[Suggestion] Gambit System

I was thinking about something like this a little while ago. I think it would be nice to add in a short of "advanced tactics menu" that would allow you to tweak the AI for each ship/group of ships. I got the idea from Star Trek: Dominion Wars. Basically you command a small squad of starships and play through the campaign set during the Dominion War. The game was buggy as hell, but you could tell your ships to maintain maximum range or do fast hit-and-run attacks. Alpha strike, or fire weapons as they're ready. Turn off power to one system and divert it to another. Try to target certain subsystems on enemy vessels.

Naturally, all of these particulars don't appy to Sins, but it was a very nice concept that added a lot to the game. I'd like it if I could have some kind of "priority list" for casting abilities and even for attack orders. Something that would let me tell my subverters to only use their shield-damaging ability on capital ships, and only use distortion field on heavy cruisers, for example. Or maybe use distortion field on heavy cruisers first, support cruisers second, and LRF third.

Being able to tell subjugators to concentrate on healing your own ships first, and using suppression second (and even then, on enemy support cruisers first and HC second) would be really awesome.

This would probably require *a lot* of coding to add, and a lot of thought to impliment properly. One way to make it a bit easier to manage would be to allow the player to right-click on a ship type at the shipyard and get a shortcut menu. One of the options, of course, would be to cancel production. The other could be something like "give command priorities..." which would bring up the box allowing you to specify a default set of priorities to everything built at that shipyard.

Or maybe there should be some kind of empire-wide method for giving command priorities.

It really is a good idea, but I can also see that it would be difficult to impliment it well.

Target priority is already a preset at this stage. I think it's controlled from data.

I agree though, it would be nice to have the option to tweak such things.

What you are talking about is an advanced tactical "player assist" AI.  I have dreamed about such things for years, and in far more detail and complexity than what you outline above.  To the level of being able to set a ship to run away after a certain number of hit points have been lost, etc.

SOP -- Standard Operating Procedure. See the TacOPS series for a game with an implementation.

Alternately -- 'Dark Reign' (adjustable sliders, per unit, regarding willingness to pursue, damage tolerance, independence, if memory serves, plus preconfigured settings like 'Harass'), or the 'Space Empires' series (targeting priorities on a ship class basis, certain behaviors like 'optimum weapons range', 'maximum weapons range', "don't get hurt"; repair priorities as an ordered list of components as well).

Because of the potential scope (different situational targeting and ability priorities, which would have to vary per ship type, of which there are quite a few) and the continuous play (not particularly real-time, unless production is *extremely* fast or combat *very* slow) you'd want to have them in scripts that could be written outside the game and activated during the game.

This would be great, but can the engine handle the amount of computations? The sins engine already eats 100% of my cpu cycles.  And the idea of optimization thus far has involved reducing how often the computer checks autocast abilities. 

So that's why the autocast on shield regen sucks ass now.

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I was actually hoping they would put something like this in.

The main problem that I see is how do you provide adequate controls for this in real-time?

The 10-button layout is awesome and helpful, but it has it's limits. A series of drop-down boxes to the right of them doesn't sound pretty or easy to learn. I'd like to see a photoshop mockup of how you'd do this.

CPU time is actually not an issue if this is implemented as issuing additional user actions through a 'helper AI'. The game model does not depend on user actions being deterministic from the game state, so nothing stops this helper AI running on a different core. To keep the network traffic down and stop hacking abuses, perhaps have a hard limit on actions it's allowed to perform: say, 1 action per 3 seconds.

The problem that I forsee is that if you make it too good / complicated, it will automate almost everything about the game. Remember Master of Orion 3? You basically controlled a series of dials telling the helper AIs what to do. And it wasn't fun.

You mean how these orders would be issued? As has been stated, it would make more sense to set them outside of game under special listings and issue each listing in game from a list. And as for the part of making the game boring... well micro would still play a part. An ability like shield regen would have to be mircoed still, for effectiveness. Setting it to heal when one ships lost sheilds would be pointless and waiting for multiple ships might cause an important one to die. It still would be something nice to try out at any rate.