"Generals" or "Leaders"

from Elemental Forums

One idea I have had for a while now is the creation of generals, or leaders. They would not act so much as a unit, but as an AI loyal to you. You could allocate a certain number of resources to them, and give them orders, something like capture a certain city. The general would then build up an army to the best of it's abilities, according to how many resources you allow it to use, and than go attack. Once it has completed its task, it would ask for new orders.

You could also set them to defend certain areas (would attack enemies within a certain range), defend cities, or just even build up an army which you yourself could control at a certain point. I think a feature like this would be useful in late game senarios. I  think back to some games of Civ that I have played, and will be fighting on twenty fronts, and building things in thirty cities, and each turn would take forever. Now sometimes I enjoy that, but sometimes I would love to just let the computer take over some parts. Maybe at the beginning of each turn you can get a report, with a status update from each of your generals or leaders, telling you what they have completed. Leaders could be more non military, like mayors in cities. You could specify a direction you want a certain city to take (like science) and the mayor would build buildings to achieve that goal (simular to the auto build feature in civ if I remember corectly).

So basically you would have generals to help manage your offence/defence (maybe they can level up as well, based on number of victories and what not, granting bonues), and leaders, like mayors of cities to micro manage city production. Then at the start of every turn, you would get a single report telling you what has been accomplished so far (as opposed to civ, where they would bounce you around the whole world telling you what each individual city has completed). It would turn some of the micro managing into macro managing. These generals/leaders could be part of the whole family system as well, with names and positions. Maybe they can even be moved around like a resourse. So if you have a mayor who is really good (because of certain bonuses maybe), you could move them to a city that is strugling, which might help it out a lot.

Ok, I have writen more than enough, hope I my idea is clear... it makes some sense in my head at least, but might be to complicated to implement.

10,637 views 16 replies
Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top

Er ... I would much rather your Family Members and Heroes act as possible leaders (and yes, it can be a rare event for a hero to emerge from a leader-less army with a stunning victory). These units, asides from their combat stats, would have leadership-based stats (to some extent) hopefully both in running an army and in running a city (so that they can be a general, governor, or both ... of course they are only ever generals "during battle" technically, while they are a governor as long as they are the "smartest" (highest administration score) family member currently in a city.

These would be generals as completely controllable as the Sovereign, and even you can pull together all your royals and heroes into one "super army" to fight the crazy groglock ... but hopefully ADVENTURERS would be better at all that stuff. (it goes Sovereign > Adventurer > Hero > family member during battle, while Sovereign > family member > hero > adventurer at being a governor)

Aaanyways, I think your Governor Idea would work well for ordering vassals around. Or more importantly, if you have blood running a "rival" nation, and they are not player-controlled, (rather they don't have a Sovereign any more), then you can give them such free-reign orders. But giving your own hard-earned units free-reign? Im not sure it would be rewarding/fun to the player.

Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

From my experience with Gal Civ II, Stardock is great at providing appropriate tools to prevent annoying micromanagement. I'm sure that you will be able to automate army and city building when it gets too tedious to be fun.

Multiplicity - Control multiple PCs using one keyboard and mouse
Reply #3 from Elemental Forums Top

Automated governor, automated workers, automated general etc...  I don't see why I will enjoy them, nor why Stardocks paying any effort to try implement them.  

There are other better ways to reduce micromanagement.

Reply #4 from Elemental Forums Top

Its interesting, but the problem would probably be that this would be frustrating and you would spend more time trying to manage/influende/give orders to your generals than you would have done just moving the forces manually.

It smells a bit too much like Master of Orion III :)

Reply #5 from Elemental Forums Top

I would certainly prefer direct control.

Reply #6 from Elemental Forums Top

Direct control is certainly preferable, until it isn't. At some point, given the massive maps that Stardock plans on having, turns will take hours. Unless there are suitable systems in place that allow you to automate movement and production, allowing you to focus on your grand strategy instead of whether your 57 scouts move N, W, E or S. Think about the civilization manager in GCII. How cool was it that in 5 seconds, you could change the production of each planet in your empire. I would certainly love having a similar system in place for Elemental.

Reply #7 from Elemental Forums Top

It would be nice to have various types of orders to give these generals.  For example, offensive actions might be 'attack if victory appears certain' or 'don't attack if risky at all' or something in between.  Similar orders might be given with regard to defense, such as 'defend at *** river (or pass) at all costs' or 'stay between enemy and ****city, retreat into city if necessary' (or ...do not retreat into city'.

Reply #8 from Elemental Forums Top

Goodmorning all,

If you could give addiquately detailed instructions, and see explicately in list form what your general is going to do to achive the goals you give them, AND be able to edit those goals and means to achive the goals.  This wouldn't suck.

if any of those steps are missing you're inevitably going to have 'The black AI box of damn why is it doing that!?!?!?' which all AI goveners in all games i've played so far suffer from. 

I actually posted a fairly detailed suggestion on how to get arround this a long time ago

 

On AI; Transparant goals/means, on MMI (man(player) mashine interaction)... https://forums.elementalgame.com/357530

The suggestion pertained to a global AI, but easily any subbranch of it could be used without the rest to create a 'general'. 

The key issue is that to run a good AI anything the AI must make priorities, define goals, and set out steps on how to achive those goals. All those steps must be transparent to users to make a good general.   So you order the general to do something, or take control of something, then you can look at how it plans to achive that goal and can look at the 5 - 10 - 15 turn plan and make corrections.

If the system is any less user friendly and transparent high compition users will still perfer to do it all manually simply because nomatter how good the pre-defined AI it'll be a black box that does undesirable stuff.

Robbie

 

 

Reply #9 from Elemental Forums Top

What's the point of having an empire if you could only control your sovereign? You guys can keep your automated... I never used it in Medieval II Total War and I doubt I ever will.

Reply #10 from Elemental Forums Top

yea ... I NEVER use automation (on soldiers). To me war is at least as important to me as my cities. To tell me to automate some generals, you might as well tell me to set cities to "automate production". And the only thing under my control would be tech research, spell research, and my sovereign (and troops in his stack).

Now, mind you, such a game would be relatively interesting from an RPG perspective (only controlling your leader), but in a game such as this? No thank you. I will take my full direct control, and I will do so until I have already won the game, where I will simply switch all cities to producing wealth and buy more mercenaries as my army begins to wear thin (if at all) and levelling up my super stack of doom as its commanded by my sovereign and stomps down the survivors.

Most likely destroying newly captured cities by this point, unless it has a global effects wonder that is worth my time.

Reply #11 from Elemental Forums Top

I'm not really talking about automation. What I am talking about is a set of powerful tools that allows you to manage your empire on a much larger scale. I don't want to use somebody else's general AI, I want to be able to create my own. Without modding. I want an in-game tool that allows you to define a set of rules that your general will follow. Instead of having to manually tell my stack to conquer city after city, which gets incredibly tedious (albeit still somewhat satisfying), I want to be able to tell my general to conquer an entire region. Obviously, I don't want my general to do anything stupid. So I tell the general what is stupid and tell him not to. I would also leave a gray area, where my general asks me what he should do in certain situations. A system of situations and reactions coupled with a system of higher-level command (ordering a general to attack region R instead of cities A-Z) would be awesome in my opinion.

This sort of abstraction will, IMHO, deepen strategy instead of limit it. By removing the player's focus from the tedious micromanagement, the developers can allow the grand strategy aspect to become more complex and more enjoyable without becoming a burden and feeling like work. Having to order 50 units separately feels like work, at least to me. If some people enjoy that, that's fine. This general feature would obviously be optional, and those who take pleasure in the menial can feel free to play without it, but I, for one, would like to be free from that for once. I would like to play a strategy game that lets strategy feel like a strategy, and not like a chore.

Reply #12 from Elemental Forums Top

Oh ... well I like this sort of Idea. If only for areas where your victory is All but Assured :)

So yea ... if your just going to steam-roll without much effort, its a really good system. I'd say it would reduce alot of the "boring" from end-game, and give a player who is Micro-Surviving a chance to .. well ... survive.

Reply #13 from Elemental Forums Top

Even when victory is not assured, victory is not usually achieved by micro. At least, not the sort of micro that could be eliminated by a powerful UI toolkit. Most micro is simple maximization, and maximization is something that computers are very good at. Let the computer maximize the relative strength and weaknesses of your army, and you can focus on what to do with that army. Unless, of course, you enjoy doing the maximization yourself.

Reply #14 from Elemental Forums Top

er ... figuring out which stacks will defeat other stacks (in fall from heaven) without a combat calculator is, well, FUN. I don't know wether its fun cause Im good at it or fun cause I just like to do it. (I still use combat calculator for skirmishes and assasins). So yea ... I suppose if you had 10 cities producing units, and you had a wide front with 5 armies, one army spaced every 10 squares or so ... then I could see you automating new recruits to join certain armies, and having an automator to say "X unit from Y city goes to army A" ... I find this is oft not the case, but to have such a system would be nice.

However, I usually find the the cast to be Cities 1-4, build units and converge on waypoint. X. From there meet army A. Where army A is the one large grouping of soldiers and is either softening up the enemy or is already in a steamroll (otherwise Army A would still be at location X).

Reply #15 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Ratya48, reply 11
I'm not really talking about automation. What I am talking about is a set of powerful tools that allows you to manage your empire on a much larger scale. I don't want to use somebody else's general AI, I want to be able to create my own. Without modding. I want an in-game tool that allows you to define a set of rules that your general will follow. Instead of having to manually tell my stack to conquer city after city, which gets incredibly tedious (albeit still somewhat satisfying), I want to be able to tell my general to conquer an entire region. Obviously, I don't want my general to do anything stupid. So I tell the general what is stupid and tell him not to. I would also leave a gray area, where my general asks me what he should do in certain situations. A system of situations and reactions coupled with a system of higher-level command (ordering a general to attack region R instead of cities A-Z) would be awesome in my opinion.

This sort of abstraction will, IMHO, deepen strategy instead of limit it. By removing the player's focus from the tedious micromanagement, the developers can allow the grand strategy aspect to become more complex and more enjoyable without becoming a burden and feeling like work. Having to order 50 units separately feels like work, at least to me. If some people enjoy that, that's fine. This general feature would obviously be optional, and those who take pleasure in the menial can feel free to play without it, but I, for one, would like to be free from that for once. I would like to play a strategy game that lets strategy feel like a strategy, and not like a chore.
End of Ratya48's quote

That sounds ideal but difficult to implement. I would, admittedly, like some automation on some of the smaller tasks to running an empire. For example in Medieval II Total War I'd often forget to move my agents, and in Dominions I'd love to set up a wizard who automatically travels from province to province searching for magic sites. With enough of that in place, a lot of effort would be freed for me to make the larger strategic decisions.

Reply #16 from Elemental Forums Top

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Goodmorning all

sorry: re the long delay school and this post got eatted twice by the forum beast


That sounds ideal but difficult to implement. I would, admittedly, like some automation on some of the smaller tasks to running an empire. For example in Medieval II Total War I'd often forget to move my agents, and in Dominions I'd love to set up a wizard who automatically travels from province to province searching for magic sites. With enough of that in place, a lot of effort would be freed for me to make the larger strategic decisions.
End of quote


I don't think this would be overly difficult to implement. Consider that the AI will have to make plans, make decisions, and prioritize goals, it won't be able to compete if it can't. In order to make a good general / automation AI all you need to do is outline the plan, and the goals and priorities. Now the general can give tell you explicitly what he or she is going to do, and if you don't like it, you retain 100% control to tell the general to change their priorities or plan.

With a system such as this you can make a 10 -20 turn plan, either by building it from scratch, or telling the AI what you want to do, looking at the steps it suggests taking, then editing them to match what you really want to do. Then turn the plan over to a general to execute. Of course the general would keep you updated with daily reports about any changes to the plan as discussed.

In terms of coding all this would involve is creating an XML like text which gets added to at every step of the AI's planning out how to achieve the goal. Which is then made more pretty presented to the user to be changed, and then fed back into the AI for execution over the following turns.

This system would eliminate the primary problem of black box automation AI's; they take control away from the user, and do stupid stupid stuff (normally based off short term algorithms that look only at the present turn, if even that.) The method I'm suggesting would leave the user 100% in the drivers seat, but get the most micromanagement for far fewer mouse clicks. Additionally one can focus on a goal, and logic out several turns of actions all at once, and review it latter reminding you what you were thinking and what you were planning.


Hopefully this is more clear by way of suggestion. (and hopefully it won't get eatted by the forum beast again.)

Robbie Price