Calin said:
But my purpose here is to learn. I'm not going to start teaching a senior programmer about RTS games.
Learning only brings you to the point of current state of the art. After that point your contribution begins. You might come up with something new, and future senior programmers might learn about your former ideas. : )
I mean, we might run into some misunderstandings here, and philosophy won't answer your question.
But your question is just too broad, so all the senior programmer can do is listing up some options to illustrate that different people and games came up with different aproaches.
If you would narrow the question down to something like ‘Ok, so i want my units to move in formations like the Romans did. How can i implement that?’, people could give some actual proposals i guess. But actually it's too broad.
Calin said:
It's buggy, short sighted but it works. )
It's buggy, but it works regardless? :O
Hehe, my prediction: flaws which feel acceptable right now will require a fix in the future.
And implementing all those fixes will increase complexity. And it may pile up to the point where the desire grows to replace the pile with something simpler.
So you start out simple, which is nice. But then it becomes complicated and messy, which sucks. Finally you replace the pile of hacks with something truly simple, robust, and general. But you could not come up with this final and good solution from the start, since you did not yet know about the unexpected flaws and problems back then.
That's how it usually goes. In my experience at least. Doing it wrong is part of the process, and senior advice has only minor effect on this natural progression.
