Free Allegiance Forums

I saw a post about an AI commander. http://www.freeallegiance.org/forums/index...showtopic=62970

I figured, if you can have an AI commander, why not have an entire AI team to fight against?

I may not have been here long, but I have already seen my fair share of 1V1 fights.

So, this goes two ways.

Have an entire AI team. A computer controlled team, with a commander that does everything he should, and give him enough AI pilots to balance all the humans on the other team(s) against him. These pilots would take out different ships as researched and needed, or when commander ordered.

The other thing I want to see done (Way 2). Is not to have an AI commander(becuase, there really is no substitute for a good human tactitian), but just add AI pilots for human commanders to use. This is also good for the 1V1 game. There would be a new menu, and a new station. This new station would be built like anything else, but after a tech lab and call it the Robotics Facility.
There then is a new menu under Shipyard, where you can buy different AI ships(based on what ships you have research, no AI caps untill you have caps) and upgrade some features of the AI ships.

Please vote whether good idea or bad idea. I'd add a poll but this doesnt support it.

an allied AI team would be sweet

Idea for some of the aiming annoyances. Equip them with a very short range, large AOE (about the range of a mini gun) weapon that would do the equivalent DOT of the equipment researched.

This keeps coming back to my mind during the day, and would be an amazingly awesome thing. It could go a long way to revitalizing things around here and open up a lot of doors.

The approach I see:

Phase 1
Improve the current drones (think Phoenix) to be able to do all the basic pilot skills a human can do. Right now they can do things like: Fly to a specific point, Avoid collisions with other ships/stations, & aim guns, but we'd really need a more complete set of skills:
- Ability to fire missles
- Ability to drop minefields
- Proper nanning
- Weapon switching (combat nans!)
- Probing
- Booster use
- Improved maneuvering (do a basic circle-strafe instead of always ramming a target, maybe a bit of random sidethrusting)
- Cloaking
- Turreting
There are several others, each of which would probably involve a fair amount of design discussion, maybe even their own Ticket. In a way, each skill is also somewhat independent. I think the key though will be to include plenty of parameters than can be tweaked to control how effective they are for a particular task.

Phase 2
The next step would be to create the player-esque construct that combines all these basic skills into a real "bot". I'm a talking about the difference between what you fight in the training missions versus something that could dock at an outpost, swap from a scout to an interceptor and relaunch at the expansion to stop an enemy bomber. There'd probably be fair amount of user interface work that would need to be done here as well.

Phase 3
- Add a "Minimum Team Size" option to GC. If there are fewer than that number of players on the team, they get filled in with Bots. Perfect for the late night crowd wanting play a 15 vs 15 game when there's only 11 people on. If more humans want to join, they simply take the place of one of the bots.

Bonus Round: Use the previously mentioned bot skill parameters to make up a set of standard profiles. So you'd have RT bots that liked to probe/nan and SysXT bots that won't get out of ints unless directly ordered 2-3 times and Starfire1b bots that like to bomb refs, and a broad range of accuracy at the different skills from phase 1. Whenever a bot is used, behind the scenes it grabs one of these profiles. That specific profile then gets tracked in AllegSkill, and the results are then used to fine tune AutoBalance using bots to help even the teams both in skill levels and team sizes.

Why can't a good idea just be left alone? The AI commander is to eliminate the stacking issue. Don't take it any further. This is a game that was created to promote teamwork...not AI.

Even with your input raum coding the ai is going to take a bit got get going and then getting all the bugs out, so weather or not you support this isn't going to change; weather people develop this or not and if it doesn't work you can always stick to how ever pugs are now days.