Friendly Fire

@raevn: Yes on both counts. Your example scenario is realistic. Just don't design crappy bases.

Guys, go test out the Spring engine. You can form a line with your units with one movement command. And units automatically maneuver themselves until they gain a clear line of fire. There is no such 'micro' you guys keep losing your sh!t over.

If anything, friendly fire serves to reinforce unit roles in a good way. Artillery weapons shouldn't be firing on top of your assault bots. They should be laying siege. Giant bombs shouldn't be in your main army, I mean wtf mate. Too many bots in one area gains diminishing returns due to blocked shots and splash damage. Assault bots that obstruct each other's vision can be supported by indirect fire bots, which get supported by missile bots(that blow up), creating firing lines that are vulnerable to flanks. A huge number of any one unit type just wouldn't work.

The less efficient a huge army is, the better a small one becomes. Small armies can be efficient on multiple fronts, helping to cut large armies down to size, rather than the game being a contest of death balls. Those are all positive things which happen when units need to think before they shoot.

As ACM points out, a good AI can make sure that stupid things don't happen. There's no need to suffer friendly fire needlessly, but it can cause an army to lose efficiency if they have a bad setup.

No. This is not a proper excuse. Trolls are always going to be trolls. There is no escaping how the internet works, which is why private servers exist.

Making things easier for abuse is an excuse. Te harder it is to troll, the less trolling there will be. If the only way to troll is to nuke your opponent, sure some people will do it, but the fact is nukes aren't easy to get, and by the time someone gets a nuke most will be too commited to winning the game, or else they probably wouldnt have even gotten that far. If we added a self destruct button that any ally could press to kill their teammate, I can guarantee you there would be more trolls. Making things easier and more open to abuse is directly related to the amount of abuse and trolling.

And while I do agree with bob on the use o smaller forces being more effective, this would encourage multiple battles at once with friendly fire recquiring you to micro you units even more over more battles.

@ayceem. Would there be more micro with or without friendly fire? It doesn't matter if its just 2 more clicks of micro recquiring to use your troops efficiently, it's still 2 more clicks for every battle. Uber is trying to diminish micro, and friendly fire is doing the opposite. It also encourages selecting single units to go into larger groups if units and dodge bullets.

Benefit: More realistic.
Possible downsides:
- Performance impact
- Gameplay & design changes to accomodate
- More micro-focus
- Less ability to wage multiple frontlines due to more attention needed in each battle
- Sim city with base layouts

It's more of an issue than just not designing bad bases. Is it worth it?

While that may work casually, the fact remains that micro will give you an advantage, meaning you have to do so because your opponent can. This removes the choice, and makes micro a necessity.

+1, I couldn't have put this better. (And I probably didn't)

The problem is reliance on the AI is that as the game goes on the AI will either use up shitloads more processing power coordinating each and every unit, or it will not and you will not be able to use any large groups without loosing half to friendly fire

Not strictly true.

While you can spend you effort on micro, I could spend my effort on macro and attack you across multiple fronts. If you can micro across multiple fronts... successfully, then you're a better player and deserve to win no matter what.

You've assumed that there's only one battle going on. If there is, then you are correct. But I must ask you in a game like PA, is that a safe assumption to make? Do we really want only on fight going on at any point in time?

To add to what BulletMagnet is saying, the concept of friendly fire would discourage the use of deathballs, and instead give the player more incentive to use their units in more tactically advantageous ways.

Well unless it's a ball of indirect fire units like hammers.

Because then the only friendly fire is from units shooting at enemy's directly net to your own.

After a quick skim through this thread, I realize how optimistic and decent the people of this community are. The worse griefing that that they could think of was to snipe a commander or drop artillery on friends. I've seen a few games with friendly fire turned off, it's a griefers paradise.

To give a few examples I'm sure people would do without friendly fire:

• 
  :evil: rush to capture all the resource nodes, then not build anything else
  :shock: construct building to block or interfere with units exiting factories
  :? construct useless building in key strategic areas
  :roll: fence or wall in team mates with cheap buildings

I'm not even an *** hole and that's just stuff I've seen/heard of happening in other games.

I believe in Ultima Online, one of the old griefer tactics was to find an AFK player and build wardrobes and similar furniture around them. They couldn't destroy the furniture and it was to high too jump over (if a jump mechanic even existed). They were trapped and had to wait for a GM to save them. So it's been done before, and it's probably older than some of you on this forum.

So Friendly Fire definitely needs to be on, or at least an option. Physics FF would be great, it would really counter the blobs you see in other RTSs and encourage proper use of the various unit types. And I think make terrain feature like ridges and high ground more useful. I'm all for making terrain more a part of strategy.

Don't care, but I want to be able to select one of my own units as the target for attack (which supcom didn't have) and to select the ground as the target for attack (which supcom had)

friendly fire for all units by all stuff.

some unit type just make sense, when you have to consider friendly fire, e.g., artillery. Also if you use FF you can balance accordingly. In the case of artillery and nukes for example you can make them stronger, if an enemy can't nuke you and send his tank blob in at the same time.
With nukes (and smaller asteroids) I would also promote after hit temporary hot zones (call it radiation or molten stuff ) with FF effects. So if you decide to go all in nuke-wise, you may have to move around the damage you have done (units should be smart enough not to step into lava or other dangerous stuff ).

Concerning possibilities for grief play, I in general don't support avoiding a feature just because it can be abused. Instead, useful measures to prevent such behavior should be employed.
In this case, grief just can happen in team games, between allied players. My suggestion:
- no fixed teams
- possibly a simple voting system to kick out or invite players

No fixed teams?? That wouldn't solve anything. In fact it might make it worse. The fact that you could switch teams at anytime is just asking for people to screw around.

as I mentioned, you would have to mechanisms in place to regulate that.

I'm in for the all AoE effect. I can't really imagine a nuke doing nothing on my own units that are in the blast radius.

For the team related friendly fire I agree with the people who mentioned team killers.

Not to mention with such amount of units large armies might require a lot of micro to shoot at the enemy and not to the units in front of them when on a hill or something.

as a side note,
if FF is considered, also a certain amount of unavoidable losses due to FF might acceptable. Aside from realism, modifying unit behavior to that extend, that they under no circumstances cause damage to friendly units, might be contra-productive.

To be honest, PA will have the best defense against trolling there is: a $20+ pricetag to each serious transgression. Abuse? Permaban. Buy a new copy.

Also, there is a downside to using only indirect fire: they're balanced around their pros and cons, so they'll still get mauled by a proper army using a combo of assault bots and indirect fire. Since assault bots would be able to get far more HP and firepower for the same cost, because of their downsides.

Removing friendly fire because of troller would be stupid.
If someone want to grief, he will find a way. And you will loose. It's not related to friendly fire.
I've played quite a lot of starcraft 1/2 match and I've never seen someone destroying my units without purpose.

I'm not sure I understand. You mean that having a good army composition being better than an army with a bad composition ( like an army with only one unit type ) is a downside ?

No, the downside to an assault bot is that you can't make loads of it due to friendly fire restrictions. The argument by igncom was that you should just build an army of only indirect fire units.

But because Assault bots suffer from friendly fire problems, they will pack much more punch per cost (as that is how you'd balance them to keep them useful), meaning that a good mix of Assault bots and indirect fire bots will beat equal cost in pure indirect fire.

So a good army composition would still beat pure indirect fire.

okay, so we totally agree then