Most maps have a text- or beacon-based settings menu at the start of the game, controlled by the Host slot or voted on by all players. E.g. Archon Tag chooses the amount of Archons by sending Probes to a beacon.

What if all this could be chosen before the map even starts, through user-selected races? For Archon Tag, the race of Player 1 could determine amount of Archons. Or, in Diplo Infi, the race of the Player 1 slot determines what game mode is played.

A different application could be to set teams: in Temple Siege, all six Human slots could have user-selected races, with all the Terrans on one team and Protoss on the other (Zerg could be an observer). There wouldn't be an importance to slots, although player colors would be different from what's normal (and I don't even know how TS is triggered, so this probably isn't feasible).

In theory, there's a limit of 3^8 different race permutations. Have a full-house and everyone go random, creating one of 6561 different game settings!



One important drawback is that user-selected players don't own anything besides their town hall at the start of the game, regardless of what's placed for them in the editor. "Preplaced" buildings and units will have to be created, or placed as P12 and given to the player.

Attached is a concept map, where players of the same race are all allied.

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Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Jul 7 2013, 11:01 pm by l)ark_ssj9kevin.

Probably the biggest obstacle to this is that people on b.net are stupid. If you make the selection process obvious in the game (ie, the game doesn't even 'start' until choices are made) then you'll get a much smaller proportion of failed/aborted games, vs having these settings in the lobby where people don't understand or don't listen to the game creator how setting their race determines how the game is run.

This isn't a problem for committed players of the map, but for random people just looking to play a fun game, it doesn't help.

The other obvious problem is that it's only a single selection choice: choose 1 of these 3 options, or have a random one. If you need 4 options, or only 2 options, then it doesn't fit as well. Or if you need players to make numerous decisions before the game starts, you'll have to implement additional decision systems anyway.

This is actually quite brilliant; I'm surprised we haven't had such an implementation done before. It does seem superior to a traditional voting system in nearly every respect, excepting the drawback that new players may not realize how to vote or what they're voting for. I like that voting can be done in the lobby for your system, and for systems with limited game options, having the first player choose the mode is an excellent shortcut as well..

I love the concept for this, and I love EUDs, so I decided to combine the two. Using EUDs, we can detect the game name the host uses. If we read a partial match, preferably the first four characters, we can use the same process described above to change the state of the game. Attached is a map that checks for the game name starting with [01], [02], or [03]. If it finds a match, it will uniquely set the deaths for Player 8 and display a message confirming such, and if it doesn't find a match, it assumes the default game mode (which is mode #1).



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it's a great idea for three-option (+random) selections, but can't see multi-user-based patterns as particularly useful (though roy's expansion could achieve choosing from a larger range of values before the game starts)

nice work guys