Very cool points, Velox. It's interesting that this sort of came about by accident -- well, actually it was inevitable. I had set out to create AI War specifically for the purpose of creating awesome AI in it (it's name was AI War from the start, and just kind of stuck), and so all of the focus of the gameplay was ultimately around facing this AI enemy that is more powerful than you, etc. The story and general scenario design grew up around that sort of concept, and most of the strategies that evolved out of the game (gate raiding, etc) were either things that came up organically through alpha testing, or which were sort of hinted at through those early play experiences, and which I then purposefully cultivated with units and mechanics to support them.
I've written before about my iterative development methods, and so I've always known that AI War was both the product of intent and an evolutionary refinement process. But, what has occurred to me for the first time is this: given the initial intent (my immutable goals), some of the aspects of the game that developed later were an inevitability. Like Neo from the Matrix or what have you.
But my point is that with the premise of having an overpowering AI opponent, and that that opponent is the only opponent in the game (no pvp, nothing scripted), then Velox's two points become an inevitability, even if the designer/programmer of the game doesn't know it. Given that premise, of course the players know they are playing an AI, and of course the strategies will then tend to center around exploiting the AI. Assuming that the game designer knows how to exploit his own AI, that will become a necessary part of the game, but in a more subtle sense than in other strategy games. It becomes, in essence, as foregone a conclusion as rushing in a pvp RTS. That's certainly a new way to look at it for me!
Shardz, regarding your comments, I think that there are two main reasons that I was able to concoct my sort of AI while the larger studios were not:
1. That was the central design goal of the game, above anything and everything else, and as a game designer I was willing to redesign any other aspect of the game if it would better serve the AI -- which, as you'll note, I had to do repeatedly. So, in essence, I wound up making a game environment that was super, super conductive to AI, rather than having to bend my AI to whatever game environment had already been thought up.
2. When it comes to RTS, almost all of my experiences in the last 10 years have been against various AIs, and so I have a wealth of knowledge on how to exploit the best of those AIs, and what was unexploitable in the various other games I'd played. I don't think that many game designers, let alone many AI programmers, have that sort of knowledge cache. So this made me rather uniquely suited to this specific task, I think. I'd have far less luck in any other genre, but RTS was the perfect fit for me.
At any rate, now that I've done what I've done, I'm
hoping that the general ideas and concepts I've put forth will be copied by others. Let's face it, as amazing as Civilization I or Warcraft I or Age of Empires I were, their main legacy was how they left a permanent mark on their genres. I'm fundamentally against patents in general, as I think they stifle ideas. The only reason I'd need a patent was if I was worried about someone copying what I do and then being more successful with the idea. By the time anyone can do that, I'll be another few steps ahead of them, both in terms of the development of AI War, and in broadening out into other concepts. Also, as I've noted, I have a rather unique cache of knowledge that makes me particularly suited to creating this sort of thing -- I doubt if any team that was solely bent on copying other IP would be able to successfully do it in this case.
