We recently discussed the idea for an IdleRPG-style bot that would be capable of playing an entire RTS game.

If anyone has input or would like to participate, either post a reply and/or join #!/usr/bin/perl on ArloriaNET, we'd likely be using POE::Component::IRC as it has just about everything we'd need built in already, and that'll save a bunch of development time. Nonetheless, open to other ideas if people wish to pose them.

I think this will work, if we can balance the game properly. If anyone wants to help give it a shot then let's see what we can put together. :)

I am certainly interested in helping with this in whichever way works best. Testing/debugging is one possibility, contributing new code and/or content is another.

I am not very familiar with POE::Component::IRC, and my initial encounter with it did not exactly lead me to the conclusion that it would save development time compared with implementing features of an IRC client directly using IO::Socket (which I then began doing to confirm that it was indeed easier than using POE::Component::IRC), but I also do not have any "PoCo-IRC" alternatives in mind unless you wanted to have your bot framework communicate directly with the server.

Some ideas and things to consider that are probably not very helpful until someone has at least begun working on it:

• earning/winning/stealing money which can later be spent on better items
  


• missions
  


• if a player idles but does not interact with the game much, is he/she/it at a disadvantage compared to players who spend a lot of time messing with their characters?
  


• alliances
  


• buildings, cities, disasters, different forms of government?
  


• how much of it is random chance combined with time spent idling (like IdleRPG) and how much actually depends on the strategies employed? at what point does it stop being an idle game and become just another IRC game?
  

Work on this has started in the past few days.

Regarding each of TheDoctor's points, here is how I currently see the game:

• Money is split into four resources. Gold, iron, wood and food. Gold is earned naturally through taxation as well as through buildings such as gold mines. The rest of the resources can be mined. The resources go toward units and buildings, which help in various ways.
  


Raids may occur as random chance (Citizens sneaking out to raid other settlements under darkness), earning a certain amount. There are higher stakes for manual missions, with the possibility of losing the settlement (Proposal) or unit death.


• Missions are... Under consideration, I suppose. I haven't thought about missions. You're working on it, add mission ideas to the wiki ;)
  



• I would think that someone who purely idles would be at a disadvantage to someone playing strategically, especially as buildings and such do not build themselves. However, it may be decided that the final settlement (or indeed, no settlements) can be taken, and they could never be truly eliminated from the game (See wiki:unrecoverable state)
  



• Alliances is something I want in the game, either at a purely role-played level, or an in-game bloc level. It would certainly put the game into perspective somewhat. Especially if we combined it with a web interface that used GD to plot the settlement locations or something... Which, on reflection, I now really want to do at some point.
  



• Buildings are already in the game at this point. Settlements have different levels, of which "City" is probably one of them. I've been thinking of various disasters (Mining cave-ins and such) as random events already been considered, so they're as good as in. Different forms of government... Wiki it, we'll see what happens.
  



• With the current complexity of the game, I would say that the idling aspect doesn't work so well for anything besides resource accumulation (Which the user would not obtain, or would obtain less of without being on IRC), IdleRPG-style penalties for user quits (As opposed to splits, timeouts etc) already have placeholder code too. So there is a certain amount of benefit to idling as opposed to dropping by randomly.