Back at it again!
Excited to see the Steam release going well, and the internal changes at Darkflow proper have netted us some long-awaited and -requested features/bug fixes without toxic staff butting heads with players.
That being said, and tangentially to other replies I’ve posted lately, I believe it is HIGH TIME this game focus on the CORE gameplay that this game has to offer: a human player controlling a squad of AI soldiers. Right now, and often over the past year, our fighting forces have been neglected in favor of power-creep prototypes and silly events that maybe a fraction of the playerbase gets to experience to completion.
I will speak for myself when I say I play this game because it is the most engaging, good-looking, and best value of all WW2 shooters on the market now.
However
I’m sure the devs are aware of the little indie game Easy Red 2, and honestly that game should make Enlisted nervous. It is far from a complete bug-free game, and is still janky in a lot of spots, but the one area it DOES surpass Enlisted is in its AI, which can actually issue orders to the player and call support without player input. This is huge, and something that I really hope Enlisted is on track to emulate. Playing as SL can get burdensome when your AI are running around like headless chickens, and its nice that Easy Red lets me play as a standard rifleman and recieve orders when I feel like it.
I’m typing this as I leave for lunch at the office and I’m going to leave it at that, but I’m interested to hear the community’s thoughts.
TLDR: less “stuff”, more “technical imporvements” please and thank you. too much potential here to be wasted on “this gun does 0.3 more damage”
bots move when you want to build something (from other squads)
bots dont go in front of you
bots dont jump around when you order them in one place
significantly improve bot pathfinding so they can move vertically (go down from roof, go in through windows after you instead of going through doors etc. )
dynamic difficulty for bots. if e.g. other team has advantage in number of human players your team bots get improvement by 10% or 50% depending on how big human advantage is in other team.
well when i tell them to stay around in trench or behind wall they have habit of climbing the wall or trench and just getting killed. idk how they can be so stupid…
Yeah, just any development towards a little bit more AI squad commands.
Doesn’t have to be a full blown squad shooter but some functional input would be nice.
You can single out single members and tell them to wait but if you want to tell your MG gunner to “cover you” while you and your squad attack point they’ll likely not even end up firing or doing anything. Just standing there and you get killed along the rest of your squad.
Realistically I’d want an MG gunner to sit somewhere, provide meaningful cover and then I attack. Stuff like that.
or get the WHOLE squad to lay down proper cover fire in a direction while I attack. right now they have slightly higher attention if you highlight an area but still, don’t really do anything.
When commanded to move to x area they should stay around windows (standing or crouching), behind some chairs/tables just to cover themselves from enemy fire.
DF also should increase player cap by adding 5 more bot teammates to each side so we could have some more intense fights that look like a real war (with improved ai ofc so they could react more realistic to the fire and take cover, fix their pathfinding and make them react much faster at mid ranges), also why not let you to spawn with a friendly ai squad that comes into the battlefield? They will drop out when they hear enemy gunfire and it would feel way more natural than a current iteration.
Cod bots or even better F.E.A.R bots that actually used flanking manoeuvres. Ofc throwing nades and molotovs at you should also be possible, right now they only use demo packs occasionally.
I was thinking also how would it work for friendly non-bot players, it could be too op but i dunno maybe could give some incentive to come closer to the points and not camp at the greyzones.
They could disable spawning if there was a firefight around you for the last 5 seconds so you could stay near the point but not too close and not too far so nobody would want to spawn at your tank’s location.
AI development is a joke. Despite constant “improvements” they still struggle with very basic things like pathfinding (they hate water ane windows), they still struggle to locate enemies unless they snipe 150m away, they still get in front of me (and also love to block allied view), engineers struggle to follow build orders or how they still struggle to see that there is a tank in front of them and that they should not keep running to it frontally.
I’d like a development option that allows me as a player to train my own troops further. It would be the perfect use of custom battles. I can set up my squads and given some sort of dev options, train them to path correctly or follow my orders in a particular manner that’s congruent with my idea of how to tactically advance and fire.
This would give the Devs more time to work on the actual C2 system and create a richer tapestry of orders that players could issue to their troops.
Any untrained troops would just behave the way the current bots are, pretty much like conscripted cannon fodder.
EDIT - the current progression system is still valid, it just opens up more options for either more advanced orders or formations as your squad grows from a fire team into the proper squad with all its perks and abilities that enhance the way in which they would follow your orders.
