Okay, so my thought while re-watching the live stream today, was that the server doesn't need an option for FFA or Team. That doesn't need to exist at all. My idea, is just make it so each square is a team, each square within a square is an army. Basically: in a free for all, everyone has their own square, nobody shares squares; in a team army game multiple players share the same square together against other players whom share a square; in an alliance game, everyone has their own seperate square and an outer square covers each individual square. Here is the best part, you could have a 1-1-1-1v3-1v2-2v4... or basically where there is any mixture or variety you want of teams formed out of alliances or actual conjoined teams. You could have 4 individual seperate allied armies, play against a team with a single army build by 4 commanders together, against 2 seperate allied teams built by 2 commanders each... Always what I aim for in my thinking anyway, the most versatile method possible. I will add a visual draft here shortly. Share your feelings about this idea below. AMMENDUM: I can so not wait until "diplomacy" is added, so you can choose to alliance mid-game with people. We can all play 1v1v1v1v1v1v1v1s and actually call truces to make it 2v1v1v1v1v1v1v1 and everyone do that in a dog-eat-dog world. Will be fun, making natural alliances instead of preestablished ones.
Okay, here we are. (TYPO, no biggie, but the endgame conditions are flipped, obv army/coms per team and coms per army... you know what, I give up...) -As you can see here, the innermost thing is the player. You can have multiple players per single com, multiple coms per single army, multiple armies per single team, and multiple teams per single game. That offers a lot of variation and no limits besides what the players agree on. -I added rules to the bottom of the screen, these aren't all it is just an example. -The color is chosen at the army level, obviously. Want to link things up between all the armies of the team, then just choose the same primary/trim and each army changes their trim/primary. -The point of this is, there can be 6 teams, each team can have 4 people and 4 commanders (if you want), and each can be different if you want. Team 1 can have 4 armies each with 1 commander and 1 player, Team 2 can have 2 armies each with 2 commanders and 2 players, Team 3 can have 2 armies with 3 players/commander on one and 1 commander/player on the other, Team 4 can have 3 armies with 2 having 1 commander/player and 1 having 2 players/commanders, Team 5 can have 2 armies and 1 army has 3 commanders and 2 players while the other has 1 commander and 1 player, and Team 6 can have one army with 5 commanders and 4 players because they need some form of handicap. -Just FYI, the endgame conditions I set are interesting and function with the above idea. It works like this: You enter a number, and that is the number of commanders needed for a team to continue, the army to continue, and the number of armies remaining for a team to continue. -The endgame conditions all being set to 1, means if the last one dies it is lost. So, if an army loses it's last commander, the army dies, if a team loses it's last commander, it dies, and if a team loses it's last army, it dies. -Now, those may seem to overlap in that situation, but what about this, if it were set to commanders per army at 1, commanders per team at 2, and army per team to 2, then in the above teams example, Team 6 would lose at game start, yes they do not have enough commanders and obviously they would change their configuration or the endgame rules would be changed. The other teams are alright, but the second the team has less than 2 commanders OR 2 armies in total, they would lose. If it started with 2 commanders in 1 army and 2 other armies with 1 commander, then if 2 armies died the team loses even if it has 2 commanders. Detailed.
yup, your idea plus one checkbox: "allow/dissalow players to form/break alliances" ie they are permanent or not. This would be best customization. For eg. Me and my friend bought PA, but we have bunch of friends and we love to make lan party now and then. In a game FFA it would be unfair for us 2 as we know PA well we would stomp everybody else and then fight for survival, ie. boring for everybody else. With your idea we could make us 2 against 10 of noob players. or 1+ some noobs vs other +noobs , etc i like this idea, more freedom in options the better for game. Just don't go UT3 way with mutators, that fragmented playerbase. So let people decide , have some default options, and dont over do it ut3 mutator style.
Ah, the idea at the top of your post is called "Diplomacy". Definitely coming, confirmed in the gamma stream. Definitely going to be nice to play FreeForAll games where players can actually form alliances. And that "ingame diplomacy" checkbox would be what allows/disallows it. That would also be what would allow alliances to be broken in games that start off as team games.
Oh also, obviously I removed the AI button. I think the server should guess an army without a single human player assigned to it should have SOMEBODY controlling it, obviously make it an ai if its nobody else. If there was an AI button, there should also be multiple choices of an AI opponent, like turtle AI or rushdown AI...
