Meta Group Designer?

from AshesoftheSingularity Forums

I'm coming off a recent GalCiv III binge and had a thought on meta groups.

Have you thought about putting a "meta group designer" into players' hands?  Kind of like the ship builder in Gal Civ III, but a much more basic interface used that could be sued to create custom Meta Groups and related build lists (e.g., not to change the appearance of the units or anything).  Something akin to the fleet builder in Gratuitous Space Battles that would tell you how much metal you'd need, how many reactives, etc.

The way I see it in my head is that players could play around offline with assembling meta groups of various unit combinations, see what the buffs would be, and then set the group.  In-game you could build your factories and then task one or more with building Meta Group 1, Meta Group 2, Meta Group 3, etc..  Once you set the build orders the factories would pump out your pre-selected units in the numbers you've specified.  This does not seem like it would require much AI horsepower, but it would let players customize their builds, focus on more strategic issues than unit building, and maybe make me care more about building a bunch of metal/reactive storehouses everywhere so that I could build up resources during a game to make my killer Meta Group build #5 or w/e.  

This approach would also add a new level of strategy to the game and give people something to play around with offline.  My sense is that a lot of strategy would go into optimal builds, since you must weigh in-game manufacturing times, the resources on a particular map, buffs, etc.  People might even customize their builds to specific maps based on the resources available and/or their opponent.

Just something I thought I'd toss into the ether.

 

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Reply #1 from AshesoftheSingularity Forums Top

I think it makes more sense to have group creation be dynamic during the game. This has a number of advantages, like allowing players to dynamically change their deployment just by changing the size of two or more groups. Sure, you could specify outside a game, but there is no reason you couldn't change them on the fly as well.

 

Suppose a player has two groups of units, A and B, in different locations. The player wants to move units from group A to group B.

You could quickly do this by increasing the desired size of group B, and decreasing the desired size of group A. Because A now contains more units than it "wants" it automatically drops the excess units from A. The excess units would do whatever excess units do, either retreat to a rally point or enter some "reserve" pool of units. And then those unassigned units would go to group B because B currently contains fewer units than it wants. B "requests" units, first drawing them from available reserves, and if there aren't enough free units then it asks for production jobs.

 

Now if you wanted to be very clever about this system, then supergroups composed of several smaller groups would be a game-changer. Functional subgroups might be physically separated, contain very different unit behaviors, or do other sophisticated behavior. Like having artillery provide fire support for an army from a distance, or a wing of planes provide air support, an engineer or repair corps, or transports to ferry reinforcements, or SAM launchers to stand well behind the front lines of the army.

Adding more units with a particular role to the supergroup will automatically assign them to the appropriate subgroup. If a certain subgroup is smaller than desired, it will tell its supergroup that it needs reinforcements, and the supergroup can include it in a request for reinforcements.

Ordering the supergroup to move somewhere will give each unit in the army specific move orders that are appropriately offset in both location and timing based on which subgroup the unit is in. Ordering it to seize a VP, assault a target area, besiege a target area, defend/secure a target area, patrol an area, or search and destroy near a target area, would all cause different behaviors among the subgroups.

Reply #2 from AshesoftheSingularity Forums Top

I hear you ledarsi -- all very good ideas as were those in your other thread.  I do not know what kind of AI computing power it would take to make your proposals work, though -- particularly when we start talking about lower-end systems. My system has some serious horsepower, but I've spent a lot more on it than the average gamer.  I defer to SD on all this, as I do not know anything about technical game design, how much you have to rob graphics to pay AI, etc.

With customized meta groups you could gain some of the advantages you describe by designing a few different meta groups to support each other, selecting them all, and then issuing a common move order.  I get that more human micromanagement would be necessary since all you are doing is issuing pre-set build orders to the game, but the more humans must do the more it frees up your hardware to render graphics, support the existing meta-group AI, etc.

To your reinforcement point, maybe you set it up so that Meta Groups can "request" certain units like you can do in GCIII with constructors & starbases?

Besides being a simpler and less hardware-intensive solution, a meta group designer may allow SD to leverage some experience they already have from GCIII and gives players something fun to play around with.  There's commercial appeal to a meta group designer as well in that it offers an interesting customization angle that plays neatly into SD's existing marketing narrative; and it's a more clearly definable/tangible "feature" than trying to sell "better AI".

Who knows though, SD may hate the idea but I figured why not toss it out there since it's something I'd selfishly like to see in the game ;-).

 

Galactic Civilizations IV
Reply #3 from AshesoftheSingularity Forums Top

I wrote something about Custom Meta units around march i am gonna paste it here

our own Meta-units Formations Rule


Lets say me as a player that i want to go crazy in the game with my Units but i don't like the Default Rules for the Meta-units, and i want to change all the formation of them, like ( making T3 units to the front, then Anti Air T2 units the middle and last get hundreds of T1 Units in the back of the formation, and the last cool around formation that you have a bunch of air units defending the whole Meta-unit group. Why not? I want to try something new here with formations, why only the default one? why we want to be the same as everyone?

It will be really cool to give us a Custom Formation Rules for our Meta-units

the idea is to keep the Default rules and add lets say 4 more Custom Rules that the player will create and use in the game however they want.

Give the player the freedom to try some really cool and random formation rules

So if i want to create a new Rule, i will want to choose who goes to the (front, middle front, middle back, right side, left side, back and around the whole group like air units). So me as the player will go and decide witch units go to each side and then create that Custom Meta-units Rule.


I hope they will let us do it. :D