Now that the team modes, the Aircraft Carrier, and the game-play polish is completed (read all about it and watch the trailers here) we will focus development to bring you single-player content in Release 37.
Basic AI Skirmish
A basic AI is being developed so you can play Line War whenever you want, whether you have an Internet connection or not, or if you simply prefer to battle it out against the computer instead of human opponents. It will also work as a practice ground where you can play as much as you want without feeling like you'll be judged by performance or play style.
The AI will play according to the same rules as you, it will only see what a human would see, and it will issue commands based on its observations. It will be a behavioral decision tree-based AI that tries to gather intelligence, and it will act based on what it sees and what it predicts. Creating a great AI is difficult and it is not our mission at this stage to create a masterful expert player, we leave that to the top 100 players of the Line War leaderboard. If you beat the coming basic AI consistently, you are ready to combat it out in the multiplayer world.
We already have a basic AI in the works, but with the risk of it sounding a bit too technical, the new and more performant architecture resulting from the Teams release requires us to update the AI to work in this new architecture.
In the future, we'd like to explore the possibility of Machine Learning AI - but that is beyond our capacity and funding at the moment - which is why Release 37 will begin with the basic AI model.
Missions and missions editor
Imagine missions where you are challenged to eliminate the opponent, destroy a base, intercept an airstrike, defend your base, perform a d-day-like amphibious invasion, or conquer a continent as quickly as possible. You can play these missions over and over again and achieve better and better scores based on your performance. You can achieve gold-level results if you complete a mission within a certain time frame or with minimal casualties or funds.
A mission editor will allow anyone to create and publish missions based on scripted behaviors with triggers, predetermined commands, and actions. Performance criteria for the mission can be set to reward the player upon completion. Maybe your objective is to complete all the missions. Maybe your objective is to get gold-level results on every mission. Or maybe your mission is to be at the top of the mission leaderboards for the best amphibious invasion with the least amount of casualties.
We'll decide whether to design our own, or hand-pick popular community-created missions, as the official set of missions for seasons.
First step towards single-player content
These will be our first steps towards providing single-player content in Line War to make it accessible to everyone. In the future, we would like to explore Machine Learning AI opponents, a map editor for fully custom scenarios or reenactments, skinnable units (imagine ranges of WW2 skins), and even campaigns with a storyline.
We are very happy and humbled by the many positive reviews of Line War praising the gameplay and the command system. We have identified the two biggest challenges of Line War to be:
- Small number of concurrent players
- Lack of single-player content
These two challenges are overwhelmingly represented in the negative feedback. Through the past year, we added the requested team feature and we've worked to polish the game and lobby experience to a higher level. We hope that adding the single-player content can turn the tide over time to encourage more players to get Line War. Even if people are playing the game in single-player mode, the active player count is an important factor to many when deciding whether to get a game or not.
Line War is being funded through its own sales and we're only two individual developers, so let's take one step at a time. The pace at which we can develop is directly related to the number of sales of the game so please consider buying Line War now if you've been looking forward to the single-player content.