JASON COLEMAN interview

[MarkG]

Jason Coleman
BHG VP of Software, RoN Programmer

You saw his name in the credits of Civ2 and SMAC and you'll see it again in RoN. The fourth of the BHG founders talks to us about, well, all of the above...

http://apolyton.net/misc/interviews/ron_2jasoncoleman.shtml

[Rasbelin]

Thanks, Markos!

...but couldn't it still be abit longer?

[tniem]

The biggest addition to the interview for info about the game is the talk about pathfinding abilities. Jason goes in depth on the process of not only finding the shortest route but finding the BEST route. This includes taking into account enemy territory and probably the best defensive land positions. On top of it, it includes your moving troops attacking enemies when it makes sense. For example, calvary attacking archers to protect your weaker more important units (i.e. monks or their equivelent and cannons). This is what he said on troops attacking wehn moving:

The next part involves essentially reading the players' minds and doing what they wanted or expected to happen. Needless to say, this is the hard part, and it turns out there are a LOT of these situations: "I don't care if that route was shorter, the other way was obviously safer!" or "When attacking a fort, I want my horses set to ‘auto-attack' to protect the cannons, only leaving them for short distances to attack ranged-units, but they should participate in the attack of other builds, unless..." Anyway, you get the idea. This is where our design process shines. We play the game all the time. If we don't like the way something works, other people probably won't either. Sometimes, when there's no clear solution/consensus, we might add input functionality or game options.

I go nuts when my units do the stupid things in RTS like AoK. Why is my calvary unit still attacking that farm when he is being attacked from another unit? Why do they wander over the entire map attacking a peon when my city is being attacked? It always frustrated me and AoK is better than many other RTS games. I can only hope they succeed with what they are hoping to achieve in terms of pathfinding and smarter troop attacks.