Mass combat game

I've played team-based multiplayer internet games almost exclusively for the past 2 years (Day of Defeat, Team Fortress, Counter-strike), but I do remember the old days of single player romps through Doom, blasting away thousands of enemies with ease in player-made maps. In DOD, killing dozens of enemies (all human-controlled) with ease is a challenge. In Doom, you could kill dozens of computer enemies with the press of a BFG 9000 button. The bodies littered the floor for miles. (they did not vanish into thin air like all games have them do nowadays due to 3d polygon restraints. Shame we can't get 2d sprites for our slain enemies as an option). It was a great feeling.... see Braveheart, battle 1, for the morbid feel of it all.

Multiplayer FPS games almost always exclude the abilities of AI forces. If they do put them in, it's often as a stand-in for human players (bots in Quake 3). Plus the bots are rarely -extremely- easy to kill. In a DOD game, for example, average kills for each player per 30 min game is 20-30. Only 1 blood letting per minute? How sad.

Some games like Serious Sam allow a small team of human players to fight hundreds of brainless enemies, but this is in a co-operative gameplay mode.. forcing humans to go entirely up against computer armies.

I am suggesting a game which brings the best of team-based internet games and the best of single player "kill tons of people easily and boost your ego" style of play. Kill something every few seconds.

Two teams. Humans on both sides. But also huge armies of AI troops on each side, preferabally controllable by the human players. 10 humans, 100 AI troops, vs 10 humans and 100 AI troops.

Take Jedi Knight 2 for example, coming out soon for the PC. The game's multiplayer modes are pretty typical, nothing revolutionary here. If a mass combat mode was implemented, we could have a Rebel Alliance vs Galactic Empire mode. On the rebel side, Jedis, smugglers, wookies, ewoks could be selectable classes by the human players. the 100 AI troops would all be the generic Rebel trooper.

On the Imperial side: Sith, bounty hunters, droids, Emperor guards, etc for human classes. The AI troops would be stormtroopers.

Imagine having the two armies meet on a field.. with the human players slashing through each other's armies like mad. You run your lightsaber through a dozen stormtroopers before seeing a Sith lord doing the same to your own AI men. You both see each other.. then the real battle begins!

The closest I've seen to this concept is Battlezone 2, where you could build an army of 30 units, have your enemy do the same on his side, then ram them together with the both of you in the middle of it all (BZ2 was an FPS/vehicle/RTS game). The biggest problem was that this had to be done on a LAN or some super fast connection, and plus it took quite some time to build the large armies... other than that, however, it was great. AI troops exploding everywhere.. you could still single out your human foe and chase him through the debris and smoke..