Using advanced AI features as unit abilities

In my last thread on guidelines regarding smart unit behaviour, the aspect of toggling certain more advanced behaviours posed to be a special case. When I was thinking more about them I got the idea, of implementing advanced behaviours not as a part of the general unit AI, but as abilities of specific units. Which I believe could turn out to be really great.

Why do I think so?
Because it automatically makes units stick out and recognizable. It adds flavor to them not through lore or stats, but through the way they act in battle. Additionally, it can supplement the role of the unit in battle, raiding for instance is supplemented by the retreating behaviour, since you want to keep those units alive so they can come again to annoy your opponent. Kiting units can supplement aggressive playstyles, while dodging units should be useful when holding a defensive position.
Additionally, this fits nicely in the setting, since it also gives the feel, that your units are as technologically advanced as they are supposed to be. Especially if you give the abilities names like "Advanced Tactical Movement Module" for kiting or "Reactionary Projectile Evasion Boosters" for dodging.
(Also, since an advanced unit AI isn't very common in RTS-games putting some more ingame-emphasis on having this as a feature can't hurt )

With my current examples, there is an other point to adress: Kiting, dodging and retreating are all useful for fast units, what could you put on the slow ones? It doesn't make sense to add interesting stuff to only a part of all units, so I feel I should at least add some other examples for more advanced stuff, which could be applied to other units as well.
For AoE-Units, avoiding to overkill units and spreading out the attacks over a group to make more effective use of the splash-damage.
Automatic focus fire (without overkill). Units with this ability basically cooperate with each other to be more efficient.

Some important last notes:
- These kind of abilities are not the only kind of abilities units should have, this is just a thought for having some way more interesting abilities, than people normally would expect.
- Remember, some of these can be changed to be inactive, if the behaviour is undesireable.
- Some lore on why the most advanced weapon technology can't fit all of these in one tank: That's too expensive, which makes it suboptimal for use on the battlefield.
- My math/computer-science senses are tingling because of a simple dodge algorithm, which should be able to randomly dodge projectiles. Including an estimate on how big the chance to dodge is depending on simple numeric parameters.
- If there is no unit which attacks multiple enemies simultaneously (no splash) I will probably be sad.

I think that's all I wanted to say, time to leave room for you to voice your opinion on it.

I feel like an attention whore for bumping my thread, but I at least would like to have some feedback on what people think about the idea.

So basically you want advanced AI behaviour to be researchable upgrades to specific unit types. Much like attack damage and shields are usually researchable, except you want them per unit(type).
I can see that the tradeoff is nice, if you don't want to use the AI you save resources and get an advantage to players that want to use the AI.

However I don't quite get why you want this so bad. Is it because you don't like microing your units and you just want to give an attack order and then move your attention somewhere else?
To me, it feels over simplified. I realise that in massive games you might have more than one battle going on and microing might become more difficult. But isn't that just the charm of it? The fact that you will have to strategize your war theatres, choosing when and where you ca focus your attention?

The problem is that it favours low micro units. A main battle tank that you don't need to micro (high hp, too low manueverability to dodge, reliable main cannon) will just end up being spammed as battles get larger and people can't be bothered to build micro intensive units.

But therein is the beauty, if most people can't be bothered micro'ing a unit, then there is room to win a battle against an overwhelming force, because the other player can't be bothered while you can.

Because you spent more time practising how to give kite commands faster so your "too big" unit count limit is higher than his.

Whether this is a thing that should be rewarded is precisely what the whole Core vs Arm thing is about.

I know, and I do not intent to reiterate the whole discussion here.

Let's embrace that there are different opinions on the matter. I still don't like any form of advanced AI features and am much more in favour of optimized UI combined with player skill.

In my opinion having researchable AI is the ONLY plausible way of incorporating advanced AI. Because it allows a difference in units: some players might go for advanced dodge / kite AIs first whereas other players might go for offensive upgrades first. If adding AI is done automatically e.g. all units are 'smart' then there is no difference, and therefore there is no advantage to having an advanced AI in the first place, as all units are on par anyways. In which case, development time can be better spent on other aspects of the game.

It *does* make a difference. It makes certain unit types become less scale sensitive than if there was no AI. Even if a rocko without AI would tie with a rocko without AI, and the tie remains just the same with AI, the difference is that in large battles you suddenly see rockos when you would never have saw them at all.
(remember that buffing rockos for bad AI makes them OP when microed; so the start of the game will be rocko duels and then the rockos go away as the economies get bigger)

I don't know what a rocko is, but I'm assuming it's a unit type that is available early game.

So you're saying that it makes sense to have this AI so that these early game units are still feasible in later stages of the game, is that right?

If not. then stop reading, and please enlighten me as to what a rocko is.
The main problem is (without getting into the arm vs. core debate) that at the end of the day, the AI will be inferior to a player. That's just inherit to the state of AIs in games. No matter how well developed, a human player will outsmart the AI (provided that the AI is not given any unfair advantage, like attack speed upgrades etc), therefore your 'rocko analogy' only applies in the case that both players use the AI.
The only argument you gave in favor of this was that you would still see this unit later on in the game. To me that sounds a little bit meager. You could easily tackle this problem by other game balances (other upgrades, bonusses etc.) without having to resort to having an AI control your units. Bear in mind: developing a useful AI is very time consuming, if the AI is not useful, nobody will use it and the development time is lost.

The rocko is a low tech cheap Kbot in TA/BA/ZK that fires a slow moving high damage rocket (no homing) that explodes at the end of its range or when it hits something.

This unit has a long range for its cost (more than most things, less than artillery) and low hp. So if it enters a brawl, it just dies. The high damage makes it powerful if you let it pound away unanswered; a good maneuverability (turn/accel/speed) lets it keep pace with most enemies except scouts and light infantry (which are its natural counters).

The only AI this unit needs is auto-kite (which is easy and *very* useful). It attempts to maintain maximum range to enemies nearby, that's it. Put them in a line formation on open ground and let them skirmish to make the most use of its high maneuverability; extremely devastating to slow high hp units (I call them heavies), less so to the general assault tanks (coz they tend to have high max speeds so they catch you eventually) but when used ideally, can severely blunt an attack (and if wreckages block pathing, will break it up and slow it down, allowing even more kills or an opening for counter-attack).

Without auto-kite, a human has to tell it to move back when enemies get near and forwards when the enemy runs away. This make it a constant attention sink and as the battlefield gains more fronts, rockos harder and harder to manage. Eventually (around 6-7 fronts per player, more with practice; I note that PA will have even more fronts per player than a large map duel in ZK/BA), rockos become totally useless and players just spam battle tanks that steamroll over unmicroed rockos.

On the other hand, if you buff rockos to make them useful in the late game, say by giving them a low-mid cost upgrade that increases their damage and AoE (enough so they become balanced when they just stand there and shoot), then spamming rockos and rushing that upgrade allows you to dominate the early game (when there isn't so much going on everywhere) because you demolish all your opponents tanks and heavies when you both kite AND have the uber damage... it turns into spamming rockos and trying to win at T1. (or surviving upgraded-rockos and expanding to make them obsolete)


Now, of course, a human will always do better than the AI. But the auto-kite allows the rockos to stay useful well into the mid-game where the whole map is full of shooty things, provided their weightclass is still useful. Sure, you'll never get rid of the micro-effect, but AIs lessen it. In this case, alot.

EDIT: the reason why I want to see this unit in the mid/late-game is to preserve the unit relationships independently of game size.

(a similar argument can be made with auto-swarm for the scouts dodging rocko shots)

I never said that and I don't want that. I never even mentioned research, so how did you even get to this statement? In my vision units simply have their ability from the get go. Mostly, since research implies a tech tree which PA will not have.

The rest of your post is pretty much again the "how much Micro?"-debate. While I agree that Micro has its wonderful moments, PA will most likely have multiple battlefields and large scale engagements, which can easily cause players to lose the focus on the grand scheme and get overwhelmed by too much Micro-possibilities. Micro in my opinion simply does not go well with what PA tries to achieve.
Which is why I agree with reducing the micro-aspect. The reason I like my idea so much is, that it replaces the lost micro-aspect with an increased diversity in your unit options, which I think will enrich the gameplay.

Why on earth did you start _another_ thread about this? Weren't the half dozen we already had enough? Have some class man.

If you talk about the discussion of unit abilities, this thread is about a more specific aspect of them which I thought was interesting enough to get its own discussion. Mostly because it as far as I know has never been done before in an RTS.
Also, throwing ideas around can't hurt. After all that's what people normally do during the beginning stage of a game, when it isn't fully decided what's in or not.
I don't see why there should be a lack of class with that.