In all these internet discussions the Commander has been a consistently controversial subject. We all know of Assassination and Annihilation as game modes, but I reckon it should also be possible to disable the Commander unit from games completely. Even in an Annihilation game the Commander remains a huge liability to the player, whose offensive, contruction and nuclear explosion capabilities prove to have too pivotal an impact in game outcomes to be ignored. I think the option to replace the starting commander with, for example, construction units to the amount equivalent of the build power to that of the Commander's and equivalent storage would solve much of these forum complaints.
Thats like saying "How about we play Patience with dice instead of cards". The game is about the commander. It's a commander game.
Even if it's not available vanilla, this kind of thing would take literally 10 seconds to make available as a mod. Don't sweat it.
Sounds interesting, to be honest. Although we'd have to see how well the game runs in non-assassination mode. Having to sweep up someone's last two scouts hiding somewhere on those 5 planets sounds a bit problematic, so there'd need to be a clear and different win condition.
Commander assassination is still a great way of ending the game. Cleaning up a thousand stragglers across a dozen worlds is an exercise in OCD. Hunting down and killing one Commander might not be easy, but when you succeed the game's done. That helps a lot in keeping the proper game scale, without having an obnoxious cleanup phase. A different type of game wouldn't have such an easy and well integrated victory condition. If your goal is to just play for a few hours and blow things up, then losing your Comm kind of sucks. But I'm not sure that's worth getting rid of the Comm entirely. There's still plenty it can do without being an instant game over. Maybe it would be something you didn't start with, but could be built much later in the game?
Usually non-commander games end when you kill all unit/building producers. So once all engineers and factory's are killed, you win. What the OP is suggesting is that you also be able to disable the walking bomb in your base and replace hip with more starting engineers.
What would you start with instead? An engineer? Some pre-built base? Starting build orders are some of the most interesting game mechanics. Edit: I know this was mentioned in the OP, but I think it bears more thought.
OP suggested we start with the equivalent build power in engineers. However in another thread we were brainstorming ideas of forces to start with for quick start games.
Like I stated, that was just for example. I'm reminded of how game starts worked in Mechanized Assault & Exploration. Each player had a pre-set amount of gold with which to buy the equivalent in mobile units, and those became your starting units(you still had to build the base on your own). It could be possible for such non-commander games to adapt this system with metal and energy, and any of which you don't spend goes into your starting reserve(might need storage units though) (maybe that commander/drop egg IS your storage). But this is just one idea.
How would you give starting resources? Typically, the starting game resources are stored by the Commander, who also produces some to get the economy rolling. Keep in mind that any new unit that can be cannibalized for extra money will be devoured.
Clearly you would need to start the game with storage units. If the commander drop pod shown in the Kickstarter trailer remains a part of the game, that could double as your storage, and possibly the resource production the commander had. This is of course assuming the imaginary vault route isn't taken. Come on, I already mentioned this in both of my posts here. With the Mechanized Assault & Exploration inspired mechanic, if you really need the resources and not the units, you would simply not choose any units to start with, as I already outlined. But really, there are so many possible ways to go about implementing non-commander starts, I couldn't possibly discuss them all here. The purpose of this thread was simply for the general sentiment of a game mode without commanders.
Depending on how important the Commander's role remains during a match, a good chunk of the game could end up missing. But there's still an entire game even without one specific unit, if you can handle the feeling of spiritual emptiness.
