alt Hacker NewsMan, 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.
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The revealed preference of players is for terrible AI so games are easier. That's why AI has been going downhill.
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.
I'm reminded of an obscure Gamecube game called Odama (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odama) which was kind of a bizarre blend between pinball + RTS, where you commanded feudal Japanese troops using the Gamecube Microphone. Of course, this was 2006, so it only accepted a short list of vocal commands like "Company halt!" and "Charge!"
BAR (https://www.beyondallreason.info/) is an open source TA clone that proposes massive scale and that is totally open. After the recent disappointment over a series of failures to bring a new big RTS game in the last 2 years, the RTS community talks a lot about this one.
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.