Why does Fullshare exist?

Full share is anathema to the spirit of the assassination victory condition. Please let me explain. The goal in assassination style games is to pull off a crippling blow that gives your team an edge. Full share removes this edge as any com death doesn't do much other than possibly reducing APM for the enemy team. This is an advantage to be sure and the ability to split your attention is finite but its not as big as an advantage as seeing the whole base go up in smoke.

If the goal for certain players is to not cripple your team with your death, why not just use one of the other victory conditions? Annihilation or Supremacy have roughly the same effect as full share without the transfer of units/structures.

I watched a high level replay last night and boy was it wild-in the sense that it was utterly incomprehensible.
https://replay.faforever.com/11070199
Don't get me wrong, it was hilarious to watch and I certainly had fun watching, but can any high rated player honestly tell me they would make the exact same choices without full share? Marching half the team into mids base with little backup and no air cover-the fact that the air player chose to send his strat for the mexes first speaks volumes I would say.

Coms are supposed to be important, they are valuable-with full share reduces the value of the unit from a metaphorical King into a pawn. This defeats the point of the assassination win condition as far as I can tell.

Can someone explain the value of full share? is it to make higher rated players feel better when they get paired with noobs? So if the noob screws up it doesn't cost a higher rated player the match? if that is the goal, then it does a poor job, it teaches the nooob nothing and radically alters the state of the game
https://replay.faforever.com/14844824
That is a replay of my own game where a better player took control of a position early on and allowed us to take the game-WITHOUT full share enabled, but with full share I'm sure it would have taken longer.

Is the object of full share to allow risky and insane plays that would otherwise be discouraged in a match? If so, again I tell you supremacy exists.

Someone explain this contradiction in apparent goals to me please

Edit: tl;dr what niche does full share provide that supremacy and annihilation do not?

Decent teamgame maps are maps where players all have a central role to play and coordination is a necessity to succeed ie sentons. If you play sentons without full share, the game devolves into a meta of t1-t2 sniping the front player and converting that into an auto-win scenario due to you being able to easily deny 1 if not more bases from the enemy. The point of full share is to make it so that the only viable teamgame map to play is not some variation of hilly plateau or canis where 80% of the mass/eco on the map is in one spot so an acu death only takes 90 seconds to recover from.

@ftxcommando Arguably this entire game is a team game, those that coordinate are more likely to succeed than those that do not. But to be honest, you haven't really answered my question, what niche does full share fill that the other victory conditions do not? I suppose I should have made that question more clear in my original post

I prefer full share. It just makes sense to me, everything self destructing when you leave seems kinda weird. Yeah in team games it makes sniping a bit less important but sniping all the coms is still the goal. It's more like they have a number of lives, and can be given APM disadvantages as they lose them. Though I usually try to stick around if I die in a team game and mark important structures on the map (nuke, anti, com).

I do feel like it is how FtX said, sniping one guy with a bit of coordination seems to too easily turn into just a roll of the enemy team.

@kalethequick and you will get no judgement from me for preferring that, and I stick around after my death for the same reasons, pinging SMD and such is useful for those still alive who might miss such things. but if you want a second chance, why not play supremacy? Full share just seems like a needless "feature" that simply replicates the other victory conditions in effect

Without full share, snipe a single ACU in a 2v2, 3v3, 4v4, or maybe even 5v5, and the game is usually over. For most people, that kind of gameplay is probably not desirable to either play or watch. Go to Gyle's youtube channel and look at the top viewed videos of all time and look at the Epic casts—the vast majority of them would have ended much sooner and not been nearly as good to cast without fullshare.

@archsimkat yeah, I get that, thats what everyone keeps saying, but why fullshare and not simply an alternative victory condition? I understand what it does and I understand why its desirable, what I don't understand is how this goal is not already achieved by supremacy or annihilation victory conditions

Not to drag lore into this, but even lore wise it makes sense an acu can pick up an ally’s units in the event of them dying. Supremacy is very, very different from full share and would be cancerous to play on larger maps.

Outside of lore I don’t really have anything to add to what Arch and FTX said, they’re both right.

@majortrouble Because it's really different from supremacy. I see how they are vaguely similar, but needing to kill 2-6 irreplaceable units is just not the same as needing to kill every engineer, factory, or SACU. Those are replaceable, so I would say it's quite different.

There are other options as well. I have wanted to try some traitors games, and Civilian Desertion could be cool if mass capturing units was easier.

But full share seems fine. It seems like it makes the team as a whole more robust, but there is still this critical irreplaceable resource that needs to be protected and can go down at any moment.

@kalethequick that's a valid point and one I hadn't considered, it also answers my question-thank you

Quick edit/question: how many games do you see where one player is in a position to snipe a com and destroy a base vs games that a player who has the opening for a snipe but not complete destruction

Truly, I understand the point now, I'm just curious about stats now-doesn't even have to be completely accurate guess, just your own experiences

perhaps its just the level I play at but snipes aren't quite as common as slowly whittling away at a defense until you can push right through base defenses

to lazy to read whole thread... but answer is balance and gameplay.

1. If you have no fullshare, then game can become all about t2-t3 air ACU snipes
2. Therefore you can't use acu in combat, and even then you can get sniped
3. As soon one player dies game ends
4. people also may randomly disconnect and with fullshare game will not end there

I personally don't really like fullshare as it enables you to suicide acu to kill enemy army, and i also don't really like the "spirit" of it.
and fullshare games can often be about t3 acu drops with TML to cause cancer and at the same time acu loss will not lead to loss of the game

I have said this before, but I really hate Full Share in TMM. We are very cautious now about killing the lower rated of 2 players.

Suddenly that 50 eco that was being wasted on a 600 rated strategy, is now added to a 1200 rated strategy.

It is also very anticlimactic.

Lastly, I play with a friend and we want to play together. Unless we are really close to victory game is over after one of us dies. Even in random TMM, I don't like it if I still have a good chance to continue playing for 20 minutes when my ally dies.

@valki therefore you shouldn't invest (too many) resources into destroying the ACU, but instead of destroying his eco / base. Which is to me a lot more fun than sniping someone or being sniped.

same dudes who sit in discord training channel saying they have no apm

thinking randomly getting double your current unit count is not a big deal

stay classy faf

I'd just like to point out that Assassination is only a thing because it fits in with the silly sci-fi backstory of vanilla SupCom, that the only intelligent being on the field is a little guy operating the commander and once he dies that's it. Do we need to continue to suspend disbelief and play this way? Because full-share is just a band-aid to make losing a commander in Assassination not an automatic team loss. In reality, when my commander dies, I'm still alive, and still have the ability to make (incorrect) strategic decisions. Maybe Assassination as the standard condition in FAF needs to be reconsidered.

@jip said in Why does Fullshare exist?:

@valki therefore you shouldn't invest (too many) resources into destroying the ACU, but instead of destroying his eco / base. Which is to me a lot more fun than sniping someone or being sniped.

Thanks, good idea... I will also apply this when your victory depends on my decisions

@zappazapper said in Why does Fullshare exist?:

I'd just like to point out that Assassination is only a thing because it fits in with the silly sci-fi backstory of vanilla SupCom, that the only intelligent being on the field is a little guy operating the commander and once he dies that's it. Do we need to continue to suspend disbelief and play this way? Because full-share is just a band-aid to make losing a commander in Assassination not an automatic team loss. In reality, when my commander dies, I'm still alive, and still have the ability to make (incorrect) strategic decisions. Maybe Assassination as the standard condition in FAF needs to be reconsidered.

Very cool thought actually...

But I fear it would work only for T1 and T2, at T3 your commander in the mix of 10 SCU's 3 Exps and 60 Bricks doesn't matter that much.

@jip said in Why does Fullshare exist?:

@valki therefore you shouldn't invest (too many) resources into destroying the ACU, but instead of destroying his eco / base. Which is to me a lot more fun than sniping someone or being sniped.

But the consequence of understanding full share is not to stop sniping, its to snipe the higher rated player and auto-win if there is a meaningful rating-difference.

Even if it's the lower rated player getting sniped, and the better player gets his stuff, it's still often a good idea if you can do it without huge losses. Losing an acu is often devastating, usually either it's at the front where it was guarding something that can now be attacked, or it's in the base, and when it explodes it takes all of the buildpower with it. It also loses any mass and energy in storage, of course you can manually give it away before dying but a lot of players do not.

All in snipes on a weaker player are bad
Logical snipes on a weaker player are good

After an enemy ACU dies you have to take advantage of it before the opponent can stabilize. Full share increases the skill ceiling of snipes because you don't just have to plan the ACU snipe, you have to plan and be ready for the aftermath.

@zappazapper The commander dying resulting in your units dying makes perfect sense, not sure what you mean by silly sci-fi back story. You’re not alive after the ACU dies because in the game you are literally in the ACU. These units are massive in scale and there is a human piloting the ACU (or Cyborg or Seraphim), and if that dies there’s no longer a way to issue commands to the units. Considering QAI seems to be the only powerful enough general intelligence to possibly take the place of people in the game there’s not a backup if the living pilot dies. It also make sense in terms of just pure gameplay mechanics as well as other people have been arguing.

@exselsior It's pretty important as a safety measure that robot armies don't run wild autonomously and you would rather have robot armies self-destruct than allow your enemies to get control of them.