I am an absolute beginner at this, and I know that accomplishing my goals will take a long time and a lot of patience; however, I am hoping to save some time by coming here and asking for some initial advice.

I know there are a lot of options for developing games these days, but I'm not sure what would be the best route for the type of game that I want to develop.

I want to create a squad-based tactics game using an isometric view (like X-com or Jagged Alliance). I'm not sure if this is a feasible venture in vector graphics or if sprites would be the way to go. I own a copy of Flash CS4, but would be willing to explore C++ and Microsoft's GDK (or even Basic) if that would be better. If there are any suggestions for the best way to go about all of this, I would greatly appreciate it. Also, if anyone could point me to some tips on developing AI for a game like this, that would be helpful.

Isometric games are notoriously difficult to work with in 2d.

I would suggest making it in 3D, you could could check out Unity: http://unity3d.com/
Depending on how much you want to learn to acheive this you could do C# with XNA also.

for AI you should google "A* Pathfinding" to start for how to calculate movement.

But if you are going to learn something new try starting with a smaller project until you are more familiar with the language / interface, belive me it will be way more satisfying than restarting your goal project 20 times because you learned something new.

Thanks for the suggestion. I wanted to avoid 3D initially, because I was planning to do my own artwork. I am pretty comfortable with vector/raster graphics but am not familiar with any of the 3D rendering programs. Plus, I like the style of the isometric games.

Dispite my ambitions, I will heed your advice and give Unity a try. There should be a good collection of pregenerated 3D models, especially in the Unity community.

You can do 2D, don't let me scare you away from it.

It's just some of the things you have to do to get everything to render properly in the correct order etc and still maintain performance can be a huge pain
You can also do simulated 2d insdie of Unity3d.

I made an Open Source squad baseed RPG a few months ago. It is hybrid 2d sprites in a 3d world but can easily support full 3d models in almost any common format. All game logic is written in well commented Lua files, running on a custom Flash-like 3d engine I wrote a few years ago. The game itself is loosly based on tabletop skirmish games like warhammer and d&d miniatures. And like warhammer and d&d miniatures the rules can be easily adapeded to sci-fi settings, like warhammer 40k or starwars miniatures.

In any case, feel free to check it out. It is open source, so you can fork it to use as a starting point for your own project, or you can just poke around inside looking at all the files to get some ideas about how to solve the problem.

http://www.indiedb.c...dungeon-tactics

A lot of the tequniques I used to develop Dungeon Tactics I learned from roguelikedevelopment.org. it is a goldmine for oldschool RPG programming guides.

http://roguebasin.ro...?title=Articles

Wow, thank you for sharing your work! It looks great, and I'm sure that will be a big help.