uncutno-
I think what you describe as a "living army" is really nothing more than morale at work. I''ve been a huge proponent of this as well, and going beyond even that. I think that the player should not have god-like control over the units under his command. Just because a player orders a unit to do something does not mean that they will automatically obey.

In terms of programming, the units would have to have a domain knowledge of risk assesment. It would have to look at the opponent it is facing and determine what kinds of odds it is looking at. Also, the base morale and discipline of the unit would be factors as well.

Orders or commands should be far more fluid, dynamic and varied than what exists today. Even something as simple as "attack" should have different modes. Evasive attacks, all out assaults, feints, etc etc. I think that the AI of units in RTS games need to be vastly increased to do many of the tricks suggested, but this will happen eventually.

I guess it coud be done with just a couple of factors...
fear,moral,boredness,pride(:-))...

I also like the more then one type of attack thing... but how would you inplement this whitout creating a hell of micro management? You would need a type of menu system like The top viewed WW2 Microsoft game... (dont remember name)...
If you have to many commands, you have to speed down the game, so that you can handle all the comanding....

My game is going to be robots only... But it would be cool if even robots got afraid :-)

But this is sort of a : add 10 commands to all units...
I want to hear about new stuff, like do we want commands att all? Of course we want, but is point and click the best system....

Its important to have a easy starting interface, so that new players easely and fast can get into the game...
Thats alsy why i wounder if its a good idea to add a AI layer betwean the player and your units...

I would rather see a system where the strategies is imortant important important.... So that one wrong move could result in loosing a army, but only god choises would make you almost invinsible....

...dont know realy...

Actually I am not sure that the unit AI needs to be that much better - if it gets too good then the players role in the game becomes less important.

Rather than try to make the unit AI second guess what the player wants it to do (you can garauntee that half the time it will do the exact opposite of what he wants anyway), simply make its behaviour consistent, so that the player can predict how it will react in a certain situation. Also, make the default behaviour reasonably sensible. Nothing is more annoying than units that wander off on their own accord, trying to chase some enemy they have no hope of catching, only to wander blindly into enemy territory and get killed.

Also, rather than clutter the interface with thousands of different order types, keep it down to a small number (I have three) and let different units interpret them in the most appropriate way. When am I ever going to want to order my Super Heavy Death Tank to do a stealthy hit and run attack? It is far too slow for such an operation - if the option were available it would be redundant anyway, and therefore unnecessary. Conversely, how often am I going to want to attempt a blitzkreig style attack with my elite commandos? Finally, including multipurpose troops which might be capable of either tactic defeats the point of role-based unit design, and you end up with a dominating unit.

SAndman-
THat''s a good point about different units recognizing its own capabilities and thereby determining appropriate courses of action. If an AI commander is in charge of a main battle tank group, it''s highly unlikely that he will perform stealth maneouvers. This in turn begs the question, how does a unit or AI commander take a units capabilities and then create a table of commands from it? I realize it''s more of a game programming question, but it does have interface considerations which falls under the realm of game design.

I haven''t put a whole lot of thought into my game''s GUI. I''m still juggling around certain concepts, but I wonder how I''m going to be able to have the player issue commands? In my game however, the player doesn''t directly order units, he does so through an AI commander proxy. But the AI commander will still have to know how to control the units.

I''m even wondering if there can be a sort of roleplaying element to my game. I started thinking about uncutno''s concept of a "living" army. Indeed, my own concept falls into this catgeory, as I want my game to be a simulation of leadership. As uncotno wants units to have personalities, I actually think this is a good idea. Certain commanders may have a penchant for being overzealous, or conversely too timid. "training" your commanders could be part and parcel of the game...sort of a multi-avatar version of Black and White, but you don''t have to teach your AI commanders from scratch. The commanders can learn on their own as well as get reinforcement from the player as well.

Living units - I''d say check out the close combat series (WW2 rts/wargame). While it didn''t feature the full ''living units'' described by you guys it does have morale and psychology. Units could become scared, fatigued, paniced, rallies, berzerk (it was quite fun to see a lone rifleman charge a tank) and heroic depending on the battlefield situation. Furthermore the units morale depended a lot on its experience. Green units would panic easier...

The gameplay becomes a little slower and since the morale was important you could basically forget about suicide attacks. The soldiers would panic before doing any good.

Multiple commands - Context sensitive orders would be preferable, i.e. the game understands what command you want to give depending on where you click and with what unit you have selected. I guess it all comes down to the available commands. Sudden Strike (another ww2 wargame) had lots of commands available for each unit.



::aggression is the result of fear::

This just occurred to me:

If some part of the game is routing orders to AI subcommanders, shouldn''t the selection and grooming of such commanders become an important part of the game? After all, the greatest generals tended towards greatness, at least in part, by taking on staff who could effectively execute their orders, n''est-ce pas?

ld