New gameplay style "Communist Mode" (multiple comm share)
Posted: 20 Apr 2009, 23:03
I've played 4 games of this so far, and I'm quite happy with it.
The way it works is you have two teams of 4-6 players or so, each with 4-6 commanders in different start positions. However, everyone's resources are pooled, and at any time any player can give any order to any unit on their team.
The game is deliberately paused for about a minute at the beginning so players can coordinate which initial commander (if any) they're controlling and work out a basic strategy. After that it plays like any normal game, although while playing you see some obvious differences.
The first thing you notice is that you get alert sirens for every attack, including ones you'd otherwise ignore since they're happening on another part of the map. This tends to make you at least slightly aware of developing problems. It's much easier to have a coordinated attack in this mode, as you can easily take command of all the front units yourself. The resources are different (you have several times what you normally do in your reserve since it represents the entire team), so you need to take a bit of care to not overbuild, especially if you risk energy stalling.
Other, more subtle effects are there as well. It's much more obvious you're working as a team, so players tend to think of what the team needs to do something more than what they need to do something. Things like sharing t2 cons happen very naturally, and since anyone can order any unit to build up a mex/moho you very rarely have issues with open metal patches on "someone else's" space going to waste.
Other strategies become more viable that might just be too boring in a standard team game with limited control - for instance dedicating a single commander to doing nothing but building econ for the first part of a game while other players power the factories. You also tend to have much less econ built in dangerous places (think of how the forward players in DSD always tend to have substantial amounts of energy, even though it would be much safer if it was built in the back).
Being lame
Of course, it's very simple to kill the whole team. You select all and self destruct. But, if we're honest about it, it's also very easy to screw the team over in a normal game as well - just D-gun an ally.
More likely is players being unintentionally bad for the team, like building 12 nanos around their t1 air lab and spending 90% of the teams resources on planes while the front falls to a small force of tanks. But, this isn't so bad, as teammates can simply give an order to the hogging factory to stop - in noncommunist games there's no way of preventing the back players from doing their own thing while the front players fall.
In practice things get a little wonky when both players are trying to control the same unit, although this happens relatively rarely - TheFatController is working on a widget that will tell you when teammates have a particular unit selected.
I was honestly surprised how well it worked. We played 4 games; 3 were legitimately fun, and only one ended after 30 seconds with a team self D (I suspect one of the players didn't quite get what was going on or didn't speak english). If you can play with friends, especially on teamspeak, this could be even better - we were playing with random (albeit high ranked) players, and it worked out well.
Technical way to do this:
First, the host needs to have springlobby. The host puts all of one team onto TeamID 1 and ally team 1, and all of the second team onto TeamID 2 and ally team 2. Then he adds bots (testGlobalAI) equal to the number of extra commanders wanted (generally number of players - 1), and allies them to the appropriate team (but gives them separate ids).
Once everything is set this way, the host goes to the map tab and sets the start positions to "choose before game". He then places the team bots and player on the reasonable start positions. Boxes don't work (since the testGlobalAI bots won't take).
Once the game starts, any player can just click the "take" button and their team instantly has all the commanders to control. Everyone ends up the same color as the initial human team, so the bot colors don't matter (but make sure the human colors are different).
There are a few lobby bugs to worry about, hopefully they can be fixed. The first is that force-assigning arm/core for the bots doesn't always work for some reason, so we ended up setting the humans to core while the bots stayed at arm. This gave each team 1 core comm and 3 or 5 arm comms depending on the game.
Another lobby bug you notice is that sometimes the start positions can get wonky - I think springlobby gets a bit confused by comm sharing. The workaround I found is to only set the start positions after everything else is ready.
Resetting colors can be a pain, since they'll often be auto-reset to what the other people on that team is. This is basically a lobby bug - when I manually change one comm share color to x, it should change it for every one. However, this bug may be due to some users playing with tasclient, since I think it then sends a competing "no my color is this" command right back.
If the lobby bugs are annoying enough, you can always just do a 1v1 comm share, pause the game at the start, enable cheats, and have each team give themselves the extra commanders. That way they can pick the faction too.
The way it works is you have two teams of 4-6 players or so, each with 4-6 commanders in different start positions. However, everyone's resources are pooled, and at any time any player can give any order to any unit on their team.
The game is deliberately paused for about a minute at the beginning so players can coordinate which initial commander (if any) they're controlling and work out a basic strategy. After that it plays like any normal game, although while playing you see some obvious differences.
The first thing you notice is that you get alert sirens for every attack, including ones you'd otherwise ignore since they're happening on another part of the map. This tends to make you at least slightly aware of developing problems. It's much easier to have a coordinated attack in this mode, as you can easily take command of all the front units yourself. The resources are different (you have several times what you normally do in your reserve since it represents the entire team), so you need to take a bit of care to not overbuild, especially if you risk energy stalling.
Other, more subtle effects are there as well. It's much more obvious you're working as a team, so players tend to think of what the team needs to do something more than what they need to do something. Things like sharing t2 cons happen very naturally, and since anyone can order any unit to build up a mex/moho you very rarely have issues with open metal patches on "someone else's" space going to waste.
Other strategies become more viable that might just be too boring in a standard team game with limited control - for instance dedicating a single commander to doing nothing but building econ for the first part of a game while other players power the factories. You also tend to have much less econ built in dangerous places (think of how the forward players in DSD always tend to have substantial amounts of energy, even though it would be much safer if it was built in the back).
Being lame
Of course, it's very simple to kill the whole team. You select all and self destruct. But, if we're honest about it, it's also very easy to screw the team over in a normal game as well - just D-gun an ally.
More likely is players being unintentionally bad for the team, like building 12 nanos around their t1 air lab and spending 90% of the teams resources on planes while the front falls to a small force of tanks. But, this isn't so bad, as teammates can simply give an order to the hogging factory to stop - in noncommunist games there's no way of preventing the back players from doing their own thing while the front players fall.
In practice things get a little wonky when both players are trying to control the same unit, although this happens relatively rarely - TheFatController is working on a widget that will tell you when teammates have a particular unit selected.
I was honestly surprised how well it worked. We played 4 games; 3 were legitimately fun, and only one ended after 30 seconds with a team self D (I suspect one of the players didn't quite get what was going on or didn't speak english). If you can play with friends, especially on teamspeak, this could be even better - we were playing with random (albeit high ranked) players, and it worked out well.
Technical way to do this:
First, the host needs to have springlobby. The host puts all of one team onto TeamID 1 and ally team 1, and all of the second team onto TeamID 2 and ally team 2. Then he adds bots (testGlobalAI) equal to the number of extra commanders wanted (generally number of players - 1), and allies them to the appropriate team (but gives them separate ids).
Once everything is set this way, the host goes to the map tab and sets the start positions to "choose before game". He then places the team bots and player on the reasonable start positions. Boxes don't work (since the testGlobalAI bots won't take).
Once the game starts, any player can just click the "take" button and their team instantly has all the commanders to control. Everyone ends up the same color as the initial human team, so the bot colors don't matter (but make sure the human colors are different).
There are a few lobby bugs to worry about, hopefully they can be fixed. The first is that force-assigning arm/core for the bots doesn't always work for some reason, so we ended up setting the humans to core while the bots stayed at arm. This gave each team 1 core comm and 3 or 5 arm comms depending on the game.
Another lobby bug you notice is that sometimes the start positions can get wonky - I think springlobby gets a bit confused by comm sharing. The workaround I found is to only set the start positions after everything else is ready.
Resetting colors can be a pain, since they'll often be auto-reset to what the other people on that team is. This is basically a lobby bug - when I manually change one comm share color to x, it should change it for every one. However, this bug may be due to some users playing with tasclient, since I think it then sends a competing "no my color is this" command right back.
If the lobby bugs are annoying enough, you can always just do a 1v1 comm share, pause the game at the start, enable cheats, and have each team give themselves the extra commanders. That way they can pick the faction too.
