I think this would make it too easy, its fun that its difficult to have 4 bases on 4 planets. and you can always use shift+number to lock a camera to fast switch planets.

^_^ Yes but this would be a team army with a shared resource pool.

I agree it would make the micro manage much easier, but it would give you more time to focus on attack formation and strategy.

There are plenty of ways it could work, but it's not something Uber has really talked about it much yet.

Mike

Stop looking from one perspective , it isn't how you can be the best war machine, this is the perfect way to give you a downside to having lots of bases: you can't consentrate on evrything, so suprise attacks are easyer on you. hell bots are full dedicated to suprise attacks XD. this means your faster to lose bases too, giving more balance, btw, i hate AI's in my team. I can't scream at them to do important ****. (red alert 3 did a good job on that, just boss ur ally ai around XD) p.s. them allys on teamarmys have shared pool too, I think its a pretty bad idea, but if it gets hold, at least make it so we can boss him to do important things, defend, attack, support, etc.

Yes, you can. Put the game in pause, take your time to think, and then act. I imagine that it will be doable, once the game will finally feature a way to pause.

Beside that, I'm very curious about the Template topic. Where can we find more info about?

Il be playing multipayer, so no way xd the templates are probably going to be like supcom build stuff and save it by selecting them and pressing a button so you can use next time to build that fast, i suggest only building tiny templates becouse it might give problems on tiny moons and obstaclefull terrain it is very handy if you want some aa turrets around all your metal extractors

What about a sequence of buildings, that the AI will construct giving the terrain available to it? Something like "find 2 mex, done, now build two energy, done, now build Bot Factory, done, etc...".

Like I say in the other six million I need ai help threads because I can't give the game a chance, because I can't learn.... NO!!!!

Now build templates yes!!!! I imagine it would work something like system editor. You can create a number of base templates from the main menu, assign hot keys and simply give fabs the order in game and let them be.

I don't want to build a sub-commander on my team, but I would love to build a new commander to create an allied team.

You lose control when creating it as a new allied AI player, it will do what ever it wants, but you also loose liability. If it's base is destroyed it doesn't cripple your economy. You can fire and forget, creating 1-4 allied factions per moon and you know it's going to fight your enemies, but you don't have to worry about it or baby sit it at all.

I'm okay with a sup-commander UNIT, but no autonomous behavior at all.

I really like this idea!

I'm against any "assist AI" that autonomously controls your units or resources for you. These are my resources and units, and I don't want an AI to get in my way. I also don't think AI should be a crutch that a poor player can fall back on by saying "computer, win this for me."

I do think we should be able to create new factions however. Build an ally and let it start as a new player. It would be like an "alliance" game, but with a late start. It doesn't control your units, it doesn't spend your money, and there's no point where I have to worry about it ruining my plans because it decided to attack with the army I had waiting by my portal. For obvious reasons any AI I created would use the same resource multiplier as the faction that created it, so I can't play vs a souped up 3X metal AI and then build a friendly AI to leach off it's economy.

On a related note, I also think we should be able to select an allied AI player and select "Invite friend", or if my friend quits an allied game (not team game) the AI should take over his units, because his internet dropping shouldn't bone me over after 4 hours of solar conquest.

I think this would be an awesome extra game type!!!! Create alliances mode or something.

However I don't want it in the game type we have currently. Talk about hours of play though it would be cool.

There could be all sorts of options tied to this. "Player Lock" to prevent inviting new players to take over allied AI teams, and a separate toggle to disable building Commanders.

I would also expect that if we ever get a ladder mode these would both be disabled to keep it a strict 1vs1.