Command RTS

There is only one unit, a bot. It can harvest, attack, build or upgrade. There are two resources ore and fuel.

Bots can go down different upgrade paths.

• Shop: Better at building and upgrading and building, but can no longer harvest. Substantial increase in weight.
  • Factory: Best at building
  • Lab: Best at upgrading
    • Military Lab: improvements for upgrading weapons and defense
    • Industrial Lab: improvements for speed and harvesting
• Motors: 4 stages (2-4 require factory, lab, industrial lab respectively) increases max speed and improves fuel efficiency (but new max speed is less distance efficient). Movement speed is based on weight.
• Weapons: various strategic improvements
• Shielding: increases armor
  • Plating: further increases armor
  • Deflector: reduces damage at the cost of fuel. Also consumes fuel when running. 1 second boot time
• Sensors
  • Upgrade camera: can see further directly in front of bot
  • Panoramic camera: can see a little ways all around bot
  • Radar: can find ore and enemies at a long distance
• Mining: improves mining speed
  • Drill: improves ore mining
  • Pump: increases fuel mining
  • Trunk: increases carrying capacity

Bots can be controlled directly. They can also be assigned scripts to follow. Scripts also allow bots to issue orders to each other. Orders come with a priority, so if one bot issue a command to another bot, the command will only be followed if it has a higher priority. Each bot also has a number of parameters that can be set: speed, script, engagement, target. These are set along with a priority - so there is two priority levels, the level being used to set the parameter and the level needed to override that. Each bot also has an ID that cannot be changed. This is just the order the bots were created.

Cases

Speed Control

When we're low on fuel, we want to direct all bots to reduce speed. Except those in battle.

Unified Targeting

A group of bots attacking should coordinate their attack to do maximum damage. Which bot chooses the target? The script could defer to the bot with the highest ID. Or the bots could resolve themselves into a virtual command chain.