Thoughts on missions

My observations about single player in RTS:

People like standalone single player missions with scoreboards - challenges.
Example: Generals mode of Zero Hour. Kodachi Rally in ZK.

People like a list of challenges of increasing difficulty so they feel progression as they nail them.
Example: Cod6 coop commando missions.

Newer RTS players like COOP with AI allies so they don't feel 'alone'.
Before I became a strong MP RTS player, this was always my mentality.

We have a few missions titled things like 2v2, 2v1 that sort of touch on this.

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My idea:

I was thinking that we could expand on those missions and cheaply put out a lot of 'challenge' missions by just having one mission per map on say, 30 maps, named after the map. eg. Coop Challenge 1: Titan Duel. Coop Challenge 2: Deadlands.

All of these are the player and 1+ AI ally against increasingly tough odds on more challenging/AI friendly maps. By the last missions, players would be 2v6 and starting in the middle of the map with AIs around the outside.

The variables would be number of AI on each side, player and ally start locations. Both player and AI could have a few different bonus starting units in each missions (for example, in later missions AI could have defences start positions to prevent glaive rush AI kill. AI could be given a Krow at start, and player could have air defences around base etc since AI knows to retreat damaged units it should use it reasonably well). The goal would be to teach players about different units and situations while providing a structured VS bots single player package.

Important would be to have a scoreboard for each challenge - with the variable being time taken to win (shorter = better).

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Important questions:

Would these be easy to mass produce compared to single player story driven missions?

Would people enjoy them and try to be top of the leaderboards for each mission?

Would it bulk out the single player in a good way?

Would they be fun/interesting enough?

Coop missions with various levels of challenge sound good. They need designing but they should mostly be doable with a custom box setup and specified AIs. A minor gimmick for the maps could be good too. It is easy to make a hard chicken game if you get to put the players in the middle of an ordinary map.

To be fair I really don't think a scoreboard is "Important" like IK said. People probably just want a bunch of easily accessible, working, premade skirmisher setups. Think of Stronghold Crusader's very linear story-less campaign that only features a different map and more/stronger enemies every mission. We can recreate that for ZK with different modes (vs CAI, vs chicken, battles without builders, etc.). Still, if scoreboards are a very simple thing to do then they're alright.

In my eyes, it would be cool to employ the various kinds of AI for this too. It could simultaneously be used to demonstrate how aspiring coders can contribute to the game.

People could just get the decent AIs by default. Currently people somehow receive AIs but they are of the not-really-good-with-ZK variety (RAI etc).

quote: How does one go about creating missions like the 2v2 coop one etc Skasi put together?

1) Obtain ZK Mission Editor
2) ???
3) Get included in the offical campaign.

quote: Currently people somehow receive AIs but they are of the not-really-good-with-ZK variety (RAI etc).

They are shipped with Spring (and not blacklisted by ZK).

Does the CAI have a difficulty control? I've always thought Quake 3 Arena took a good approach to the "bare minimum" single-player campaign, just "fight bots of increasing difficulty on various maps". A simple ordered list of like 20 botmatches to play through would make a decent "single-player" campaign, separate from the full-featured story-mode.