yvrelna

There are issues with the possibilities of cheating, the game is open source, so with enough technical knowledge, you can run a custom game client that gives you unfair advantage such as by implementing automatic troops micromanagement or to exploit the latency-compensation mechanism. Also, the network code, from my understanding is written in such a way that every player simulates the whole map, so that means that a cheater can remove fog of war and see what other players are doing. Cheaters won't be able to alter unit stats, that will get them out-of-sync. But I don't think these should prevent one from running a competitive gaming scene. Sportsmanship and some level of trust is necessary, and you can't always rule out every form of cheating in any game. This is not unique to 0AD, even commercial games have exactly the same problems to varying degree. Just don't make the prize pool so large that people becomes monetarily motivated to cheat, and action reported cheaters promptly. If you want to run a competitive scene with large monetary sums, you will need to run an offline competition, so that you can control the gaming machines and ensure that players can only use an unmodified version of the game. (actually, I suspect that if you actually try to deliberately make cheating hard and try to implement various rules to make cheating hard, that will probably just invite people who would cheat just to show you wrong; so you either has to go all the way to prove that they're wrong, or rely on sportsmanship)