Mod request: Werewolf

An Among Us style coop traitor game. I talked about this on discord but forgot to write it down. The idea is something like the following.

• Players are on a semi-shared unit control team.
• The players are ostensibly trying to defeat some AI threat. Possibly chickens or some sort of spawned waves.
• Players only have exclusive control over their commander.
• Players only have line of sight around their commander.
• Players can only select and give orders to shared units within some range of their commander. Ties could be broken by the closest player, the player who first had control, or we could just let both players fight for control.
• Command queues for sending units out to do tasks will be essential.
• Degenerate commands such as Self-D may need to be disabled.
• I don't know how communication would work. Possibly only commanders within LOS of each other can chat.
• Traitors exist and have to sabotage the team somehow. Imaging building a missile silo and blowing up enemy comms, using intel passed along a chain. Non-traitors could even do this against people they suspect.
• Traitors would probably need some extra power.

It's a very rough idea as there are a few gaping holes. Why would the non-traitors spread out their commanders? Something has to motivate them to visit lots of parts of the shared base. Perhaps the base starts of fairly sprawling and needs oversight to defend on multiple fronts. What should the coop objective be? The game might be a bit long so dead players should have some meaningful way to contribute (maybe they gain some limited global power over the side, over the enemy AI? Can they still chat with everyone else?) It would be neat if someone could pull it off though.

The technical side sounds tough. Making the shared base and commanders semi-allied without sharing LOS may be doable via Spring's inbuilt neutral masks and alliance settings (the alliance settings that are player-usable via /commands). Selecting units of other teams in a way that prevents hax is harder. I made this feature request for engine support earlier https://github.com/beyond-all-reason/spring/issues/567 Without engine support we're probably looking at reimplementing the engine concept of selection in lua. This isn't as hard as it sounds as selection is already almost entirely a local UI concept, and lua already handles a lot of it. The utilities that do preselection highlighting can easily be repurposed to detect what should be lua-selected. An alternative to selection is to not let players actually select shared units, but rather bark orders at them with commander abilities. This seems less flexible though.

This reminds me of a Starcraft: Broodwar custom game that had a similar theme which may be possible to be implemented in ZK.

It was called Phantom and the basics of it were:

- An FFA, probably best between 3 and 8 players.
- All players start off allied and have full vision of each other, with the ability to unally and turn off vision share.
- At some point early in the game (~1 minute) a player is secretly informed he is the phantom.
- The phantom wins by killing all other players, all other players win if the phantom dies.
- From this point onwards the phantom gains extra resources (in ZK could be done by a resource multiplier based on the number of players in game?).
- The phantom will need to start spending his extra money at some point to take out opponents, but they'll all be watching each other closely.
- After a certain amount of time, the phantom is revealed to all. This is to stop the phantom just playing as if he didn't have extra resources and dragging it out into a long boring game.

Here is a thread on one iteration of it I found in Starcraft https://tl.net/forum/brood-war/59882-new-ums-map-phantom-ultimate

If you want a "super simple" coop traitor game in Zero-K, you only need to make 3 changes from the base game:
- Traitor wins if any single non-traitor com is lost.
- Others win if traitor com is lost.
- Traitor is revealed at ~30 minutes and Sudden Death starts.

This could be tested with a host sending private messages and declaring a winner afterwards.
You just need to tell players if they are traitors, or not, and end the game correctly.

Much less interesting than OP, but maybe it can inspire someone?