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Original post by Nytehauq It's a great idea. Keep the personality traits in there, even if you don't show them to the player. Having characters defined to the umpteenth degree will never hurt gameplay. Even if you don't show the players, the worst you'll end up with are very well designed and realistic characters, who react dynamically to situations :)

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Original post by sanch3x I love the personality idea because it really does attach the player to the characters. It's even cooler if you actually make some of their action kind of random.

Thanks guys for the confirmation. No one yet has said they wouldn't like personalities in their soldiers so I guess a) there aren't many power gamers at gamedev, b) everyone is supportive or c) they are just lurking bececause they dont want to turn this thread into a flame war (thanks in that case!).

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Original post by sanch3x If one of the squad mates is a coward and you're in a firefight where your squad is outnumbered it wouldn't be uncommon to have him runaway.. "Dammit Jim stay on your feet!"

Stylin has a point when he said..

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Original post by stylin I believe a retreating, or rather, a deserting of one of your troops would not be a very happy thing, especially if you're playing for pinks.

The ways I see deserting troops working is if you got reinforcements every once and awhile or I upped the number of soldiers per squad. If you spend your time tweaking a soldiers personality for a plan you want to put into action, and then that soldier chickens out and runs away, I'm sure the player would be greatly dissapointed in the personality feature of this game.

I plan on having the soldier (under stress) either lock up physically (for a short time) or have a delayed reaction time. Stress levels would rise if you send a soldier out away from the squad for too long (scouting?)(I'm talking about players with their nerves attribute really low) or a soldier that escaped death but watched their whole squad get killed.

On the other hand, I don't want to turn this into a game with a bunch of tactical wimps who have to hudle together for moral support and at the slight possibility of losing, give up and die.

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Original post by sanch3x Mind you you'd have to find some kind of AI algorithm that makes them have a personality and not make them stupid (you wouldn't want the aggressive to try and take on 100 guys on his own and you wouldn't want the coward to try and runaway when your squad is surrounded)

Competent AI will have to be programmed correctly. This could make or break the game.

Hahaha I know this could end up as an annoying thing that's why it would have to be controlled. He doesn't necessarily have to run away but if he's a coward and he's outnumbered he'd start shooting everywhere, not minding their ammo, trying to get cover from their own allies instead of having some gut and just biting down hard on the situation.

I agree that I'd get angry if the guy would just run away, heck I'd find a way to plugin the hand from Dungeon Keeper and slap him around until he'd pass out =D

Edited because I'm dumb...

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Original post by stylin I've understood the quick match/minigame aspect, but I was confused on how squad formation and customization would be implemented. In your squad menu, you'll be able select and customize x number of troopers, rolling dice or using a slider to affect their combat technique and general disposition. I think I'm good so far.

Exactly. I do prefer sliders/point allocation over rolling dice though. Ramdom seems... well... too random for a tactical strategy game. Random might be a nice game mode though. For that one game, your squads personalities are randomized and you must figure out how to win not knowing how your squad will behave. This could go bad though if you randomly recieved a squad of crazy ivans (maybe not?) or soldiers whos nerves are shot.

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Original post by stylin The error is mine in that I assumed you had the option of keeping part or all of your squad for subsequent missions (consequently their attribute stats as well). I interpreted it like an RTSRPG (where now I gather it's more of an accelerated RTS), and that's where my ideas about your character attributes are coming from. If this notion is incorrect, then you should definitely fill in the blanks for me. :)

Gladly. This is how I picture it. From a select Mode screen there will be two options; One option is Skirmish (minigames/quick battles/possible laddering?) and the other option is War (many squads/long battles/rtsrpg).

If you select skirmish, a screen will come up asking you to configure your squad. You'll be able to load previous squads or start a new squad and save. After that you will be taken to a lobby where you can create or join games. The game types you can play are listed in the linked thread at the top of this thread.

If you select War, a screen will come up with all the dedicated war servers (These are player run). You select which you'd like to play on and you must login with name and pass to that server. You will then be taken to a screen to choose which squad you'd like to play (or create a new one). Squads are server side to prevent cheating. Your squad will show acculated experience (if any) and you can allocate them into your squads stats. When you click join the fight you will spawn as a reinforcement squad, a brief description of how the battle is going, what squads are where, and a heirarchy of whos in command. The game objectives will be to destroy enemy reinforcement zones, head quarters, and enemy squads. Experience will be rewarded for completing these. After a side wins, the battlefield will be reset, or a new battlefield is loaded. The number of sides, duration of reinforcement time, which battlefield, and any secondary objectives can be controlled by the server admin.

Does this answer your question?

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Original post by stylin I do have to say: there's something about dynamic troops that appeals to me. Even with the fast-paced squad battles, there's always room to grow. And more field experience means giving your soldiers a chance to develop, enhance and learn to play cohesively, emphasizing and perfecting their particular character traits (Obviously a renegade will always be a renegade, but I think it would be cool to see how he changes and learns how to adapt to the type of soldier he is).

I would love to see this too. The AI would have to be amazingly complex to be able to learn what he does best. It is probably possible with neural nets and would add an attractive appeal to the feature list. However, it's hard to design and balance something like this because how the unit reacts in different situations will change and when you go to tweak the base discipline attribute, you find that your soldier has tweaked his own discipline attribute because he learned when to follow orders and when not too. Does this make sense? Crazy Ivan may decide not be crazy Ivan because the last 10 times he was in this situation, he died. Even though he may have wounded a whole squad, indirectly causing his squad to win, he still lost his personal objective. Dying is the quickest way of checking whether a solution worked or not. ... Well perhaps whether this feature will work or not is left in the hands of the programmer.

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Original post by stylin As you said though, many games like that end up being dominated by people who win based solely on the fact that they play the game 24/7, and all their characters are levelled. Without trying to expand and corrupt this novel idea of yours, you could add a ... ? ... a mercenary gameplay mode, in which players could use their built up characters. The other half of the game would be something of a generic or militant mode where levelled characters with dynamic attributes are not allowed to play.

I think this mercenary mode is like my war mode that I described previously. I'm still debating whether to even have a war mode because it really deviates from my quickgame / game for any type of player, game design.

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Original post by stylin Either way, I still think I need more clarification on what this game entails, so I'm not wasting (more) of your time with my ramble.

It's partly my fault for not explaining (due to my indecisiveness) the features of this design and I still think any rambling is better than none. :)

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I am working on compiling a game design document which I will post here (in a new thread) and have people comment and question on it. Again, any ideas that have been said will be credited to you.

Thanks for the replies and apologies for the delay in response. I will be diligently working on the design document now and will check in from time to time to answer more questions/comments if needed.