Why are colors locked?

In pretty much every other RTS game I've played, players can select their own color from a palette to identify their units and buildings by. I'm aware that you can change the color presets at the top of the left screen (although they're all very similar except for colorblind) and that you can create your own custom color palettes with some file editing for your units, allies, and enemies, but as far as I'm aware that's clientside and only YOU get to see the change. I feel like one of the big things about picking a color is that it makes a statement about you to your opponents and other players, and it's something that can identify you. (As an example, I like playing pink Cybran in Supreme Commander FAF and I kind of have a reputation for always picking pink Cybran)

I suppose that it's helpful for gameplay readability if you're always green and your enemy is always red, but in 1v1 games (where this holds true) it's kind of boring and pointless-- it's not hard to keep track of two colors. If your units were yellow and the enemy's were blue, it wouldn't really matter all that much (of course, not for colorblind people, I'm glad the colorblind mode exists). In teamgames, your allies are a mix of cool colors and the enemy are shades of warm colors, but it's totally random otherwise. I like the idea of having one side be cool colors and the other side be warm colors, but at the very least it'd be better if you could choose from each palette respectively? I know this is kind of a minor nitpick, but I think a lot of people would like being able to pick their own color-- at least in custom games.

I'm not really asking for this to be changed ASAP, but I'm rather curious as to why Zero-K is much more restrictive with color choice than most other RTS games and whether that was intentional or just kind of happened.

Zero-K used to allow this, just like all other spring games. In the end you just get a mess of colors, with some colors being so dark you can't recognize any unit icons and others so similar you can't differentiate between them. Picking colors means there's no consistency when watching games and it's very hard to read the game even if you know the colors.

Instead of having users manually type !fixcolors to force everyone to default colors every game (That's what happens in other spring games), Zero-K just removes this hassle altogether.

quote: Zero-K used to allow this, just like all other spring games. In the end you just get a mess of colors, with some colors being so dark you can't recognize any unit icons and others so similar you can't differentiate between them. Picking colors means there's no consistency when watching games and it's very hard to read the game even if you know the colors.

Well, that's just because ZK allows you to pick any shade from the millions of possible shades on a color wheel. Other games solve this by having a select palette of colors that are differentiable enough. Even with large team games there are at least 20 different shades I can think of that are clearly distinct.

"Instead of having users manually type !fixcolors"

Wow thanks for bringing back this huge memory back from the past! Had totally forgotten it.