Should all of a player's units including the ACU be transferred when a player drops/quits?

Nice idea @Penguin_ and @ThomasHiatt - but how does it work in practice?

Say we have a system that is able to keep track of which units belong to which ACU. And that the information is restored after a player leaves and the army is gifted to another player. We'll assume that your army is Seraphim, and that the 'gifted' army is UEF. Then we end up with a few (unnatural) choices:

• (1) When is a unit still considered linked to the UEF ACU? As an example, when I construct an extractor with UEF engineers is that structure linked to the UEF ACU, or linked to the Seraphim ACU? And what if I upgrade an extractor or an HQ, is that still linked to the UEF ACU or is it now linked to the Seraphim ACU? What about units made from factories?
• (2) Say an UEF unit can't be upgraded - it therefore remains 'linked' to the UEF ACU because you can't apply any of (1). Would you reclaim these units, and rebuild them with Seraphim engineers? Why would you not do that?
• (3) And last - how does it work with UEF units that are shared manually? Do those transfer suddenly too, or are those destroyed too when the UEF ACU is destroyed? And then you end up with the choices regarding (1) - when are they still 'linked'?

I can likely continue as I keep pondering about edge cases. Let alone when your army is not Seraphim but Cybran, and the 'gifted' army is not UEF but Cybran too! Previously you could argue that it is simple: the UEF tech is linked to the UEF ACU. But now it is undecipherable after a few minutes of playing what unit belongs to what ACU.

And all of this ignores that the system to keep track of which unit belonging to which ACU is not trivial to implement to begin with, let alone that it introduces an overhead to every single unit in the game. Even if it is just one field.

I like the idea for full share games but am less sure for no share games. practically Im assuming you would have it work similarly to gifting units to a teammate where if you snipe the gifted ACU only units gifted that were originally built by that ACUs old player would die.

In terms of Jip’s overhead concerns if done this way it would only mean 1 variable for only the gifted units (not all units).

However from the opposing team’s perspective it wont be clear what the impact of an ACU snipe would be.

Id like it as the default for full share (including TMM), but as a (ranked) non-default option for non-full share

@maudlin27 said in Should all of a player's units including the ACU be transferred when a player drops/quits?:

However from the opposing team’s perspective it wont be clear what the impact of an ACU snipe would be.

That is another edge case , make that number (4)

Don’t know how several OCs are going to interact with one another based on a singular e bar. Phim SACUs got a problem of bugging out with it already.

This is also going to lead to fairly large balance concerns if the bubble shield rework happens and you can just walk a UEF ACU around with things like an Aeon ACU.

Actually it brings up the issue of your ACU being a lot of your early mass and e storage, you could probably hardlock yourself accidentally by doing this.

Ah, you also just totally destroyed matchmaker ability to prevent slot imbalance and significantly buffed premade teams. Best player gets most important slot at game start with pretty much zero loss in efficiency.

All the edge cases exist already with the gifting of units and engineers in share until death games, I assume they would be handled in the same ways. It is OP and abuseable already but nobody bothers with it.

@Jip

The regular units would be handled just like they would if they were gifted manually. To address your examples:

(1) When is a unit still considered linked to the UEF ACU? As an example, when I construct an extractor with UEF engineers is that structure linked to the UEF ACU, or linked to the Seraphim ACU? And what if I upgrade an extractor or an HQ, is that still linked to the UEF ACU or is it now linked to the Seraphim ACU? What about units made from factories?

It would function the same way as manually gifted units function with respect to ACU death. The extractor would be linked to the Seraphim ACU. The upgraded structure would be linked to the Seraphim ACU. If you owned the factory when it made a unit, that unit would be linked to you.

(2) Say an UEF unit can't be upgraded - it therefore remains 'linked' to the UEF ACU because you can't apply any of (1). Would you reclaim these units, and rebuild them with Seraphim engineers? Why would you not do that?

You could do that, but it would probably not be worth it in most cases because it would probably be inefficient and unnecessary in general. I have experienced many no share games where 1 player suddenly has to go or doesn't want to play any longer and gifts all of their units except their ACU and just parks the ACU in a relatively safe place and goes AFK. I don't recall ever seeing a player decide to go and reclaim and rebuild some of their newly gifted units in that situation for the purpose of them not dying if that player's ACU dies. Besdies, if that player's ACU dies, the wrecks would still be reclaimable anyway.

(3) And last - how does it work with UEF units that are shared manually? Do those transfer suddenly too, or are those destroyed too when the UEF ACU is destroyed? And then you end up with the choices regarding (1) - when are they still 'linked'?

It works like one should expect. If a UEF player gifts some units to another player, those units are still linked to the UEF ACU but are controlled by the player they were gifted to, even if the UEF player drops. If the UEF player drops and another player ends up controlling it, the units gifted from the UEF player are still linked to the UEF ACU. They would not suddenly be destroyed unless the UEF ACU was killed or they died normally (ieL by being shot to 0 hp).

(4) However from the opposing team’s perspective it wont be clear what the impact of an ACU snipe would be.

By that logic, one could say that it's already not clear what the impact of an ACU snipe will be since players can gift units to each other. This wouldn't be a new problem. Heck, I've seen no share games where at the beginning of a game, a player gifts everything they make to another player right after they make it and then goes rambo with their ACU after the first minute or so.

ftxcommando said in Should all of a player's units including the ACU be transferred when a player drops/quits?:

Actually it brings up the issue of your ACU being a lot of your early mass and e storage, you could probably hardlock yourself accidentally by doing this.

Ah, you also just totally destroyed matchmaker ability to prevent slot imbalance and significantly buffed premade teams. Best player gets most important slot at game start with pretty much zero loss in efficiency.

I want to clarify that these potential issues voiced by FTX would not be with what I suggested in the OP. While the ability to manually gift ACU's is an interesting idea worth discussing and others have mentioned it in this thread, it was not part of my OP because it would add some additional concerns. That could be discussed further in another thread.

Regardless, with my suggestion, it would still technically be possible for a 2k player to team up with 3 500's and get them all to leave the game at the start so that the 2k player can control all 4 bases and all 4 ACU's. That is not so different from what they could do now with full share, having the 500's gift all their units to the 2k and then them just micro'ing their ACU's the whole game while the 2k does everything else. One could also argue that both of those things are cheaty, but regardless, my point is that my idea wouldn't really add much to that sort of attempted abuse of the system, while it would help a lot in many cases, as I outlined in the OP.

I don’t really care about the situation of a 2000 playing with 500s, I’ve been arguing for those games to be automatically unranked for years. I’m concerned that Yudi will be forever asking or asked to take rock or air on sentons because everybody knows it’s always the correct move and the only thing stopping it is house rules for everyone to intentionally play the worse move.

The change essentially removes the whole point of randomized slots and that removed variation in gameplay.

My proposed change doesn't do that though. It doesn't enable people to manually gift their ACU's. ACU's would only be transferred upon a player disconnecting from the game, whether via drop or quit. Thereby, it wouldn't enable people to switch slots more than they already can. It doesn't make Yudi any more able to take the rock or air slot beyond him being able to keep and control the other person's ACU if that person literally leaves the game. Yudi can be gifted the base either way. If you want to argue that Yudi being able to control the other player's ACU is more valuable than that player being able to do anything in the game and look at the map to notice things for the team and such, you can make that argument, but I'm inclined to believe that would be a bad trade compared to just gifting the base to Yudi manually and having that player still in the game and able to micro a small number of units and notice things and also be a backup player if Yudi happens to get sniped.

If it only happens on disconnect then I don’t have any problems.

Agree with post. It would be nice to just not lose a unit to the commander due to the loss of a player on disconnects. It would be nice to introduce a trend where the ally commander will stay alive and also go into control. Because after the explosion of his coma, you lose the necessary combat units (if any). Also, the value of the bmk is such that in team games, you have the power to stop anything within the limits of balance. Therefore, the situation will be excluded where, after the explosion of the commander, 150 tanks will simply go to your base to kill everything that is possible. Thanks to this, you can also play quite greedily from both sides, making the trajectories of lumps cut to units, which will allow a stronger player to play from the skill, and not aimlessly spend all your advantage to save the rest of the claw-handed territories and calmly deal with t2-t3 mexs.