new game mode: Generals and Politicians

After some discussion about the possibility of an ai controlling a human army in co-op I had an idea. This coul either be so co-op or between 2 humans. Basically we split control of the army into economy and military.

One player would play the politician. Your job would be to manage the economy, build factories and support structures. You would not be able to control military units.

The other player would be the general and control the military units.

The general would not have rescources but will be able to view them. When the general does build anything they would only have access to rescources in storage.
The exception to this would be weapons fire. Any rescources used by combat would be able to draw from the entire rescource pool althout the politician would be able to turn this off and on incase they wanted to prioritise building something important. Anti nuke defence for example.

So what can the general build then? The general would be able to build units at any existing factory. But would not be able to build a factory. Both players would be able to see who queued what in the factory. The general would only be able to source rescources from storage. The politician would be able to source from the starting amount and current production. If a factory had units queued from both players the politician would be able to "boost queue" this would fund the build from the politicians rescourve pool until the next unit in the queue was queued by the politician or 5 units have been built.

Both players would be able to control construction units. The general would only be able to build static defences/forts. The politician would not be able to build those. Anything like shields/radar/walls would be able to be built by both.

If both players queue orders to a construction unit the priority order would go as follows.
1 building currently being built.
2 orders queued by the politician.
3 orders queued by the general.

This would mean 1 player would be able to finely micro manage the economy and the other would be able to micro manage the army. I think this would lead to a different play style.

I think it would be good to start the game with a small number of basic military units to give the general something to do from the start, some basic scouting

isnt this already in the game with team armies?

Right now you can control anything on your team and that's decided by the players, what he means is it's a mode picked in the lobby and assigned in the lobby, executing a script or somesuch meaning that if your commander is a Politician, you can't select army units at all and if it's a general you can't select any buildings, aside from Factories.

Ok, he does include a couple of caveats I think cancel themselves out, being that the general can control fabbers, Which I wouldn't allow because it eventually reduces the point of the polition once the general has his own fabbers.
I also don't know why the general would also only be able to access storage buildings, the eco doesn't run that way, as long as the politician has an eco, the general should be able to build and mass his armies as required.

The way I see it is as a training tool to encourage people to think in a stricter team-work environment.

To really make this interesting, I think it would require the economy model of the game to be more complicated and in-depth, to give the base building player more stuff to do and make it more involved. Make base layout matter more, have more resource types, have actual supply routes/demands, build roads, etc. Basically the current game is what the general would do (minus building metal/energy buildings), and the politician part would be like Transport Tycoon or some such management game. I would definitely be interested in a more complex game like this, but I think it is not really the focus of PA which is more of a traditional combat oriented RTS, so I don't really see it happening.. I hate when people say this, but most likely would be mod stuff. Asymmetrical co-op does sound fun though.

https://forums.uberent.com/threads/what-game-modes-should-we-start-with.43223/

Yes you can currently control each others army, the point of this though would be to deperate economic and military control.

One player is purely focused on economy and production. The other person is only focused on military strategy. I think it would allow for some interesting different play sytles allowing for some additional micro management

so this is already in the game. then why ask to have it put in when its already in?

Initially I thought to not allow the general to access factories. This may in fact be the way to go, or just give him limited access to them, like calling one unit. The point was If I want my ally to build more sea units I will say dude you need to provide me with more Naval units. However if I just want one particular unit for whatever reason it would be less tedious if I could order a small number myself. Since the whole point of this game type is that you are FORCED to communicate and balance your military and economy building it may be best to not allow the general access to production at all. Or at least limit it so he can only queue one unit at a time.

I don't think I made myself clear here. The point is to give the politician priority over rescources and to only allow the general to only be able to access rescources that either the politician assigns to them or that is in overflow.. I wasn't sure how best to achieve this but thought I'd throw out an idea for it anyway.

The way I see it working heres an example.
You start the game with 1000 of each resource. Military cannot access this starting amount at all unless its on overflow... see below. This both enforces the politicians control of economy and prevents the General from running off and using all the starting resources building defense towers Should this limit be increased in any way by the use of storage or whatever else then both players will be able to access it. Now in a normal game capacity in storage or from the starting amount are treated the same. In this game type the politician would take from the starting pool first, and then the storage if the starting amount is empty and the general would take only from the storage. This means it is impossible for the general to collapse a healthy productive economy by over building defences or things like that and leaves the politician with greater control of the economy.

Now PA allows us to start building at any time and build from our output rather than stockpiles. Obviously the politician would get priority. Where I am undecided is how this should be balanced. A simple solution is to only show an available output for the general once the politician has met or exceeded the starting amount of rescources. I think this is too simple though because if we were able to balance our economy perfectly our rescources would never be full. If you forgot to build storage you could end up with the general sitting bored for the first 20 min until the politician has a booming economy. This would not be fun. ~Clearly this system needs some work and some balance but its more important you see where I'm going with this. Maybe someone will come up with a better way to balance it.

I love co-op and team games. I think giving each player a role rather than letting both players do everything will add an interesting alternative play style. I also don't think this would be too difficult to implement from a technical perspective although I do think the balancing of economy to not leave the general sitting doing nothing for the first 10-20 min would take a bit of trial and error tweaking.

I don't agree it needs to be more complex. I will admit I've barely played the game (got it yesterday) so my mind keeps jumping to Total Annihilation when I'm thinking of economy and balance issues. I had some games in that where I had a mega economy and an impenetrable defence but hardly any army. I'd focus on defence and go hard for the nukes and spam nukes to Annihilate the enemy. Other games I'd pop units straight out of factories and micro-manage them in surgical strikes to either defeat or cripple an enemy early on. The game type I'm proposing would allow you to do both. I think it would improve this idea if there was more depth to the economy and when I've played the game some more I may even suggest some ideas but I don't think it would be required for this to work.

I think your missing the point. The point is to force separation of economic and military control.

So you both play on the same team but only one of you controls the military, the other player cannot control the military. Forcing each player to play a specific roll.

Oh I also don't like the name Generals and Politicians. I think it gets the point across but lets face it politicians are not cool. Any ideas on a better name

I must be missing the point because i know for a fact this can already be done in game.

[quot]https://forums.uberent.com/threads/what-game-modes-should-we-start-with.43223/[/quote]

You should do a search before posting in accordance with forum rules and chime in on the official Uber thread.

Play with friends

When I do games with friends we always have defined roles such as one focus on economy and nukes and the others on units+attacking

You should read an entire thread before citing forum rules telling people how to use the forum.
This is not simply a game type suggestion it is also a discussion on the details of that gametype and how they might work. I am aware of the official uber thread and I have chimed in on there linking back to this discussion. I did not want to spam the official uber thread with a long discussion on how this game type might work.

If I'm honest, though I can see where you're coming from with this, I (can't believe I) agree with Gunshin, though he of course is being his usual blunt self.

Basically, if you are using voice comms, and if you go into a team armies game with a pre-made strategy, this sort of thing does happen already.

If, for example you know that two people on your team are really good at eco spam, one person is terrific at base defence and two more are superb at attacking and scouting, then you will go into each game with these pre-defined roles already in mind, subconsciously.

Everyone has different strengths and weaknesses. Good teams will take advantage of their members' strengths in each game. I don't see that adding restrictions to unit control will do anything but hinder people's ability to play as part of the team.

There's a difference between an enforced rule and a casual gentlemen's agreement setup. Right now players can play "no defences" games. Does that mean there shouldn't be native ability to limit what can and can't be built when creating a lobby? Of course not.

I would say that stating "this can already be done in game" is missing the point. There's many game types that can "already be done". This doesn't mean they shouldn't be properly implemented.

You know thinking about it I bet there are a lot of game types like no-defences that would be relatively easy to implements. A lot that are already "Gentlemans agreement" games that could be formalised

Yeah this would be cool. All you really have to do is restrict the 'general' so he can't build metal or power.

Without spending much time reading everyone else's response, I'm sure this has probably been mentioned, but, while I understand the train of thought behind Politician/General, I think it's not a good idea to force one to 'specialize' in one area while the other specializes in theirs. This makes you less flexible and more dependent on your teammate to either be a good general or a good politician. I don't doubt people's abilities to excel in either of them (even in game), but if my buddy is struggling to gain the upper hand in battle and I'm limited to just how much assistance I can provide, then that puts us both in a precarious position. I think we should stick with the current flexibility of being able to come to an 'agreement' on who should do what and practice good communication with our team. It's like in the real military: If one guy gets taken out, the other can step in and do the job.