Delegation of units / Automatic team forming

So, let's say there are 'x' players playing, building up their base and slowly expanding throughout the universe, at some point in time player 'a' will conquer player 'b'. Would it be an idea to offer the player that lost to "join" your empire (automatic team-forming based on victory), or even take it a step further and have the ability to delegate certain tasks/controls to that player?

The motivation here is that I can imagine it will become extremely difficult after having colonized/conquered loads of planet to maintain them all, also the player that you killed knows about his base-layout, so saves you the hassle of getting accustomed with it. Additionally, you will truly get the feeling of being the "Supreme Commander" if in the end all the other players are "at your service" ;-)

Only if it's limited to a 'would you like the player you just defeated to join you?' confirmation for both sides.

Would be fun for during lan play with friends, would be of limited use with random pubbies.

I'd always accept an invitation to join my conqueror.



It'd give me a chance to stab him in the back later on.

*takes note*

Could be prone to abuse, small groups of people playing in 4v4 games could agree to surrender early on so that all from the group are on the same side in what could now be a 6v2 or 7v1, which would not be fun for anyone. And before anyone suggests that it only be possible after certain conditions be met, that limits when it is possible for legitimate users of such a feature to use it with minimal impact on abusers because when collusion is involved it's easy enough to ensure that any conditions needed are met by the involved parties.

I wouldn't mind some way of being able to get team mates that died back into the game though, such as having a team mate build a replacement ACU that can be given to the team mate that died as a replacement, they'd have to start from scratch again but with a little time they could get back into it and continue to help out, and it wouldn't risk altering the balance of the teams (though it may make suicidal commander rushes a bit too common).

+1'ing this completely, i'd like to be able to make sACU that would be quite weaker than a real one for teammates to take control of, so i could hand over some of my forces or even an entire planet to my recently defeated teammate. Maybe restrict them to only part of a real commander's feature, aka make them into a big engineer with a gun.

I love the idea, I only worry that this might prolong games infinitely. Player dies, accepts control from player that beat them, gets an sACU, wash rinse repeat. Which isn't a big deal: just limit it t skirmishes. Then it would be awesome.

I don't think it'll cause a stalemate, as the available resources and map areas don't change. It's just that the longer surviving players will be more of grand generals, who can use the dead players to perform lower level macro and even micro. Like field commanders.

THAT makes a lot of sense. The topic was going more toward basically donating an sACU to a player and letting them do their own thing, which essentially would be a respawn. Which is super cool. But...prolonged

Simply allowing control of units to dead players to micro them for you would be very neat.

Yep, join my enemy and grief the crap out of them.

Just to make sure that they lose when I am supposed to be on their side.

My thought was that a proper player will try to retake a fallen base asap to make use of its infrastructure. Of course the battle won't have left all the wreckage in a salvageabale state, plus the enemy will have stolen some of it. What would happen is you'd end up giving your player an army or a factory or two to keep control of a planet or control a skirmish you don't have time for. Maybe just keep the players from using unit cannons and other interplanetary units? Just to keep each 'defeated' player confined in some way. I'm sure that someone with more intimate knowledge of the game's current infrastructure could devise a set of limitations that would make them just microing generals. In any case there'll be a give units option almost for sure.

Though maybe it could go in a more Starcrafty way and you could donate factories to a player who's about to be overrun to keep him in the game BEFORE their base is destroyed, so he wouldn't be 'defeated' to begin with, just retire to a far weaker role.

No no no no no. No. That would be a silly idea, unless they removed your friendly attack option. I'll stick with keeping the original teams always.

Ah, well, unit gifting was in FA and was very useful. You very well could keep your friend alive by donating one of your engies to them, along with a couple base structures. Heck, you could give them a few structures that were already inside your base, effectively giving them time to recover. Unit gifting is definitely a good idea.

I think along the lines of the discussion, though, giving dead allies (I'll amend my statement, allies, not players) some control of your combat units might be a nice touch, and could keep them entertained with the game, despite being, well, gone.

There are many more ways to grief then to shoot, how about I wall up your base with power plants and prevent your units from leaving your base?

Or if I reclaim your metal extractors when you are not looking?

Or if I just get my self captured back?

You need to be very careful when designing a Game Mode around this kind of thing, even if there are 2 identical 'teams' in terms of units, resources and player skill, as long as one team has more 'players' they'll still have an advantage.

Mike

What if by default, team games were simply army vs army games? Namely, you share control with your allies for everything, and you can't 'lose' a teammate. The only thing under a players exclusive control would then be their commander.

I think it would be way more natural and fluid to get everyone thinking & playing as part of a big army, not as individuals only lightly tied together by some resource sharing links.

Was it Starcraft that had an option / mode like that, where you started with "your own" units at a seperate start point, but all units as well as resources were shared by the entire team?

I remember quite liking that for a team where you know the players well, since one player could focus on micro-ing the air force, one could build their tank army, while another could be going all out on the eco-spam to feed the rest. You'd also end up focusing on seperate flanks, although to be fair this also happens in standard team games where "team" spawn points are close together anyway.

In a PA setting I'm not sure whether it would be better to have seperate (unshared) commanders for each player, or only one commander for the "team" as they are effectively a gestalt player entity. I'm also pretty sure it is open to abuse; you'd only want to do this with friends, rather than in a pickup game, as evidenced by some of the responses on this thread

I remember that in Empire Earth 2.... bloody nightmare trying to coordinate anything, you are having clicking wars with a worker to try and get it to build/move or whatever,when the other person was trying to get it to do what they wanted, all this happening whilst in the background your base is getting decimated by an enemy army.

I suppose you could, I dunno, talk to your teammate?

Seeing the other player's actions on your screen would also go a long way towards fixing this.

Another option would be a simple control scheme where the UI automatically filters out units from your selections that are performing orders from teammates. Sort of like how Supcom would filter out engineers when you drag-selected a set of units. If you were to specifically select a unit performing orders from another player, the unit selection box could be a bright color to let you know the unit is 'in-use'.

It seems that you have not played this mode in EE2. He was sitting opposite me, and it is rather tricky trying communicate virtually everything you are doing to your team mate, because if they don't know, then he is going to end up doing something that you didn't want happening.

For example, you are discussing your strategy, and you may tell a worker to build a barracks, and you don't think about it you just do it, because that's what you would do in a normal game, and are not used to talking to others while playing.

He may just click that worker and send him to cut down a tree, not knowing that he already has a task set by you, although allowing players to see each others actions on screen may solve this but there would be a lot of screen clutter because you would have to know exactly what a unit is doing and where.

This is a problem, because eventually you will end up losing because no one has any idea what the hell is going on anymore, resulting in arguments and just a downright negative attitude.