Monster Groups

Gamer asks about how grouping monsters will work:

So, I know we can assign custom AI scripts to creatures, in order to give them a specific behavior, like the werewolf pack. I’m wondering, however, if we can assign creatures to a group, and use another script to coordinate a group strategy…. I started sketching out a scenario of a small village under siege by a group of Orcs. The Orcs would make a series of quick probing attacks, and, being particularly smart Orcs, would analyze the casualties from the attacks to find the weakest spot in the town’s defenses, then organize a massed assault on that point. So, basically, I’d like to split the Orcs into units, and run a commander script which moved the units around the field as needed….

This is exactly where the faction system could be put to very good use. You could, for instance, have 6 separate Orc factions (1 for each group) and ally them together. Your scripts can then check for creatures of your own faction (my Orc group), creatures of allied factions (the other Orc groups), and enemy factions (players, villagers, etc), performing actions that are appropriate to each. We’ve designed it to be a very flexible system and you should be able to do some really neat things with it, AI-wise.

Pillage the Village,
Rob Bartel