Mythruna

you said you can't order npcs around but can you give them orders if they are in your army?

Lets just say this; Paul has a good understanding of what he expects the end product of the game to be like. But until the game is finished, us nor he has a definite answer for what exactly will be added when the release hits. If the answer is no, it is likely that feature won't be implemented and vice versa. And of course, there will be mods you can install in addition to the released game that might add things like ordering an army, etc.

The truth is that I just don't know if/how this will work.

One of the early AIs I plan to write is an ant colony for the giant ants.  So there will be a collective hive mind and so on.  So maybe an army would be possible using this.

Maybe also the player can never control an army because it turns out to not have a real point, or not be fun, etc... there's stuff that "can" be done and stuff that "will/should" be done and it's sometimes hard to separate the two.  And anyway, Sean is right about the mods.

There will be some hierarchical goal structure built into the AI system.  That much I'm pretty sure of.  Whether I let players inject directly into this at a high level in the default unmodded game will just depend on a hundred different things between now and then.

It certainly "sounds" cool, though.

please at least let players give basic orders i wanna be able to command an army on my server  :-[
also check out my Fred story some more i just posted a new chapter  :P