We all know about HL2 Wars right? Seeing as how we are both RTS games, I'm sure we learn alot from each other. So why don't we work together?
HL2 wars is controlling AI units, AFAIK there's no players on the ground at all, it's neat but there's nothing there for us, and there's nothing here for them.
I played that mod before I played empires, I thought it was bad then and i still think it's bad now, it has no hope, and we won't get anything out of it.
We can make an NPC building for squad leaders to use. A squad leader can go into one of these buildings and spawn some npcs NF can have antlions, since they use biological augmentation BE can have combine because of their artificial augmentation Squad leaders can make move orders that act as info_nodes for the npcs It would look somewhat like the video when they were moving npcs in first person view.
As far as mapping goes I think empires and hl2wars share a lot of concepts and pitfalls. It'd be cool to talk to some of their official mappers.
one one hand it would be superawesome, on the other hand, go play ArmA CTI mode (its quite similar to empires actually, just no funky research shit and a damn huge map) and youll learn about the stuggle to have AI squadmates. nother option would be to use it to dota-ize the game. wonder how a dota-esk fps would play. but it prolly fits badly with empires, or maybe not, but wont happen anyway ...
Other than some very specific situations I really can't see the point putting AI in empires, certainly not as players. The most I'd be willing to add would be scanners with calculators taped to the front to act as robot flying engineers, the CV could spawn a pair and you could make a structure which spawns a couple. But as enemies? In a game where everyone has death rays for guns? That'd be either really annoying or really pointless.
How about every team gets just _one_ bot that can be controlled directly by the commander whilst inside the CV: "press F3 for bot control" (buts you in bot-first-person-view) bot spawns only once per round in middle of your first repair pad moves slow, welds stuff like a normal engineer has no other weapons bippety bippety NF bot BE bot
nf marvin is more like the marvin i imagined when i read the book ... also chris, though bots could be pinpoint accurate, they dont have to. i wonder how fps-dota would be - not in empires, as seperate game. maybe ww1 themed, ww2 is so overdone - or smthg like korea or nam. nothing modern, i hate having acogs on each and every weapon including shotguns. wonder why they didnt put them on knifes in bf3 ... sry im derailing myself my point was that they dont have to be superefficient/accurate, but something to pointfarm for skills or equip and to use as cover or distraction - simulated noobs so to say kinda would be an awesome replacement for recources in general - turn empires into dota, best thing is youll only need one map and it could look and play like district, isnt that what everyone wants anyway? :p
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (TV series) from 1980's, it was the first thing I saw about tHGttG, before the book or the shitty movie. I would send you the series, if it weren't hiding from me in old old backups. The rest of your post was crap.
How I always imagined marvin, a bit more unhappy/slouchy though. (and I read the books before I played ratchet and clank, I always imagined him as short, green eyed and depressed)
I think the idea dota style npc bots or w/e has already been suggested before and kind of approved, can a dev tell us how hard it would be to actually accomplish it? or wookie his idea is good too, although I dont really like the idea of 1 bot you can controle in fp, let's say you can get 1 squad per building you make with a max of 1 per player or something like that and just controle em like you would in an fps, give em like what, 50 hp each etc and the only thing they can do is build or w/e
Effective = annoying, ineffective = pointless. Moderately effective = moderately annoying, moderately ineffective = moderately pointless. The problem is that it's a scale, between annoying and pointless, 'good' is not anywhere on the scale. You can have very annoying, very pointless, or equal parts annoying and pointless, but never good.
