jump into an already started game?

In fact, even in team games, latecomers don't actually work after the first few minutes (and certainly not in the days-long so-called 'epic' games that people think will happen all the time). With exponential growth players tend to expand to fill the available space. It's unlikely there will be any space to build up even one hour into a game, let alone twenty-four. All their ACU brings to the field is a liability.

In my experience, the most common game at LAN parties is often DotA or one of its clones, which has a similar problem. Players who lag behind are worse than useless, and just feed enemies with kills, yet players are never eliminated from the game, so players who're behind on experience are roughly equivalent to latecomers here: nothing but a drain on their team's resources.

Great, another option for people to set wrong, increasing the time it takes to find a lobby running sane games.

Your parties don't sound very fun.

Your internet doesn't sound very fun either.

This is a perfect example of why designing to the lowest common denominator makes things worse. "Some kids might get hurt playing dodge ball, so lets never have dodge ball in middle school PE anymore." This is also why I can't ride a jet pack to work either :cry:

My LAN game of choice is Minecraft, not DotA, on the grounds that DotA is terrible. This doesn't mean the room isn't half-full of people playing DotA/LoL/HoN and not sounding like they're having very much fun.

Have you seen the Internet? Given the millions who subject themselves to Call of Duty or Farmville,

I'm not advocating "designing for the lowest common denominator". I'm advocating designing. Solving every problem by saying "we'll make it an option" is the opposite of design. Just as modern RPGs giving you sliders for everything from lipstick intensity and nose width to left upper arm musculature and voice masculinity means they don't have any character design in them, putting every vaguely contentious gameplay element in as an option makes it less of a game and more of a pack of playing cards.

no doubt there will a conf file for dedicated servers which is no hassle once set up.
so options arent the problem, if you dont know how to set up a server correctly its time
to do some reading.

Another one I have somewhat mixed feelings on. On one hand, I completely understand the idea, in a smaller scale battle, especially in a 1v1, the idea of someone joining mid game is blasphemy. It would be downright retarded.

On the other hand, in a large 40+ hour epic FFA battle, it could be pretty interesting to see people able to join and leave freely allowing for a seamless battle. Be honest, have you ever really played a 40+ hour battle of anything? Civilization? Hearts of Iron? etc. You have to pretty hardcore to even consider it. Even if you have tried this, chances are your experience was that of playing the game for a few weekends before people got bored and left leaving another big epic battle unfinished.

Having a seamless large scale battle allowing people to "hop in" mid battle, might be an interesting option. It would certainly make large scale epic battles a bit more accessible to the average gamer.

I see merit in both ideas. Maybe they should both be options.

honestly i never played a 40+ hour game, however look at this way,

the server is running the game its dedicated and never turned off,
letting players hop in and out of this game needs to happen...

ive thought about this a little more, for GW, i would guess that the AI
code for this is paramount, it should pick which units to send to a planet
based on the planets strengh IF its a new player and just play full throttle (normal)
for players that have been in the game a while, this way in the grand scale of things,
new players would actually be able to build up a base ect and defend incoming attacks,
it really boils down to surviving the first 10-15 mins of joining that game, obvioulsy again
there could be another option for this.

maybe there should be blocks in place coupled with the above AI strategy to not allow human players to attack new players to the game for a certain amount of time, this would eliminate alot of hassles, quite simply ignore new players until you can actually damage them.

i just hope the AI is good and versatile and doesnt do stupid things.

its difficult to assume anything at the moment, as there is little info given,
were being teased with tit bits of info but nothing concrete on what is what.

we know its a next gen rts, based on "huge" planets in galaxies
war will be waged across galaxies with thousands of units. I read
somewhere a comment that games can last days, so there must
some mechanism already implimented that handles rejoining existing games.

I just want to point out that none of us really know how the whole galactic battle thing is going to work.

The 40+ mega game idea came up on Reddit before the galactic battle stretch goal came up.

If this turns out to be some persistent scoring / ranking kind of thing like the clan battle map out of Shogun 2's multipayer then you guys and your high expectations are in for a let down.

they promised awesome, we want nothing less.

I have no problem with it being a game option. It would be cool if I was playing a solo/coop game and was able to send an invite to a friend. I could see their ACU teleporting in next to mine and building up off the overflow or a "temporary support tax" from my economy. As well as another AI opponent ACU teleporting in to even the teams.


The only restriction that would be needed are...
* Players can only join on invite or request
* A setting to toggle it when creating a lobby (disabled for ranked matches)
* A max player limit

I'm not entirely sure, since your post reads like you typed it on an iPhone with your feet while drunk, but you seem to be implying that new players would get free units proportional to the units already on a planet, which actually creates a huge number of problems. It actually incentivises cycling players out as often as possible and suiciding their units at the enemy, since every time you do this you get a free set of units sufficiently large as to deter an attack (as now a new player represents a significant, scaling, source of mass from their wrecks). Team games become about who can most effectively use the 'tactical part/join'. That those units stand a good chance of spawning inside an enemy base (spawn spots being natural expansions, and all) only makes the tactic more attractive.

So now new players are free to destroy your buildings in order to build theirs in their place, and you can't fight back? Remember, after an hour or so there's no unclaimed mass anywhere.

Hi,

Sorry, yeah i do tend to write posts from my phone, I was not drunk or typing
with my feet though.

I'm just trying to think of ways of making joining started games applicable,
i didnt mean you get units for free, i meant that the ai attacks you with units
it would at the start of the game and not with more powerfull units that would wipe
you out.

Regarding human players not being able to attack new players, maybe there
should be a mechanism so that IF the new player attacks another human player
then this human is then able to attack the new player, if the grace period has not elapsed.

It's a pretty rough idea at best.

Doesn't address the fact that in order to even get the mass the new player needs to build up, he's going to have to attack enemy-held mass points, and so immediately void the ceasefire.

You are assuming that all metal spots have been claimed, and that they're well defended.

People are talking about "40 hour games" here. When have you ever had even a two hour game of SupCom where there have been unclaimed metal spots? And if they're "well defended" or not is irrelevant. The moment the new player attacks them he loses his immunity, and gets torn to pieces by enemy artillery, missiles or aircraft which he can neither detect or defend against. A commander out in the open without radar, AA, TMD or shields is as good as dead. This is of little consolation to the player who got his mexxes attacked by the newcomer, because the commander's explosion will blow up several even if he's destroyed immediately, setting back his economy.

Certainly it will be technically possible. It probably only makes sense in certain contexts though (And not in something like a ranked match).

To me the idea of someone joining a team mid-way is more interesting than starting off with just a commander mid-way through the game. That might lead to people joining just to commander suicide or something.

I think that this would only make sense in some kind of fun games and may cause too much unbalance if you want to have fair matches, especially ranked ones. But it could be a quite interesting option. There are mainly 2 possibilities to balance it more or less:

1. Players in game can activate a certain option, when they want to stop playing. Other players can join the game and firstly watch it from the leaving player's point of view and then take over the units of the leaving player. Maybe it should not be allowed to replace a player, when you have already seen the game from his enemies' points of view.

2. Players can join games with "late join" option enabled. As it would hardly be possible to build up after jumping in the middle of a running game like jurgenvonjurgensen explained, a new area like a planet or an asteroid should be created, where the new commander can build up. (this is less necessary when joining a team (the weakest); but then team members would have to give some mexies :/ )
For better balance there should be a 15min no rush time or sth (nothing can leave or enter the asteroid/planet). But this would decrease fun i think. A no rush time is also not absolutely necessary when joinig a team. There should be a limit of joining players for the game may not get too big.

((An option that enables unlimited joining would be the automatic destruction of the new asteroid/planet after 30min. But that would just destroy most of the new players and none of the old players would be very interested in conquering the new asteroid/planet))

Actually yeah I have been thinking about this for a while and, for team games anyway, the most "fair" way for a new player to join a game is unit donation.

Let's say you are on one island, planet, or whatever and you are thinking of expanding into a second base. So you send 4 engineers and a dozen tanks over to the new spot to set up shop. You could easily do it on your own and use the added mass / energy income from the new base to increase your unit and building production.

Or you just hand over your four engineers and a dozen tanks to whoever is joining the game on your team. They'll set up their base, and use whatever mass and energy you would have gotten to start up their own base. From an economical stand point your team will still have the same net amount of mass and energy flowing into it, all you'll do is add another conscious mind poking at things and giving orders.

This would be a good way to run team games without having anyone getting left out if they die early on, or show up late. When all of one person's units blow up they are still in the game, it's just up to the other players' generosity to keep them doing stuff.

Just on the subject of unit donation, this was something that was open to abuse in Forged Alliance. In a 2v2, if one player is killed then he has a window of opportunity to select all his units and give them to his teammate. This has the effect of seriously turbocharging the remaining player's eco and makes it very easy for him to rush a game-winning unit.

So by killing one of the enemy commanders you have actually put yourself in a worse position.

This has been fixed in Forged Alliance Forever, where the host can set the option Full Share (dead commander units are split between remaining players automatically), or Share Until Death (dead commander units are all destroyed upon his death, even those previously gifted to other players).

Share Until Death is the only way to play the game so that its intended mechanics are preserved, and I would hope PA implements something similar.

Hah yeah I guess unit donation doesn't work with assassination mode. The whole idea of "if you blow up someone's ACU they die" kind of runs counter to people coming into and out of a game.

In say a 4v4 game like setons I often find that if a friendly commander is killed the complexity of the battle increases as I know have to fight at two fronts .. or if more get killed three or even four.

More experienced/skilled players probably know better what to do but for a less experienced player this often results in not being able to control the situation.
Even if I receive the complete base and all the units from the dying commanders.
I end up waisting resources, forget to use factories, rebuild, dont know what to build to counter the enemy fast enough as I just got into the fight, etc.

It would make it even harder for me to make something of the game if all the units and the base seize to exist after a friendly commander death, it would probably be unrecoverable. Before I got something rebuilded there, the enemy has already taken over.

What I am trying to say is that eliminating brain power (micro power) on the enemy team can be a huge loss. (even if no units/bases are lost)
Especially in a complex situation.