Presentation of the game

Before I jump into the gory details of the AI implementation for our WIP game, a general presentation is in order: what are our goals and the planning on how to get there.

Elevator pitch: Dwarf Fortress with robots in a fully 3d environment combined with an automated economy simulator and minor Tower Defense and FPS elements (you can shoot enemies along your automated defense systems).

Long description: World

The basic world is block-world stye; we could have done an organic marching-cube world but building anything in it would be much harder to be made to look like a credible construction.

On this world (some far-away planet / moon / meteorite) you have just arrived with some starting resources and a few robots. You have to start building a fortress while maintaining a healthy ecosystem because "they" will start attacking in increasing number and strengths.

Robots

All the robots are autonomous agents. They do any job available and compatible and you can customize/specialize their work. Each robot has 3 chip slots in which you could install custom chips to enable additional jobs or to do some jobs more efficiently. For example, default bots can dig and carry ore to a storage but only bots having the "Transport" chip are able to carry items from one agent to another; when fighting, a default bot will only shoot his digging laser which won't do much harm but a "Fighter" chip will replace his digging laser with photon torpedoes or some other classy blasting equipment.

All robots gain experience doing the same jobs (you could say their AI code evolves) which will result in increased speed, less power consumption and other effects.

Economy

The ecosystem has several "great circles of life" in it.

The most basic is power ecosystem: you need to build some power generating agents (the simplest/cheapest is a Solar Power Antenna) which will fill batteries. Batteries are carried by a "Transport"-chipped robot to storage and from there, distributed to any other agent needing power (everyone consumes power while operating, including default bots). Depleted batteries are moved to recharging agents and the cycle starts anew.

For building structures you need materials; some are mined, most are crafted. Raising a granite wall will be easy but having a reinforced-concrete one (or carbon nano-tubes one) will require building of a crafting chain.

Here's where the "automated" part of the system comes in. When your fortress can support it, you can link all the agents: you could link the output of a crafting station to the input of another, have the futuristic equivalents of transport systems or distribute items with a programmable scheduler. In all, you could design an industrial complex.

You'll need it too, because you'll need ammunition for defense; spare parts for maintaining robots in good shape and some other goods to sell on the out-of-planet market.

Fighting

Wave after wave of nasty bad guys. You have to plan a real fortress with multiple layers of defenses: automated turrets, traps (including the galactic famed gravito-trans-pullifier), corrosive substances and more. It will never be enough so you might jump in the fight and try your hand at shooting.

After an attack (if you survive, of course), there is reconstruction to be had: repair damaged/destroyed constructions, fill the wall holes and discombobulate the wreckages.

And be sure "they" will come again so expand while you can.

That's it for the presentation. In the next article, I'll talk about the game architecture to make all this happen.