Play Against Yourself

[TheArchive]

Hello everyone, this is my first post on these forums. I'd like to first say that I hope I'm posting this in the right area, and that I'm not posting something that's been suggested a thousand times before. Now, for my actual suggestion.

I'm not sure how many of you have played the game Rise of Nations, but for those who did, do you remember the option you could set in the game which allowed you to play against yourself? They even had cheats which allowed you to choose human control or ai control for players.

I don't know about everyone else, but I personally loved that option. Sure it was fun to go against the computer, but I always enjoyed setting the control to human so that I could control the players. It let me determine how I wanted everything to play out. I could build up cities and armies, and have them do what I wanted them to do. What I really enjoyed was the fact that it added a lot of role-playing qualities for me.

So this is my question. I've heard that this game has been compared to Rise of Nations, and so I was wondering if that will be the same for this as well? Will there be an option to set it so that we can play against ourselves?

[Ykkrosh]

How does the user interface work in that case? Do you control just one player like normal, then click a button to switch to controlling the second player, etc? Or can control all the players' units at once? in which case how does it work if you try selecting groups of units belonging to multiple players, how does it decide between attack and repair actions when right-clicking on a building, etc? The game engine can easily support this, and it sounds like a nice feature, so I think it's just a problem of figuring out what user interface would make most sense.

[TheArchive]

How does the user interface work in that case? Do you control just one player like normal, then click a button to switch to controlling the second player, etc? Or can control all the players' units at once? in which case how does it work if you try selecting groups of units belonging to multiple players, how does it decide between attack and repair actions when right-clicking on a building, etc? The game engine can easily support this, and it sounds like a nice feature, so I think it's just a problem of figuring out what user interface would make most sense.

Your first guess is right. Basically, when the game starts all control belongs to the human. In order to switch to another player, you have to click on something that belongs to that player. It could be a unit, building, or you could click on the name of the player in the bottom right corner (which has a list of all the players). Once you click on something that belongs to that player, you would then control them. This way if two armies were next to each other you could drag a box around everyone and still only select your soldiers. If you wanted to gain control over the other troops, you had to click on them. I thought this worked rather well. Also, to deal with the fog of war issue (like how would you select the unit/building of the other player if it was blocked by the FoW?), it was set so that all players which were human controlled had their capital uncovered by the fog of war. That way, you could always have something to click on to switch control.

There was also no trouble with right clicking something. Let's say there are two players, A and B, both human controlled. First, I create an army for A. Then, I would click the capital of the other player. When I do that, my control switches over to them. One thing this means is that fog of war is switched (in other words, I would only be able to see what that player would be able to see. For example, when I switch from player A to player B, I see what player B sees, and lose the sight I had as player A. Make sense?). Anyway, once I have control over player B, I then create an army for them. Next, I move both armies (do this by moving the B army, switch to player A, then move the A army) to a spot right next to each other. If I don't want the two armies to attack right away, I simply set both to hold fire so that they won't attack.

I have a few options after that. First, I can pause the game, and while paused switch between the armies and set them to attack. This way, the two armies will attack each other when I unpause the game. If I don't want to do that, I can simply tell them to attack. For example, I would switch to player A, take the A army, and then right click anything belonging to player B in order to attack.

What I'm trying to say from all of this is that right clicking isn't an issue. If you're playing as player A and you right click something belonging to you, then the unit you have selected will guard/repair what you right clicked. If you take that same unit and right click something belonging to player B, then it will attack - the same way it would normally.

I hope this helps answer your question. If you need more help, might I suggest getting the game and trying it out? It's very fun and sure to last a long time (one fun thing about it is the different eras, ranging from ancient to future). However, you might end up having to download it online, since I don't know if it's actually in stores anymore.

[TheArchive]

I've actually noticed the option in the developer overlay that allows control of all units. This is actually pretty similar to what I was thinking of, only my version would be like in Rise of Nations, where the player is fully controlled by the human. With this option you can control what ever you select, but once you leave them alone the computer takes over again.

I also noticed another option called Enable Time Warp. However, after activating it I can't see what it does. Can someone tell me what Enable Time Warp does?

[Pureon]

With time warp activated, press spacebar to warp through time (speed up game time)

[TheArchive]

Just wanted to point out that I was wrong. I thought I could make it so where I could play against myself by setting the AI to none, and then in the game using the Control All Units option from the developer overlay. It worked, but it didn't work.

The reason it worked is that I could select the player's units without the AI doing anything. However, I ran into some problems. First of all, this can only work with the map revealed, since even though I can control the units, they are still treated as enemies. Second, I can't do anything. When I try to build/train something with a unit belonging to player 2, the thing I train still belongs to player 1. So that pretty much ruins it.

[Ykkrosh]

Yeah, "control all units" doesn't work well now - the gameplay code still thinks you're always player 1, and the option just changes the UI code to let you issue commands to other units, and the gameplay code doesn't yet verify that players are only commanding their own units, so it sort of lets you control them but not properly. If we switch everything (UI and gameplay state) to player 2 when you select one of its units, that'd probably work much better.

[TheArchive]

Yeah, "control all units" doesn't work well now - the gameplay code still thinks you're always player 1, and the option just changes the UI code to let you issue commands to other units, and the gameplay code doesn't yet verify that players are only commanding their own units, so it sort of lets you control them but not properly. If we switch everything (UI and gameplay state) to player 2 when you select one of its units, that'd probably work much better.

Yeah, that's how it works in Rise of Nations. When you set both players to human control, everything switches when clicking on something that belongs to the other player (so you can build and train, the fog of war switches, etc). Sorry if I'm not explaining this good enough.

[Ykkrosh]

You explained it well - I was just repeating it and saying I agree it'd be good, in contrast to what "control all units" does . (I want to implement a replay system some time and I expect that'll have some way to watch the game from the perspectives of different players, so this would be a natural extension and could probably share the player-switching UI (except working in normal games, not just replays), so I won't try implementing anything right now but I'll keep it in mind.)

[TheArchive]

Alright, thanks for considering the idea.

[Alpha of the Eagles]

(I want to implement a replay system some time and I expect that'll have some way to watch the game from the perspectives of different players...)

Wouldn't it be best if you could watch all simultaneously?

[Ykkrosh]

Maybe, but in some cases I imagine you might want to see exactly what a player could see - resource counts, fog-of-war, combat alerts, etc - to get a better insight into how the player made decisions, or something. A separate mode that shows you the whole map and all the unit details would be good too, though.

[TheArchive]

Maybe, but in some cases I imagine you might want to see exactly what a player could see - resource counts, fog-of-war, combat alerts, etc - to get a better insight into how the player made decisions, or something. A separate mode that shows you the whole map and all the unit details would be good too, though.

They have something like that in a game I like called Supreme Commander. You can make your own replay or download replays from other players, and then watch them. While watching the replay, there is a list that contains all the players. Selecting one of those will show you everything that player sees. When you get tired of watching that player, you can just select another player to watch. Or if you just want to watch everyone, there's an option that allows that as well. Clicking that will remove the Fog of War, and show you everything every player is doing.

[feneur]

They have something like that in a game I like called Supreme Commander. You can make your own replay or download replays from other players, and then watch them. While watching the replay, there is a list that contains all the players. Selecting one of those will show you everything that player sees. When you get tired of watching that player, you can just select another player to watch. Or if you just want to watch everyone, there's an option that allows that as well. Clicking that will remove the Fog of War, and show you everything every player is doing.

I think AoK did something like this as well, I seem to remember it not saving the Fog-of-War, but it was a long time ago so I could be wrong Will be nice to have in any case.