I know I have a lot of suggestions - hey, I’m a creative thinker! Here comes another one…
Is it crazy to want access to some of the AI capabilities. For instance, if I want to go on vacation and won’t be able to check in to the game for a week, can I get the AI to take over without conceding defeat? Can I get the AI just spend my production money in a reasonably sensible way?
Taking the concept further, one could conceivable tell the AI what goals the player wanted to accomplish, and the AI could set about trying to accomplish those goals. Simple goals - ‘take this planet’, ‘buy more econ’, ‘keep funneling my ships to designated rally points’, etc…
At some point, the player becomes the commander in chief, setting an agenda, while the AI functions as the field general, executing the policy.
Basically I’d like to do less micro and more macro. The AI could facilitate this.
It’s only cheating if the AI is better than a human player. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t, I don’t know.
I agree it’s not much fun if you have a computer playing for you, but what about ‘computer-assist’? If the AI is like a self-driving car, then all I’m proposing is the equivalent of a ‘lane assist’ feature, rather than full blown autonomy.
Maybe not have the AI play for you, but auto spending would be cool, I can already order my ships to do what I want while I’m away, why not my too? At x hour I know I'll be asleep but also have enough for that thing I need, this could be handled by the browser through the game. Of course then that would naturally lead us to ask for triggers to set waypoints for a new carrier that I bought. This could get out of hand easily, but some automation on spending could be cool. Especially in Triton “drop all $ on econ on final tick” ha
Could be done with carrier actions too to represent the officer going and doing the thing? Eg have additional options that the carrier could do that add to the list of “no action”, “take all ships”, etc but have something like “build econ”, “build indy”, “build science”. And would be cool because you would have to have that extra carrier to be able to do these sorts of things. Would add a whole other level of complexity without much code/mechanic changes. I have mentioned this before for building warp gates as well in another thread. Make our carriers awesome Jay!
It would also make it so no one would need to wake up at odd hours due to bad timing. Could set the carrier to land and build the industry you need to survive the retake attempt.
