Let me share with you a wonderful experience I had when I just now played the newest version.

So, I'm arriving at my issued objective; a trench filled with what must be at least thirty-or-so enemies. I have a little squad with me, plus some half-assed support from some other AI guys that are mostly just running around, playing grab-ass and contributing very little to anything whatsoever while their buddies are dying a few meters away from them. Promptly getting slaughtered, massacred and generally castrated and publicly humiliated right in front of the enemy because half my team doesn't do shit, I choose to not respawn right away. The reason for this, is that I'm absolutely sure my guys are going to launch a large attack against that position at any moment, and I want to have my camera there to see it. Why am I so sure? Because there are about a zillion enemies there. If you want someplace to attack, surely that would be the place. That's apparently where they all are, for fuck's sake.

So I'm waiting.

And waiting.

And waiting.

And waiting some more.

It doesn't take long until I'm raging a fair bit. Where the fuck are they? What the fuck are they doing?! When will fucking revenge come? So I'm respawning back at the closest uncontested base, and a lovely sight awaits me. There, right before me, is a group of about twenty-thirty people, just sitting there on their fat asses, doing absolutely fucking nothing. So I do what I've been doing since the very first release of the game: taking advantage of my rank, (Rank 7 - the highest one.), I start running about the trench gathering friendlies like some idiot rounding up a lynch-mob. And then there was finally an attack. (That promptly failed, leaving me forced to go through this whole, wonderful experience again. )

Sadly, this pretty much sums up my experience with the game perfectly. Half the time, it seems no-one is doing jack-shit, save for you. Sure, there is the odd attack every now and then, but you also have genuinely idiotic situations like this one; where huge groups of people from opposing sides just sit there, completely inactive. Probably acting on some moronic defense-script, or something. This slows the whole game down, until it feels just... dead. Lifeless. For something to happen, you must be the catalyst. And that does just not lead to good gameplay.

You must remember that if this is to feel like a living, breathing battlefield, there always needs to be shit going on. Over there, a small team of Goodies is skirmishing with the enemy in the woods, there, the Baddies are launching a huge assault on a trench. There, the Goodies have just taken control of a town, and are waiting for the inevitable Baddie counterattack. There, two large, opposing forces are in a huge firefight, and both sides are calling in reinforcements. In many ways, I feel like I'm forced by the developer to pick the highest rank. Because if I don't take initiative, no-one else bloody will. Can you imagine just how damned infuriating that experience recounted above would have been if I had been rank 1? Spawning at the nearby outpost where a small army of friendlies are sitting around like a bunch of idiots, and me powerless to make them do anything?

Not helping, is the fact that the current build of the mini-map doesn't really give you much information. As of Alpha 0.3, it shows the (vague) location of the player, the environment, and the player's objective locations. For later builds, I really need the mini-map to show me where my teammates are, where the (currently visible) enemies are, and ideally even somehow the objective-locations of the rest of my team, just so I can have an idea of just what the hell they're up to. But I'm sure you're already thought of something like this; and besides, that's a rant for another thread.

Come to think of it; that actually ties in with another issue. I know I've complained about both sides being too inactive, but how the hell am I to know if there's actually a big fight taking place just outside of my field of view? Since the mini-map doesn't actually show you where your friendlies are, I have no way of knowing this.

So I hope you read my post, and take at least the gist of it into consideration. The reason why I'm so frustrated is that this has the potential to be a genuinely special game. If I didn't care about it, I'd probably just have shrugged and uninstalled it. But this could end up being the sort of game people would gladly pay for. The stuff that gets included on the latest Humble Indie Bundle and wins Indie Game awards.

This is entirely a known thing and I'm going to present a few factors below that could have affected to what you've experienced. I also understand it can be frustrating, but can you expect anything else from a 0.3 alpha version? Don't take it too seriously quite yet, 0.6 should be a lot better, and who knows what the game will be at 1.0.

I'm explaining the whole thing, even if you said that you had been following the objectives. The AI currently organizes attacks to one base target at a time, so if you want to attack with other AI teams, you need to follow the commander AI's orders, you can see them in the map, there are green/red (depending on your choice of team) markers. The marker that's on the border is the rendezvouz point, the other one is the target. The commander AI is sending all those troops there that are left over from his idea of soldiers required to be defending the occupied bases and watching the borders. When the rendezvouz point surroundings have more than about 5 soldiers waiting for the signal to start the attack, they do it, they comment about it, and you should join them at this point. You might also succeed in starting the attack in advance yourself, so that the other guys waiting for the signal will join you, but they only join the fight if it happens close enough (they don't think it's the attack that started, rather it's an odd nearby fight and they are willing to help). One bad thing here is, that you can't yet see who's in the attack party and who has just been ordered to defend the border.

It's certainly clear that at this point, in 0.3, the balance isn't right yet. There might be too few soldiers on the rendezvouz point most of the time, and you end up waiting for too long which isn't nice. The commander AI doesn't really optimize which squads are sent to get the balance he's after on each block, so in many cases it might be that the soldiers are sent to the rendezvouz point from far away, and it takes more time then. Also it may be that those soldiers end up in a battle on their way, which slows them down even more. Also, it might be that the simulated travel / battle time isn't right, which increases the total time they spend to get to the rendezvouz point.

The challenge in balancing this all is mostly that there must be enough soldiers defending in the bases, so that the battles will not be too short and too easy when you attack there. Each soldier put to defend is away from the attack party. Also the attacking parties should not end up being too big, to avoid that each attack easily just crushes the defenders. It was recently added that the more bases you have occupied, the less soldier capacity you have per base, and vice versa, the less bases you have occupied, the more soldier capacity you have per base. In theory, this should enable intense fights over the last bases, rather than just coming down to the last base with massive attack forces against a handful of defenders. In the worst balance case though, it may make the even bases situation slow and the last base fight attack forces too small to start any kind of attack. I'm just saying that it's not an easy feat to get this right, and it won't happen over one night. I also understand that it's one of those things that ultimately needs to be right, otherwise it'll ruin a big portion of the game.

If you go alone to another location, not the one commander AI has ordered, guns ablazing, the AI teams won't just come up and rescue you. If they are close enough to the fight you are having, they again join the fight, but this means really close distances, about one width of the camera view.

When you fight at night, the distance the AI soldiers see is ridiculously small, so if the firefight ends (there are no muzzles for some period of time), the fighting soldiers will probably just not see each other. And if they originally came there just to check what's the racket you were making, they might now just let it go and get back to their original task, possibly just holding a line on the border.

There's also the soldier count option now when you start the game, that should have an effect on this all too. If you set it to something big, in theory you should see more attack waves, as the more soldiers you have in general, the more quickly the minimum soldiers per attack wave at rendezvouz point is reached.

If you want to keep playing even in the state the game is currently, you could start with one or two occupied bases, that should give you more action.

The map is a rather weak aid still currently. If there's a battle outside your block, you can see that as a faint yellow block (it's really faint I know), you've also received a radio message about it recently. It's quite close on my list that the map should be improved, but there's still the basic online mode implementation, getting the performance in order and bunch of other things to be done first.