I was playing the old game Battlezone 2: combat commander and it got me thinking... why don't more games have fps AI in an rts setting?
When you see the tanks in Battlezone (which is a fps/rts hybrid) fight they are so much more interesting to watch... they circle around each other while changing weapons to fit the scenario. It actually looks like intelligent combat as opposed to the two troops standing there shooting each other until one dies.
Of course a game like this wouldn't be based around troop numbers because of the strain of having more complicated AI, but if a game made that long ago could do it... why not today? Heck, they even had fairly large numbers. I played a few games where we built upwards of 50+ separate units and there was no slowdown what so ever.
Does anyone know of other games that do this? Where you can command troops in an rts fashion, but they behave in an fps sort of way when they fight/move?
A good question. There is a reason why though: FPS AI tends to have far fewer instances of it running at any one time (to give an example, in half life 2, you had at maximum about 15-20 NPC's on screen at any one time). This uses a manageable, but significant, fraction of a computer's resources.
Now look at an RTS. On screen, there are far, far more individual NPC's than usually seen in an FPS. To give every one of them FPS grade AI would tax the average computer too greatly, and thus would be seen as a bad move by developers. In addition, FPS AI tends to give the NPC's a degree of autonomy, which could become quite irritating when the RTS player finds that his units open fire on a nearby enemy unit when they should be moving.
Thank you for responding, but I feel that if they did a limited fps AI like Battlezone did where in online matches we would regularly have upwards of 30+ units just on our team... and this was made in 1999.
Now if a modern game used less than the best graphics and used similar AI to Battlezone it would be easy to have plenty of units in the game.
I can only imagine a medieval rts where the units actually run around swinging their swords and maybe even using items like they do in Majesty. Even if they had to keep the units down I still think it could be tons of fun. Think of a game like Oblivion with more limited AI but in a rts game... Oh the possibilities.
Men of war does this. Soldiers will go where you order them but if they start getting shot at they man run for cover; if there is none they will go prone.
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