No captain mode

[zakhennahr]

Raise dead!

To have a full (but basic) VS AI game, here's what is needed:

Wraith AI (will be hard as fuck to implement right, medium difficulty to implement them to swarm miners or whatnot too far from the BC)
Upgrades AI (easy to implement a "pick an upgrade at random and do it" AI, more difficult but I think necessary for a *good* game to implement an AI that you control at a distance by allowing one player to type "upgrade c" for offense tier upgrade, or "upgrade qzz" for laser damage upgrade, etc.)
Power AI (same as upgrades, does it act on its own or can someone tell it what to do from a distance?)
Nav AI (see above)

Assuming the Upgrades, Power, and Nav AIs work by being told what to do from a distance (I think this is extremely necessary for a decent game VS AI, otherwise the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing, or they're each going to require double the implementation effort, one for VS AI, and one for player vs player teams), there will finally be a Controller AI (Hive Mind Emulator AI? Grocery Store Manager AI?) component that decides at a high level what to assign drones (and players, if we add it as a game mode) to and give them commands as necessary. For example, such an AI would do the following:

• Assign 1 drone to upgrades
• Assign 2 drones or players to wraith
• Assign 2 drones or players to miner
• Reassign one drone from upgrades to science to ping
• Reassign drone back to upgrades
• Type "upgrade c" to upgrade offense tier 1
• Type "upgrade eq" to upgrade wraith damage
• Reassign drone from upgrades to weapons when an ally is under attack near the BC
• ...

Notice though that the list isn't even remotely complete in the actions this Controller AI would be doing, and it still even needs to pick which builds it goes based on resources it's getting and starting spot and minerals around the BC and ships the enemy has built and so on and so on. A very basic, semi-passable against < 30-50 reputation players would be doable, but it would need a lot of work for it to have some challenge against higher-level players. The upside though is that once all of this work is done to a decent level, a lot of smaller games could occur (2 noobs + BC AI vs. enemy BC AI, 4 pros + BC AI vs. 6 AI + enemy BC AI, etc.), likely increasing the community of this game. All of the implementation would take quite a long time though, and also would require a lot of thought beforehand as to how to go about designing each of the AIs into their respective roles.

[Dreadnought]

Keep in mind if we do a co-op vs AI thing will have to keep a few things in mind

If there is one single player on that team, all AI players added will revert to drones (its to complicated to have drones and players cooperating, and its a sin anyways)
AI will have additional parameters to even basic roles (mining AI wont run, if there are allied ships nearby to support it, it can also choose to help by mining the enemy ships)
There might be less then 6 AI on a team (players being players want to make things easier on themselves, or test things out) and what if there was just 3 AI, 1 AI? Its like will need to create a list of jobs (get eco, (big field detected) create chomper and chomp big field, fighters defend miners/chompers, fighters harass, Enemy BC detected at close range- request additional help on battlecruiser, ect...) its like a list of jobs, you have 6 guys and you split them up to tackle different jobs, oh the basement is on fire, that job is pushed to the top and needs 3 to tackle it....
Ok that was kind of weird