Ok I''m thinking more Sci-Fi ones (still Wav''s fault, all this talk of sci-fi games...) again. If you''ve ever player Cultures then you''ll have some idea of the kind of "intellegence" I''m thinking of here (ok in Cultures its more integral to the gameplay..). But for those of you who haven''t, a quick overview. In Cultures you''re responsible for a bunch of Vikings, each of these Vikings has various needs, (depending on the job u assign them) Food, Sleep, Entertainment and Religion. And you''re responsible for building up a community that''s capable of suppling all these needs. But the Vikings are intellegent, they dont stand arround waiting for you to tell them to eat/sleep/whatever (well ok Scouts & Soldiers do, but thats irrelevent) if they get hungry they will stop working and go and find some food, or somewhere for a nap or whatever. Also if the building they are working in runs out of a resource (say wood) then they will go and find some (i.e. to the wood-cutters) and not wait arround for you to tell them to get it. So whats this got to do with topic? (esp. the sci-fipart of it) Well what I''m thinking is this. Ok imagine you have already colonized a few planets and have a few ships. Maybe a starbase or deep space outpost or two. Planet A suffers a famin and runs out off food, in normal empire games they would notify you, and wait for you to do something about it. This is still possible in what I''m thinking about, however you can "assign" ships to planets and starbases, if a freighter is assigned to Planet A then it will automatically go to Planet B (which has an abundance of food) get some and take it to Planet A, without you having to lift a finger. Similarly, warships assigned to a starbase will routinly patrol the sector, etc. Also, if a freighter is attecked by an enemy fleet it will emit a distress call and the nearest warship(s) will divert to aid the frieghter (without waiting for instructions, unless thier "mission" has a high priority, which set by the player) or a starbase may send an idle warship to aid. What do people think of this idea? Do you think it will take too much away from the enjoyment of this kind of game, or can u see any potential problems? Or do you think this is a good idea? NightWraith

What?!?! A 4X sci-fi post with no replies?!?!?! I''ll fix that!!!!

I think this is cool, provided that you the player always have enough to do. It would display personality, and be useful in automating truly large empires. You''d have to make sure that the player had enough control over the automation to get exactly what he wanted / needed. The Governors of Alpha Centauri got close, but didn''t allow enough conditional refinement to give true control (i.e., "don''t build a damned Gene Jack factory in my happy city, you idiot!!!")

The one thing you do not want, however, is what Sid Meier called a "game that has fun playing itself." Maybe an early game limitation on automation would be a good idea; otherwise, like with Civilization: Call To Power you may discover that some of the activity you automated (replacing settlers with Public Works, in this case) actually provided the only interesting thing to do in the early stages.

BTW, I''d love to see something where you could tell a unit to
-Always do something
-Never do something
-Restrict movement to a zone I click and drag
-Always avoid zone (no pathfinding straight into enemy territory)

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Just waiting for the mothership...

Oh, yeah. How about units that are on general reserve? That is, you build ''em and leave them in an area, and anybody who needs them (priority, or first come, first serve) can call on them for aid. (This is just an extension of the general attach idea; rather than a specific place, you attach to a region of your empire, or the entire empire itself)

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Just waiting for the mothership...

quote:
Oh, yeah. How about units that are on general reserve? That is, you build ''em and leave them in an area, and anybody who needs them (priority, or first come, first serve) can call on them for aid. (This is just an extension of the general attach idea; rather than a specific place, you attach to a region of your empire, or the entire empire itself)

Yeah I like this idea, that would (I guess) be any idle fleet in the "galaxy". And they would be called upon by a planet/starbase once that planet/starbase had used up its attached ships.

Also it would make things like "Remote Mining" orders easier to issue, instead of the "Select Ship -> Give Remote Mining Order -> Select Planet -> Select Freighter -> Give Transport Minerals Order -> Select Planet being Mined -> Select Destination for Minerals Planet Order" set of actions to set up some remote mining. All the player could do is "Select Planet -> Select Remote Mine Order -> Set up a few Mining Options (Destination for Minerals Mined Planet, No of collections per year, etc.)" and have an idle Remote Miner and a few idle freighters go off and set up the remote mining operation. Takes away some of the teadious scrolling and clicking. Although I think BOTH methods should be available to the player.

As to giving the player something to do in the early stages, Yes this could be a problem, but I dont think an inital restirction on automation is the answer, possibly making it an optional part of the game (like having a menu function allowing the player to turn it on/off or to set the level of automation) may be better.

quote:
BTW, I''d love to see something where you could tell a unit to
-Always do something

er.. like what? do you mean repeating orders? or what?

quote:
-Never do something

Depends what the something is, this could be a pain to implement. I''m thinking something like this could be done by using mission priorities (Transporting food to a famin struck world would be a high priority, a scouting mission a low priortiy), the higher priority the mission the less likly the ship is to go off and answer a distress call, etc.

quote:
-Restrict movement to a zone I click and drag
-Always avoid zone (no pathfinding straight into enemy territory)

This would be good, its something that could be automated to some degree as well, e.g. frieghters avoiding areas known to be pirate hideouts, unless u directly order them to go that way (or again the mission priority is high)...


NightWraith