what you are suggesting is exactly why I want a system interface where you can essentially "build" orders from a set of basic commands, establishing directives to these commands, and setting conditional/decision making steps.
Basic Commands might be the following (each command will be a class which holds member variables and methods):
Attack
Defend
Move
Communicate
Rally/Regroup
Hold
Form
Observe
Directives based on these commands might be the following (Directives are some the arguments to the command class methods, as well as basic state data):
Priority
Threshold
Defensiveness
Aggression
Independence
Conditionals might take the following forms other than simple if/else or boolean tests:
DO action UNTIL condition B is met (for example, "follow target up to the hill")
WHILE state exists DO action (for example, "shoot at target B until it''s dead")
See how it goes? You can pretty easily conjure up a wealth of orders by putting in your commands, then slipping them into IF/ELSE, FOR, WHILE, and even CASE switches and couching them in very English terms. Now granted, I''m a designer more than a programmer, but if push came to shove, I could probably code how to work this out given enough time. So I''ll leave that stuff to more experienced programmers
But hopefully the point comes across that you can chain together some very basic commands into some very complex ones, and make conditional orders pretty easy too. The only real trick I see is in making a GUI interface that is very intuitive, but even that I don''t see as being too problematic.
