Topic: Neutral / wild enemies

I'm wondering how feasible it would be to implement enemies with traits something like the following

• They spawn without need of any buildings or economy. (Possibly randomly in certain pre-defined areas, or in fog-of-war near player borders or whatever).
• They attack nearby military buildings, and if successful they momentarily capture the building to push back player borders before razing the building.

I'm imaging something like what happens when you land an army from a warship, but spawned in some other way rather than landed from a ship; and not associated with any main player.

The reason I'm suggesting this is that I reckon in some maps it would be good to have a little bit of minor military pressure from non-players while building and exploring, in advance of full-scale war with actual players.

In particular, I find that I large maps I often basically ignore military training until I'm starting to get close to the enemy, then ramp up rapidly. It goes from basically zero military, to a full army of heroes, then an explosive short battle on the frontline, then it is basically over. I just wonder if it might more interesting with some stages along the way. I wonder if some small low-level threats from non-players might be interesting, just enough that expansion requires some conflicts in advance of more serious threats. I don't imagine including this in every map. Maybe it would only be for scripted special scenarios; or maybe as a game creation option.

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Ok, I think maybe Nordfriese is right. What I was saying did sound a bit artificially fighting heavy - and in most situations that doesn't really suit the style of gameplay. So I'm not sure. I still think my idea is well motivated, I reckon something along those lines would be good - but probably not quite what I described. I'll think about it some more and maybe have a better idea in a year or so! :p

Right now, I'm thinking that perhaps randomly spawning and attacking is a bit too much; but simply have neutral enemies passively guarding some parts of the map might be ok. I'm imaging something like the neutral enemies in Warcraft 3, which guard some key areas to prevent overly-rapid expansion. (In war3, there's more to it than that, because of xp and items etc, but I'm only really interested in their ability to guard parts of the map right now.) I guess that kind of guarding could be done already by just having a 'No AI' enemy with some military buildings pre-built in certain parts of the map. But somehow that doesn't quite meet what I'm looking for. I want it to look/feel a bit less formal than fighting a full tribe. Anyway, that's about all I've got right now.

(@kuputtnik, I'm not sure if you're comments are in response to the wild enemies idea or to something Ogg said and deleted. Probably the later, I suppose.)

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