Suggestion: two humans for one player in the game

Hi guys,

I don't know if you played to Age of Empires II The Conquerors. In this game, you have the possibility to pick the same color that an other guy in the game.
When two or more players have the same color, they play the same Commander in the game.

What is the interest?
At start, it is boring or you can discuss strategy and assign roles
After:
- The first player can take care of the base and the other one controls the army
- The first player can control the North army and the other one controls the South army
- etc.
You can launch a 1v1 game with 4 players (2 players control the Red Commander, 2 players control the Blue Commander)

It is a very fun mod of game.

Think about it!

I create a poll.
I think it is easy to code

Yeah I could totally see this as a fun game mode!

I don't know if you saw this, but there was a topic started on this already (maybe you can link to it in your first post?)

Anyways, my thoughts:

Oups, I did not see, sorry.
It is important to have a poll to show the interest of the fan about this functionality I think.

Why is this better than each player on the team having their own commander?

Among other things... it lets me control you units and prevent a total disaster while you BRB (bathroom/S.O./parents/kids/etc.)

(While not having to pause the entire game.)

This was possible in SupCom/FA with cheating enabled, with Setfocusarmy # in the console, although it brought up a message about the user cheating every time he changed the command of an enemy unit. I think especially for these larger battles it would be helpful to have one player focus on economy and another on space exploration/battles. That reminds me - in-game voice chat needs to be implemented in a way that works very easily and simply. TA and SupCom/FA never had it implemented, even though it was heavily requested.

I am talking to my friend about this over skype and yes this would be awesome but it would need changes to unit control etc how about Player 1 build a factory and Player 2 build units out of the same factory would they be under control of Player 1 or would player 2 have control over them.

The basic idea is that you'd both have full control over everything.

Mike

Nice to see you here OrangeKnight

Also +1 for this!

DO IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I actually do remember this feature from AoE 2 and miss it quite a lot. I haven't really seen it in any game since, even AoE 3 sadly enough.

A friend of mine and I used to play this way all the time. It was a fun way to play co-op. We both stayed quite active at pretty much all stages of the game. It let us delegate different tasks to each other so that we could both play actively without requiring either of us to have super mad crazy APM just to play the game.

Admittedly, I am surely a small minority in that I actually knew of and used this feature in AoE 2 so I understand in a way why many developers just don't care enough to include this.

On the other hand, why wouldn't they? It doesn't require additional artwork, or even really any code. It's something I'm confident any developer could knock out in 30 minutes or less and be done with. Why wouldn't they do it ?

Only thing I can see wrong with having 2 commanders and still being able to control your allies units something I sometimes see in TA. If the game is set to continue after the commander dies, 1 player rushes an air transport, flies their commander at the enemy, and uses it to instantly get rid of one player (those commanders HURT ). That's fun at first, but really ruins the game.

This is actually something that came up a bit in SupCom, but more so in SupCom2 wheny ou rushed research and marched your comm directly to the enemy, between starting research, the research you got over the time to get to the enemy and research from combat it was very difficult to counter, and even if you did the other surviving player usually had an army ready to go by then.

That was mostly in the early days thought.

Mike

Commander Rushing, Ugh...

That aside, that really isn't what the OP (or I) am asking for here. He is asking for one commander, one army, two players as was done in AoE 2. There would be no expendable suicide commander. This is not two empires. This is one empire, with two players who can both control everything.

The hard truth here is that no mere mortal can truly play a RTS game properly. There is just too much you need to be able to do simultaneously. The professional players boast impossibly high APM numbers as they struggle to simultaneously control multiple groups of units simultaneously attacking and defending in multiple locations all while building new units, researching, and managing your economy. It's just too much. Even the most gifted amongst us cannot do it perfectly. The rest of us mere mortals, can only gaze upon these gifted few in awe and fear.

Which is what I loved about AoE 2. Here was a game where a couple of mere mortals had a fighting chance. We could team up to control a single empire cooperatively. As we learned to work together we each had our roles to play. We were both active, but not horribly buried under the impossible complexity of trying to manage a seemingly infinite number of tasks simultaneously.

And I found it to be a heck of a lot of fun as any good Co Op activity can be. It's good to be able to fight with your friends now and than rather than against them.

It is 1 commander for x players. It is a normal game, just x players control the blue side for example

From a coder's standpoint, having two people control the same faction is nearly trivial. In fact, with a client-server-architecture, it's almost a free feature.

Exactly, it's extremely trivial. So why wouldn't you go ahead and include it as a feature?

It truly boggles my mind that no game since AoE 2 has supported this as a feature. It costs nothing to code this. Even if it only satisfies 1% of your fanbase you're talking about 30 minutes of your time well spent.

Lets not go telling them how much time something should take. At the end of the day even if they dont include it and its so easy, it will only take you half an hour to code up a mod to do this right?

In this case, yup.