General > Discussion

Civilians... those little buggers.

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Ruminant:
What if soldiers could direct civilians to "safe areas", rather than the civilians running to those areas automatically?  A soldier could either "verbally" point a civilian in the right direction or else physically escort that civilian back to the safe area.  This would mostly preserve the nature of terror attacks while providing the player with better options that just watching them die or stunning them.

BTAxis:
Great ideas. Anyone up for coding it?

Form orderly queues, please...

SpaceWombat:
I think most "realistic" would be a variation between hiding in some corner, running into the open in panic and -most likely- running to the direction the soldiers come from because if that ugly alien freak is after you it would be rational to seek help from the human guys with the big guns who are after the alien thugs. Maybe this would add some dufficulty since you need to watch while fireing through the herd of civs running out of the buildings in your direction. That could be combined with the ability of giving orders to them if the civs are in range. Whether they obey or not depends on character and panic level.

Would give a challenge in tactics and as well would make the civilians more than obstacles. If you cannot do anything about them or they are just randomly stupid I consider them just nerds who stand in my way while i'm in a good shooting position. If they are really seeking my help and it is less depending on luck I feel more like it is my duty to actually shield them.  :)

Surrealistik:
I feel Wombat's initial idea is the best, featuring the three AI types.

The first impels the civilian to panic and flee at random away from any spotted alien.

The second has the civilian actively attempt to hide, never ending his turn in any tile in an alien's LoS. The AI for this type can probably be derived from existing alien AI.

The third, the most rational and common, causes the civilian to run from spotted aliens, and as a higher priority, run towards PHALANX soldiers.

Even with these self-preservational AIs in place, it will still prove difficult to rescue many civilians, especially as so many typically end up being a signifigant distance from the dropship, are unarmoured and thus take full damage from all weaponry.

SpaceWombat:
By the way I have a question regarding the AI dependence of aliens and civilians.
Right now I have the feeling that aliens always try to hunt down a civilian not taking into account what trouble this might bring them into considering tactical issues like the element of surprise.

For instance I had an alien on the roof and I wouldn't have noticed it until 3 turns in the future when I would have tried to place my sniper on that roof. That stupid alien gave a long range shoot with a plasma rifle on the civilian right next to my soldiers not hiting anything but a tree 5 tiles away.
That gave me the exact position to place a timed grenade for a one shot kill.

For a rational subject the tactical analysis would have prevented such stupidity as a no gain but all loss action and lead to a more stealthy sneaking-around-the-corner behaviour.


Is such kind of situation analysis part of the AI or planned in the future and furthermore can this be transfered to civ AI? If only one character setting like "hide" would be tagged to a civ on lets say a football field this might result in not finding a corner to hide an run around in circles which in a turn based game structure would be as bad as standing still and face the inevitable.  :'(

I have heard about a study on mass panics in sports arenas recently and it said that "the stupid crowd" seems to be rather smart when running away. The only obvious problem was that in mass panic many people are blocking each other. But we are just talking about 3-10 people scattered over the map. So I would consider their behaviour as rather smart and responsive to the actual situation of every single civ if that can be coded.  ;D

There is of course a need for trial and error of such a complex AI. It would definitely strengthen the excitement for tactical missions for the players. The less luck it takes to make a mission the better.

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