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You can't hotlink from funnyjunk :Þ

Nor should you ever visit the site in the first place.

Freedom of speech bro

Anyroad. If there is a hotswitch to use this "sentry" AI system. I would really like that.

Bandwidth is speech. Hotlinking another site's stuff is violating their free speech.

If a player can "reconnect" and get back control of his stuff, you'll clearly turn this already awesome game into a new awesome mmorts.

You don't need a IA to play the stuff offline, just perform "default" tasks like return fire, finish building queued units..

You could even host a official endless galactic game server with subscription fee access. I sure a lot of us would happily pay to all play together on a unique persistent server

This is exactly my dream since 12 years, a mmorts which result from the mix of Mankind and Total Annihilation.

I so cannot imagine how a persistent RTS should work.
You can't even go afk for 5 minutes in a serious game. What will be left of your army after hours of being locked out? An AI cannot possibly defend your stuff against other human players.

That's why you make alliance with player all around the world and defend each other
That's how Mankind was(is) working, great game at it's time.

I can imagine lots of different ways these games could work.

For instance persistent clan servers where you always try to have a clan member around to defend your base from all comers.

Or large team or clan tournaments that last for a long period of time (these instances could potentially be paused as well if needed).

To re-iterate though we'll see. The idea here is to have a framework to experiment with this stuff. Together we'll figure out the most fun way to make this work. Or nuke it from orbit if it sucks.

I like this idea...

You'd need a clan that has member in different timezones to make that work.
But yeah, experimenting could be fun that's true.
If you have only people from a single timezone it might be reasonable to pause the server at certain times. It is hard to find people who are willing to regularly play at 6 am in the morning.

Would be fun to "warp" your space station in and out.

Could have it as a means of "assault". Meaning any server, large or small. Can be invaded, and or must be protected?

Spacestation where you store your Commander. You could maybe have larger Space stations for clans attacking systems also.

Right now im imagining big Clan Tournaments, where each Clan has 3 Teams... One for Playing, One for Observing the player, and One sleeping, which all switch after 8 hours

not to forget the fourth one of the team going to work making triple shifts to finance the other three.

Hmm, while we are on this subject. How about a new business model: "the hired help"
put in a lobby where people can register as mercenaries. If you have to go off, run an errant, etc you can choose one of those guys and they step in for you in your game. When your are back you can kick them out again. The business part of the model, they get paid by the hour.
Now, we can discuss if they are paid by some ranking, minimum wages, their success in your game or some auction way...
(and not to forget I get a percentage of every dollar paid just for suggesting this deal. )

Im sure the dev's have thought of this but just incase, we realy need some sort of protection to provent "Hijacking" of your side. Do you all know what I mean?

The WAR OF THE UNIVERSE HAS BEGUN!

If you were to ignore all of the problems with using real money, that actually sounds like a pretty cool idea. A "karma" or "honor" system of some sort might work; maybe earn profile medals or titles or something.

A big problem though would still be timing. Say they promise to return in an hour, and they're gone all day. What then?

The way I see it, it can be handled in one (or a combination) of a few ways:

1. This mercenary model kalaskow and asgo described.

2. A defensive, "maintain the status-quo" AI as mentioned by wiccasick.

3. Leaving a simple instruction set until you get back (i.e. "Continue this unit production queue and patrol this area until I log back in").

4. A "hunker" mode where your units and structures go into a "fortified hibernation", possibly digging themselves into the planet, hiding them and making them harder to destroy, but also totally inactive. There might be a case to do this in certain areas/planets even if you're logged on. I'm thinking that this would take a long time to hunker/unhunker (~2-5 minutes) so that it would be very difficult to ambush with, making it primarily a "set and forget" feature.

If I think of any others I'll post them.

EDIT: Now that I think of it, the "hunker" mode would actually need to be fairly quick to come back up, since an opponent can camp out with a large force at your base and easily destroy it when it's coming back online after you log back in. Unless you can work out the kinks with this, a combination of option 2 and 3 is probably the easiest to go with, with the possible integration of option 1.

OK, so talking with a few of my buddies (who've also backed the game) and it almost seems completely unfair no matter what you do with automation when you disconnect. At the very least, it would seem fair than in a match, if one entire side left the game (whether it be one player or many players), that that game should pause until they return, and that if only one player left, then a teammate controls their units/base until they return.

Maybe from there you can have some server mods to have AI monitor your base until you return, but it wouldn't be a built-in thing.

Is that about right? I sincerely apologize if this has been mentioned before elsewhere.

I guess there can be different settings on that. Based on:

Is the player coming back.

Length of the game.

Size of the team.

But I would personally prefer a sentry system, that just kept all my units as i left them, and rebuilt and repositioned them if they got destroyed. IE back to the way it was when it started. Conservers.

And when i came back, I just take the wheels and boom. Planets disappear and **** like that.

(This current discussion sounds like it should fork off into a separate thread)

As far as servers go, would a fairly high end system with 16GB RAM and a decent graphics card be able to run both the server (for approx 4 players) and client?
If both can't co-exist/run at the same time on one system (but it could handle it spec wise), can the Server be run in a VM?

while running both at the same time shouldn't be a problem (as that would be like the single player mode), I can't answer what the performance limitations for such a combination are. But you should expect a lesser performance on the client on the server pc than on the other clients(even if the specs as a sum are enough, the processes might interfere with each other accessing the same resources).

You wouldn't run it in a VM, that's a heap of useless overhead.

Figure it this way - if you can manage a 4 player supcom game on your PC without slowing down, you're running both the sim ('server') AND the client at the same time, ALL the time. So in PA, you'd be able to do at least that good.

Now the great thing about PA is that if your buddy has a crappy pc that used to slow down your games, now HIS pc only has to do a fraction of the work, so all 4 of you will be able to enjoy a game without slowdowns!