Current Project.

My current project is a Agent based RTS, where you give orders but don't control the troops, feedback from the enivorment is provided from your troops when they return, if they return.

Now most people are thinking "if I only gett feedback when my troops return, what will I do when they are away?", well your base of operation will allways have a realtime feed, and all units moving in it's range will be visible (if they are friendly, or if they are not sneaking). Additional to that, you may request the building of outposts, as well as request construction of landlines between outposts and your main base, resulting in real time feed, or atleast slightly delayed feedback from your outposts. An outpost can be any type of building you might construct like guardtowers, forts, farms and mines. The decisions if you want to landline somthing is simply a question about cost.

Squad managment and orders becomes more important if you can't actually follow your squad in realtime. So you will have the possiblity to prioritising the layout of the teams gear, where greater armor and weapons might give you an edge in a fight, but the weight might prevent them from retreating if things go south.

The main problem being, if a unit dies, the gear drops at the units current position, meaning, if you send a highly equiped team and they are outmaned, knocked out by gas, sneaking enemies, or just in someway dies, the gear will drop at that point, worse, if no one make it back, you won't miss your team untill they miss a planed radio contact (if they had a radio) or you expected them to come back. You won't even know what prevented them from coming home. It can also be so simple that the radioguy is taken out first, and the rest of the team is pinned and can't call for backup.

The game itself might suck since it's kind of unproven ground, no controll, and no feedback without reports, but it might be intresting and require a new set of strategies.

At the moment I am working on behavior trees to get the AI working, previously I've had a hardcoded leader, and hardcoded followers, and now I try to merge them, as well as allowing them to dynamicly pick a new leader if the old one dies, or if part of the team is cut off.

So far it's going quite well, but since the tree and original behaviors are quite different, it might take some time to sort things out. First goal, to place on AI that designate himself leader and try to navigate somewhere, after that, adding two AIs and make them decide who's leader, make the leader plot a course, and the follower to follow him.

I have high hopes.