Offtopic since I agree with all from above especially with aReclusiveMind. They do it to show faces and give characters more agency. In games you don't care so much about individuals as you do for a ship as a whole. Not even in FTL which was quite involving when it came to crew. The problem with mechs (tanks and battleoids) was that they were purely defensive units. You couldn't deploy them in invasions nor use them while boarding ships. And you are rarely in situation where you see invasion coming, have no space defenses and have finances for otherwise useless armor barracks. I find my self rarely building ordinary marine barrack if they don't improve economy (+20% morale) such as under democracy and unification which is doubly true for armor barracks. Well only sane situation when I'd build extra barracks is to give more targets to Antaran bombs in hopes they'd kill tanks instead of infrastructure. But if they could provide bonus in offense, especially in boarding actions then tanks and battleoids would be much more useful.
You set some sort of light bulb off in my head IvanK. I didn't want to go off topic in this thread which is largely about tactical ground combat, so I created a new thread about ground combat and invasions to write about it.
This approach resembles Total War UX when you have to decide if the ground "5 minute battle" is challenging or decisive enough to take part in it. Anyway, ambitious game concept to design.
An excellent point If anything, having tactical ground combat would give these types of units a practical reason for being in existence. I too ignored many ground combat buildings in Moo2 as there was really no need for them. I believe that by fleshing out the ground combat, both certain units and buildings would instantly gain more importance and not be so much of an afterthought.
As for defensive battles I see another big challange. It is way easier to defend vs AI because programming a decent offensive AI is still the Holy Grail of every strategy game. Almost every Panzer General style game is a streak of offensive missions just because lack of competitive offensive AI. AI are quite good in reactions to particular player's offensive actions just because it is one turn calculation task. Offensive operations are rather scripted or conducted in infamous tower defence swarm-like fashion. Please, honestly, please tell me that I am wrong.
JG, unfortunately I believe you are mostly correct The problem becomes even more evident as games become larger and sophisticated and I have thought about ways to address this from a different angle. It may be easier for the AI to put on a good show if the amount of choices available to it (and the player) are limited. The problem then becomes how to make it interesting and captivating while at the same time ensuring that a player does not notice the limitations set. While this in and of itself would not be enough to really create an AI that can rival a human it might actually work well as a first step and allow the AI to put up decent fights both on offence and defence. (Like chess, the AI is far more effective there as there are a more finite number of choices available) A quick edit The basic thinking is that you give a player a fierce fight from the AI, some players would welcome this despite the fact that it is limited in certain key areas such as size of map,number of units and possible moves. It would be very challenging for the player and it does come with a proven concept
