TL;DR Another idea for a new sub-meta for Planetary Annihilation Titans. [Premise] In the current game when the enemy Commander is killed, he and the rest of the defeated army explode, often killing the victor's units. Sometimes the defeated army inexplicably fights on to continue destroying the victorious army's units. A more realistic outcome would be that the conquered army is "assimilated" and becomes part of the winning army. Obviously this only makes sense for FFA or Team games. How this might play out is illustrated in the scenarios below. [Scenario 1] FFA. In a Free For All the army that kills the Commander immediately acquires all of the enemy's units and structures. In a multi-planet system all of the defeated army's units and structures would be assimilated system-wide. I need to think about if those units were fighting other armies. Maybe some action to signal a change is happening? (Think of the Quickening, the lightning storm in the movie Highlander when an Immortal gets an upgrade after a recent decapitation.) That's a detail. [Scenario 2] Team. In a Team game there are some different possibilities. In a 2v2v2 or larger on a single-planet system, whichever army kills the last Commander on an enemy team gets the enemy's units and structures. On a multi-planet system you might have a single enemy Commander on your planet with the enemy team's other two Commanders off-world. When the single enemy Commander is killed all of the enemy's army on your planet is assimilated. If there were two enemy team Commanders on your planet you would have to kill both. The off-world armies would remain under control of the off-world Commanders. If you were playing Shared, the entire team would benefit from the Assimilation. [Rationale] Someone told me that if it's too hard to explain, it's not worth doing. If anyone is still reading here I go again. A good part of the game is claiming, defending, and using resources. The better you are at doing that, the better you can defend your Commander and take the fight to the enemy. It doesn't make sense that after the war is won, everything that was part of the enemy would be destroyed. To the victor go the spoils! Bounty is kind of reward for the victor and helps offset the losses incurred in the battles to achieve victory. Actually gaining replaceable structures and unit reinforcements is much more useful. [Pro] 1. Conquering armies would rapidly expand and help prevent long drawn-out games. 2. Hoping to claim the surviving assets should sharpen the attack on the enemy Commander. 3. No more wars of attrition where all enemy resources are destroyed leaving only the enemy Commander. 4. Team members should fight harder to avoid giving their assets to the enemy. [Con] 1. Possible increase in lag issues with players having larger unit counts. [Disclaimer] I have no idea how much work this would be. I'm guessing that the same code that destroys the conquered army's units could instead not destroy, but be changed to move the units ("assimilation") to the victor's army.
I wouldn't be so sure Kiwi. Some great things have been done with server scripts. @cola_colin How possible is this?
I believe server script (requires running a custom server) handles the "if commander dies, defeat the army" bit. The UI is pretty hard-locked to only controlling one army though (though maybe server script has a little more latitude here), so the best that could be done would be something like Puppetmaster which turns on sandbox mode and then makes it so people can only change control to armies they started as or defeated. You'd probably have to be in dynamic alliances if you didn't want them to shoot at each other as well.
First hack that comes to mind: A client side mod could iterate the units a player had the moment their commander is killed and give that list to another player, whose UI could then use cheats to spawn in new units of the same type in the same location.
