Why does Fullshare exist?

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.

@arma473 Yes exactly. Like I said in my first post on here I don’t mean to bring lore into it too much, but when something makes sense both from the game lore perspective, regardless of what you think about the lore, and from the gameplay perspective at the same time it’s hard to argue against.

In particular, if you have an awkward makeshift alliance of a Seraphim, Aeon, Cybran and UEF ACU fighting another awkward makeshift Alliance... then you really don't want your units to fall under the control of someone who could be your enemy tomorrow.

Full share is another type of game play.
I don't like it, but you can choose to play these, or not

@biass said in Why does Fullshare exist?:

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 assume this is directed at me and trust me I don't take it lightly, I understand it is a huge deal-just not a big a deal as losing a position and I think you would agree with that

I just want to say thanks to everyone who commented here, from those that examined the lore aspect of it and the top players and admins throwing in their view as well, its all good stuff

@zlo said in Why does Fullshare exist?:

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

As the highest rated player in this thread (I think) what do you do to mitigate air snipes? Beyond just achieving air control is there anything a player can do to prevent these kinds of snipes? or is the mass cost in flak and SAMS too much in comparison to ASAF and Strat bombers? Air snipes are frustrating to be sure and deadly quick but shouldn't the object be to encourage better gameplay?

As to your 3rd point, aren't the upset victories just that more thrilling? the second replay I linked is one of my own games in which we lost a player and came back for the win-how often does this occur in high ranked play? And yes-I agree with the suicide of coms being antithetical to the core game play, that's kind of what I was getting at

Thanks in advance for your insights

I’m certainly not ZLO but I can answer how to deal with air snipes.

First and foremost, scout. Know when the enemy has t2 air, and also try to know what the first few units they’re making from there. If it’s gunships/mercies/corsairs then plan accordingly.

Secondly, get flak. In basically any game your ACU is towards the front a flak should be one of the first t2 units you make.

Shields are important. UEF and Aeon should get mobile shields on their com. Sera coms can’t get mobile shields until t3, but you can get nano and t2 to get more health and more regen to survive.

If you’re Cybran you need to be especially careful, you have no shields and the weakest ACU. You probably need to stop using the ACU as much as the game starts getting into the t3 stage unless you have really good intel.

As the game progresses your com should be in your main base with multiple shields. Intel and not losing air control is the key. If air control is gone then sams. Have very good Omni coverage vs Cybran for their stealth strats, and again be constantly scouting.

in my opinion upset victories are harder in higher ranks because stronger players are better at not losing from a winning position. I don’t often see top 10 players throw a game they’re winning hard. Granted, upsets still happen but probably less often than lower ranked games. It has been a long time since I’ve played low rated games though so idk for sure. Full share and non full share both allow for different kinds of upsets. They’re probably more common in full share games honestly.

@exselsior said in Why does Fullshare exist?:

@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.

k, you said you didn't know what i meant by silly back-story, and then literally quoted the back-story.

There isn't a human piloting the ACU. It's a game. The human piloting my ACU is sitting in a chair in my living room, and when my commander dies, I don't die. I'm absolutely still able to issue commands to my units, and because my units aren't actually being controlled by the commander (they're being controlled by my Windows 10 PC), there is no actual need for the commander to be alive for the units to continue operating. The only way that the units need the commander to continue operating is if we all suspend disbelief and pretend that there's a leprechaun in the commander, which is controlling all the units. That's one of 3 game modes available. It's fun, don't get me wrong. But we're talking about full-share, and I've always thought that full-share was a piss-poor band-aid for preventing a automatic loss to a team that loses a commander, when we could all just stop pretending that the units are being controlled by the commander, and play the game because it's a great RTS and not because of the relatively silly back-story. I love the mechanics of this game. I think the sci-fi back-story is cheap and boring. For all I care, the setting could be medieval Europe or WW2 as opposed to the far-future galaxy if the gameplay mechanics were the same.

Also as note: Every CT-Styled RTS Team Games are primarily played Fullshare and ADDITIONALLY pre-FAF share until desth meant if you donated your base before you “died” the other players kept the goods. Meaning this was functionally fullshare

@zappazapper I mean the back story isn't that silly compared to some other games where the lore isn't the main point, it makes some sense and is more or less internally consistent. At least kinda. Is it the best backstory and lore ever? No. That's but that's what I mean, it's simply not silly or completely ignorable that in this fictional world there's a human or other intelligent life piloting the ACU.

Your comment about it being a game and the human piloting the ACU is you in your chair on your PC is being deliberately obtuse. Should you never die in Dark Souls because you, the person in the chair, are still alive and not undead? What kind of logic is that?

Full share fundamentally makes sense, from both in game universe logic and gameplay perspectives. It's also consistent with every other Chris Taylor RTS like @Dragun101 said. If you don't care about that, then cool, gameplay is also far more important to me than in game universe logic anyway so I'm with you there. This has been discussed to death, but losing an ACU in full share is still a very big deal unless there's a huge rating discrepancy and it's much, much better than games where you have one teammate do something dumb means you insta lose. That would be bad, and would result in bad gameplay. Taking away full share from TMM for example or anything else really leads to boring turtle gameplay. If you don't want full share and aren't playing TMM then cool, go host some lobbies with the settings you want.

If you have an issue with assassination then host supremacy lobbies. That sounds tedious to play in my mind, but more power to you. It's a game at the end of the day, do what makes you happy. Removing assassination from the default would make most people unhappy and there aren't really any legitimate arguments for not having it as the default.