Man, I could see the next Total Annihilation / Supreme Commander-like game where rough orders/instructions are given to commanders and they carry out those commands.
The scale of those games was already nuts, but that would 10x things.
The scale of those games was already nuts, but that would 10x things.
The mechanics are old school, as with basically all RTS, but the openness allows for far more experiments than one would assume in a proprietary game.
Payday 2 is my favourite example since they've had a bug since Day 1 that lobotomizes the AI subsystem.
Specifically, there's a global cap of 1 action for all enemies per game tick, so when there's too many enemies the reaction time is 5 seconds.
The mod Full Speed Swarm fixes this bug and the game is unplayable without collaboration and a lot of skill.
It's also unnoticeable until you die or if you do a ton of research on the AI. I used to host pubs with the mod to troll other players who suddenly found the game impossible to play at lower difficulties.
I think it's possible we get an AI driven RTS but the demand is too small right now unless its a recruitment vehicle for the military.
When people say they want better AI, they mean they want smarter + human-like AI without "cheating" (more resources, perfect aim, rubber banding, perfect knowledge, etc).
And even if you build a human-like AI, it's not going to be fun for players if it's too good, just like how humans have the most fun playing against other players at their level, not against the top-ranked players in the world.
So to keep AI fun, there is always going to be artificial limitations, and "people want terrible AI" doesn't really capture that.
One example might be games where you can hear footsteps or a branch snap. With stereo audio, you could technically derive exactly where someone is, possibly even which room they are in. When that raw signal is provided directly to a machine, it might accidentally be too good, know which bush you crawled into, and shoot into it.
Yet humans would only be able to go "I think I heard a branch snap" or "someone must be creeping up on me" even though they are given the same signal as the AI.