Would the player stand a chance against very smart monsters?

[Memfis]

What if the monsters behaved highly intellegently, shooting in advance rather than directly, attacking as often as possible, dodging projectiles, forming teams, obstructing the way to health and ammo, maybe even alerting the whole map and attacking all together? Would the player still be able to fight them well due to his maneuverability, powerful weapons, ability to activate triggers and so on?

[Maes]

Any largely crowded slaughtermap exhibits several or all of the elements you mentioned (except monster firing speed, but that can be fixed with -fast) and there are players that can still beat them.

Some don't even need to be implemented (e.g. "alerting all of the map" or "forming teams"): all monsters in Doom know exactly where the player is, all the time, one alerted, even if they never had visual contact), and they ALWAYS attack "all together", they don't take no turns or even care if their buddies get in the way.

Some other skills like dodging projectiles would be nearly useless in Doom unless the player's arsenal is practically nerfed: most of the standard weapons have a quite large effective radius of action, wide spread or are hitscan.

On the other hand, give just a SINGLE monster one overwhelming advantage such as speed, near invisibility, one-hit kills, psychological shock factor....

If you want to fix ONE flaw of the monsters however....make them reluctant to fire when other monsters are in their line of fire, thus minimizing infighting. THAT alone would ramp up the difficulty considerably, since slaughter gameplay relies on that.

But for a quick and dirty fix, just give monsters a greater moving speed, e.g. just barely slower than Doomguy: ever seen Pinkies on Nightmare? Imagine if EVERY monster could move like that, and close in on you and melee you to death in mere seconds.

[Phml]

Dumb or smart is irrelevant to the player's fighting chance, it's all in the mapper's hands.

Put 10 cyberdemons in a 512x512 room with the player in the middle and the exit switch behind a pillar that takes a couple minutes to lower, the player will die with "dumb" Doom AI.

Put god-like AI in a map with a lone zombieman while invulnerability spheres and BFGs are splattered everywhere, the player cannot lose.

Smarter monsters would make the game harder. That's all you can guess, without defining context.

[Voros]

The answer is yes. We can learn how to give a nice counterattack, exploit they're weaknesses. That's our advantage: we can improvise.

[Memfis]

I'm imagining a situation where all monsters are controlled by actual human players, so it's like one guy vs 50/100/whatever, but his character is obviously stronger due to the speed and stuff. And they can talk on Skype to discuss the strategy at any point. Could they outsmart him? For context, just pick any Doom 2 map, like The Citadel or something.

[baja blast rd.]

I like playing against overpowered monsters:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUeK6-iXvJc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bl_r9bbbgFI

(Those aren't optimal strategies for fighting them or anything, just fooling around.)

It's a shame these are way too silly to use in actual maps, but at least there are things like the afrit. :) :)

Maes said:

THAT alone would ramp up the difficulty considerably, since slaughter gameplayer relies on that.

A misleading conclusion because mappers balance ammo and space with the possibility of infighting already baked in. So sure, certain encounters will get tougher, but if you adjust for this -- i.e. increase ammo or space to compensate for the lack of infighting, to not much above the minimal amount of ammo required to kill everything by hand and the minimum amount of space required to not immediately get pinned in encounters that originally assumed that a cluster of mancs and barons would start infighting almost immediately -- then the encounters would be far easier than original. Infighting as a mechanic adds unpredictability, which is often the main source of danger (example: multi-cyber setups where you have to keep track of what the cybers are doing, which would be fairly easy if nothing would infight and you could herd the cybers and everything else around effortlessly).

[Zapzop]

Memfis said:

I'm imagining a situation where all monsters are controlled by actual human players, so it's like one guy vs 50/100/whatever, but his character is obviously stronger due to the speed and stuff. And they can talk on Skype to discuss the strategy at any point. Could they outsmart him? For context, just pick any Doom 2 map, like The Citadel or something.

Well, that would surely outsmart the player.

antares031 said:

But then again, highly intelligent monsters will not commit suicide attack like idiots. So my vote goes to the MAP11 of Plutonia Experiment (it's not Doom 2, but it's official IWAD anyway). Imagine arch-viles, controlled by human players & efficiently organized with voice chats, from that narrow maze level.

There is a mod for Doom called Master of Puppets which lets you control Doom monsters. Add voice chats and you've got what you said in your post.

[Maes]

Trading monster numbers for intelligence and tactics is what nearly every other shooter after Doom has done, so judge for yourself how well that has worked.

Truth be said, in those games the player character himself is often quite nerfed compared to Doomguy, and his mobility is significantly worse than that of the enemies (e.g. compare how Imps in Doom 3 can move, while the player moves around like a stiff CoD (pun intended)).

In essence, in a game like Doom 3 or Soldier of Fortune, almost every encounter with enemies feels like a miniboss battle, and esp. in the latter enemies can hide, crouch, even roll to avoid pistol shots at point blank. The player, while reasonably tough, could not move like that.

Now, the thought of a game where you're pitted against 1000 special-op soldiers with SoF skills while you're like an out-of-shape wimp in comparison....well...that'd be pretty terrifying, and the outcome pretty much predictable. You can experience the feeling first hand by going into your local tough guy bar and insulting the toughest biker's/gangsta's mother. Hell, you think you could take on even just 5 or 3 of his gang mates at once?

The other scenario proposed, e.g. player controlled monsters, would actually be an interesting game variation well-suited for a port like ZDaemon: one team would control a fixed number of players, while the other team would be able to control any monster on the map (and switch between them at will or upon death). It would be interesting to see e.g. if a player-controlled Cyberdemon or SM would fare better than its AI-controlled counterpart. And if the monster team had access to Revenants, PEs and Archviles.... ;-)

Besides, games with asymmetrically powered factions (e.g. Humans vs Zombies) already exist.

[printz]

It strongly depends on the initial placement and monsters' actual physical attributes. They're inferior in mobility in every way compared to the player, so their tactics have to compensate a lot. Also, even if intelligent, they still have to be fanatic. Otherwise, they'll just realize they have to flee or surrender and join the winning side (the player), assuming that would really keep them alive.

A general source port that vastly pushes the monster AI would be a very interesting project.

[Maes]

Don't forget that even "dumb" and "weakling" monsters such as zombies and imps stand a chance against a player if the architecture and their placement are proper.

E.g. imagine a weak bunch of 5 zombies, three shotgun sergeants and two imps placed in the middle of an empty NUTS.WAD arena. No challenge, even for a pistol start on NM, right?

Now, place those same 10 monsters in a dark winding corridor, hidden in alcoves/surprise doors, and with ambush flags set. Are you certain that you would sustain no damage on your first try or even make it to the end?

But that's the beauty of Doom: you can go from the extremes of mindless slaughter maps, to the Danmaku-like sophistication of large coreographed fights, down to gritty survival situations where you have to scrounge for ammo and try to survive on 1% health, fearing even the slightest wound inflicted by a zombie's single shot.

[HorrorMovieRei]

Memfis said:

I'm imagining a situation where all monsters are controlled by actual human players

Maes said:

The other scenario proposed, e.g. player controlled monsters, would actually be an interesting game variation well-suited for a port like ZDaemon: one team would control a fixed number of players, while the other team would be able to control any monster on the map (and switch between them at will or upon death).

I remember playing a mod like that in Zandronum/Skulltag a long time ago. You could chose between being a marine or a ghost that could possess monsters placed in the level. I remember a lot of interesting things happening, like player-controlled arachnotrons blocking possible escape routes with suppressing fire, and Archviles players rarely relying on offensive, instead preferring to revive other monsters away from the marines. Oh, and camping. LOTS of camping.

[Job]

I would love to see enemies with improved speed and behavior that mimics bots/players.

[Doomkid]

do-tims has a map with relatively convincing "bot" enemies IIRC called "It's raining men", that same logic used for shotgunners and chaingunners could be quite deadly.

[printz]

If player 1 controls Doomguy and player 2 controls all the monsters, shouldn't player 2 have a real-time strategy interface, seeing the entire map from above and controlling monsters with the mouse?

[Maes]

printz said:

If player 1 controls Doomguy and player 2 controls all the monsters, shouldn't player 2 have a real-time strategy interface, seeing the entire map from above and controlling monsters with the mouse?

The implication of controlling only one monster at a time is that the rest of the monsters simply follow the regular AI. Such a modification would be relatively trivial to do, even in Chocolate Doom for shits n' giggles.

But giving the second player a RTS-like view of the map and collective control over groups of monsters would require way more modifications -such as the ability for monsters to follow specific, collective/group commands that would override their usual Chase/Attack AI, like "move to spot X, no matter what", "stay put, don't attack on sight", "hold your ground", "fire continuously in this direction", "fire only when the player turns his back at you", "fire only from a fixed position, don't expose yourself" etc.

And there already is a Doom RTS, for that matter (actually, two of them, if I don't err).