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A concept I always thought would be cool.

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5 years ago
Over many years playing RTS games. My brother and I always thought it would be cool to if there was an RTS where each Faction Had three players in Match. One of these players would be the lead in the usual method of RTS command. While the other two would act as FPS Heroes. Communicating with their leader and providing a unit capable of thinking and acting of its own accord. Want a RECON unit that will scout ahead while avoiding the common flaw of blindly pathing into enemies? BOOM player hero. Want a leader to help aim artillery and ordinance so you can focus on production? BOOM player hero. Wand a bomber that can more actively destroy enemies with your constant rail roading? BOOM player hero. I know its a long shot and I understand that game development takes time and has its mess of issues. But I feel a feature like this would truly make for a unique and diverse play style for everyone.
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5 years ago
Could this possibly be a feature in Game?
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I don't understand what you've written. Could you explain it better please?
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5 years ago
If you want to control units, the engine offers a first person mode. So you can squad up with your friends (share units) by using the "Invite to squad" button in the Tab playerlist. Then they select their unit and enter /ControlUnit into chat. This should put them into first-person unit control mode.

A warning before you try it though. It's an old feature that has never been really well tested or used. When it works it's still very clunky and not really enjoyable to play IMO, but I just wanted to let you know it exists.

So honestly, you might be better off looking for a game that focuses on FPS/RTS interaction. For example Eximius is a game focusing on exactly that.
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FIrankFFC
5 years ago
I think he is wanting dota but 1 player is playing rts with units
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5 years ago
Well for 3rd person control he could just use the squads and have the players control individual units.
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there are games that have played around with this concept. Natural selection 2 comes to mind. Battlefield 4 had a thing where one person could play as commander for each team, but it was shallow.
Yeah I also always dreamt about this, as do many I think.
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5 years ago
what he is saying is that different players could control different parts of an army
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5 years ago
Imagine a match were each team consists of three players. One plays the RTS commander. places buildings, queues troops, manages economy, etc. The other players on the team get First person controlled "hero" units that allow them to directly engage in the battles of the game. for example a sniper that can recon an enemy base, kill particular enemy units. Or a tank that can lay down fire and help spear head a frontal assault. All while they communicate and work toward a victory.

Is that clear enough or am I still failing to explain?
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5 years ago
Clear enough.

You can already do this:
  • host a custom room and set the `Commshare` option to `All`.
  • wait until your desired playercount (presumably 3v3 but this works with any amount of people) and start.
  • now the leader controls all units, but the side players can still select them (technically any teammate can control and select any unit so you'll have to agree who the leader is).
  • the side players can select a unit and type `/controlunit` in chat. This gives them FPS control of the unit.

Things that will be different from your vision:
  • no 'hero' units. The side guys can only use whatever regular units the leader builds.
  • each side will start with 3 commanders (I assume you'd prefer a commander for the leader and a hero unit for each of the side guys).
  • your enemy is not forced to use the FPS mode so they can all just use the superior RTS mode.
  • the FPS controls suck bad.

As for the future:
  • no plans to introduce hero units. However at some point a game will escalate to striders and they are somewhat hero-like.
  • at some point we plan to decouple the amount of starting commanders from the amount of players so you'd be able to start with 1 commander per team. No plans for starting with anything else but the commanders.
  • no plans to improve the FPS controls. We never even wanted to have them but the engine that ZK is using has the feature.

The game is open source so if you or somebody else implements and is willing to maintain a feature, it can get integrated but I don't see this being popular because the RTS control is just so much better at ZK's scale of gameplay. All of the benefits you brought up (units not stupidly wandering off to die, helping aim artillery etc.) are done even better if the side player works from the top-down RTS perspective, even if just controlling 1 unit (think DoTA).
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Maybe one day I'll take a crack at making a mutator for commshare heroes. Depends on the demand for such a feature. Of course, this would mean needing an actual FPS interface. To be honest though, FPS mode in spring is.. to say the least:

* Buggy as fuck
* Broken as fuck
* Limited as fuck

I once used it to make space krows rain cluster bombs upwards. Wtf.

TL;DR: Spring's FPS mode is woefully underdeveloped and seems more or less a fun little distraction. I don't think good gun play is even remotely possible with it. I would like to expand commshare one day though to allow it to be done pre-game and allow squad members to place commanders and what not.
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5 years ago
So you want to make a Savage 2 mod of Zero-K? Have you tried this game?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savage_2:_A_Tortured_Soul
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