After playing some old 4E games and playing with the shipbuilding I had an idea for a game. For now lets call it Micro creep. Game Setup Game is turn based strategy. Basic premise is similar to 4E games except it is based on a single moon. You control a colony and an ever expanding mat of microbots. These microbots are your creep. A nearby colony has similar creep and is bent on your destruction. The eventual goal is to beat back their creep and overrun their colony. You have a large variety of microbots (which you can design from researched components) and they all perform seperate tasks ranging from general attack, to gathering materials to solar collectors, to units that make more units, to units that can fling others across the battle field. For the large part the units are controlled by their simple preprogrammed onboard ai. Some units will have general tasks that can be overridden (such as a launcher sending material back to the factory being asked to launch a fighter into the fray). Other units will be created and sent on their merry way and will not be able to recieve future orders (such as a wave of drone melee grunts) One eventual goal would be to setup such multilayered tasks such as deploying a bunker. It would involve launching fighting units to one area followed by worker units to create fortifications followed by factory units to start creating more fighters. These tasks would be able to be exported and imported so you could share tips and techniques with others. One other thought I had was to allow radio transmissions to be seen by all. You could then create runner bots that would give your orders without the enemy knowing. Questions Where should the line be drawn between direct control of units and internal AI? I would like for part of the game to be scripting the best strategy into your units while keeping their cost down. More script means more memory for the bot which ups the resources needed to create it. Related to above: When to people get frustrated at a lack of control? Do you get frustrated when a slow projectile (as in the soviet rocket launcher in RA2) misses a moving target? Would it be different if it was a bot with some simple orders of attack the nearest enemy? Would you be frustrated if you could not select a specific unit to do a specific action? How should new fighting techniques be encouraged? Since the sharing of battle plans is something I would like to include, what should be done to prevent the "Ultimate Fighting Script" from being used by everybody? On second thought, this is more of a balance issue that should be addressed later. After defeating Colony A, what variables should be changed to make Colony B a challenge? I personly get annoyed by games where you are forced to research the same thing every mission (as in Starcraft-mind you, I still love starcraft.) More questions later as my thoughts on this converge. All thoughts, comments and critques are welcome. [Edited by - Thermodynamics on March 22, 2007 9:52:27 AM]

Neat idea.

There was a game called 'ChipWitz' that was recently re-launched. It might be a really cool idea for a game like yours:
ChipWitz

The player should still have some rough control, perhaps by injecting a <goal> variable into the scripting language (so that if it had a goal it would walk t/shoot/construct at that place). The player could then select a group of bots, and inject a 'goal' position/creature into their dataset

You could also have a repair unit, which has the optional possibility of replacing any logic with a new one.. Say you have AttackBot Script <defend> for your original base-building exercise. Now the space is safe, it's time to take half of them and reprogram them for AttackBot script <search_and_destroy>, so you send the (expensive) repair bot over to re-flash their eproms.

Can you steal the other side's robots? Maybe use a form of suicide electro-magnetic-pulse 'bot that knocks out the enemy bot for X seconds.. if you manage to reprogram them (using a repair bot) before they reboot their BIOS, they become your units (but still looking like the opponents?), and you can use them for attack/infiltration.

Anyways.. neat idea, and if done well it would fix the frantic clicking aspect of RTSes.

You can balance the size of the 'chipwit' board to force smarter bots to cost more, though I'd be careful to avoid a 'peasant rush' mechanic where a 2x2 board of "GO X, SHOOT X" defeats everything.

Good luck,

Allan

The AI bit sounds like Majesty, by Microprose I believe. They had a "reward flag" system that I really liked - one of my favorite games of all time. I'm not sure how you'd implement it, but it would certainly be effective.

I dunno how you'd handle the whole nanobot thing... it'd be really tricky to get right. They'd have to be really quick to build, but not too quick... tricky.

As for the "don't make them research the same thing twice", yeah, it sounds like a good idea, but you'd have to have REALLY REALLY HUGE tech trees so there'd still be something to research each mission without backtracking. Again, it would be interesting, but difficult to do well. Also, try not to make the techs boring, please!

After talking on #gamedev, it was brought to my attention that my idea is similar to project-hoshimi.
Some of the differences would be:
-Turnbased instead of realtime.
-less focus on individual units. I imagine the map looking like salt and pepper sprinkled on a table.
-more scripting choices and less direct orders. I mentioned dropdown menus and someone else mentioned the FF12 gambit fighting system. From what I have seen it looks along the lines of what I was thinking.

I looked at ChipWitz and I do like the graphical programing aspect. I would need to do it with modifiers on the tile though.