Why does Fullshare exist?

@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.

It's just another playstyle. Some maps are more fun with full share, some are more fun without. Imagine gap with fullshare? Yikes. Imagine setons without? Nearly as bad.

Imo, full share's goal is to make the feeling of a game being a waste of time not happen. Imagine you're playing setons, you're doing fantastic on your side, but your teammate is an idiot and suicides somehow. No matter how well you play, your chances of coming back from completely losing one of the lanes is not that high. You either have to start going for snipes on your own, or attempt to win your lane real quick. And if that was possible why didn't you do that already?

Ofc you can reply and be like, well that's part of the game! Yea, no shit. But a lot of people obviously prefer still having a chance to win if someone on their team isn't doing so great. It makes certain maps more enjoyable and allows for different strategies.

For example, I love playing seton's mid. One of my favorite positions to play in FAF. That said, I'd hazard 70% of my games I'm presented with a situation where I can kill the enemy mid ACU. But then what? Do I have enough to keep pushing? Is my eco good enough to counter a now double eco'd player? Should I let the enemy mid live and just eco myself? Would I benefit the team more by switching to navy or rushing an experimental instead of sending a ton of mass to potentially donate down mid?

If you didn't use full share on setons, mid would go from a defensive/supportive position to probably the most important position because if you die, it's gonna be a pain in the ass for your team to stop what's coming. Navies will have to pause, air will have to switch to bombers/gunships. And at that point, now every lane is behind.

I'm not saying setons without fullshare can't be fun. It can be. But at least for me, it's more fun and the games vary a lot more with fullshare on.

Full share is a half way point between Supremacy (where you lose nothing from a snipe) and pure assassination/share until death (where you lose a lot from a snipe).

Killing a commander in Supremacy is almost always a bad idea. There is usually a softer target that you can kill instead. Meanwhile, killing a commander in pure assassination/share until death is always a good idea. Full share makes you think about whether or not killing a specific person is good or bad. It adds another layer of decision making.

Sniping in supremacy is still good early game at least. Later game not so much. The ACU is a very powerful unit, and if they’re using it in combat then you can often kill a lot of their units in the explosion as well.

I'd like to add that losing a commander means partially losing the most valuable resources a team can have: attention span and APM. If you're suddenly alone you need to focus on so many aspects that things just go dead wrong: a bomber you didn't see and took out your radar. A bad fight you accidentally took. A raiding party that you saw, but can not micro manage properly against. Your interceptors / ASF being engaged without you being aware for the first 10 - 15 seconds. So many things.

And whether or not it fits with lore is not too relevant to me in this case. I would always go for full-share option as otherwise the game is just over after a commander dies.

Just a weird idea. But what about percentage share.

When a player dies his team gets a % of the units still on the field. For example 75% stay alive, 25% die.

That way killing an opponent player does hurt the enemy team economically as well in full share.

What exactly will die is something to think about. As well as what to do with the wrecks.

Just a random idea.

What we need is a question on a FAF poll, but as I understand Morax is not in office yet.

@exselsior said in Why does Fullshare exist?:

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.

That's a common response on this forum, as if one person is telling another person how to play the game. I'm not telling you how to play. We're having a discussion, a debate. I'm making my arguments, you're making yours. Saying "just host Supremacy lobbies" isn't a compelling argument in this case. Of course I'm going to play how I want and you're going to play how you want. But you haven't convinced me that Assassination is a realistic gameplay mechanic in what might be the most realistic RTS ever created. That's all I'm saying. This game allows us to explore strategy and tactics that have been used all throughout human history, not just what might happen in a far-future universe. I don't think you can find a battle in human history where one guy died and the whole rest of the army went, "ok, fuck it" and went home. It's just not a realistic aspect of this game and I'm just suggesting that just playing Supremacy instead of Assassination with full-share makes for a more realistic battle experience. Of course, this game will generally be played in Assassination; the 1v1 games, which is kinda the only thing I play, are Assassination, and to be quite honest even when I play against AI, I play in Assassination, because it is fun, don't get me wrong. But it's not realistic and that's the reason why the OP even asked the question in the first place, and the answer for me is that for maps where full-share is the only way to play Assassination, like Seton's, for example, it might be a better solution to just play Supremacy. The commander is still a valuable unit, and it removes both the situation where a team has lost a quarter of its units and a quarter of its attention/APM, which as @Jip suggests is almost as likely to create an automatic win situation as losing the entire army.

oh well,it goes downside,pretty sure everyone figured out why it "does" exist,but this turns into some more arguments,locking for 1 day to remind what is being discussed there.

Fullshare was once the default and it should be again. Without it, too many games are decided by disconnects.

If you are dumb enough to kill the lowest rated enemies first in a fullshare game... well... you will tend to lose rating xD

If you join a Setons lobby and Full share is not enabled while not as such advertized in title... you can be pretty sure the host has a team full of buddies with some optimized strategy to whack 1-2 of your teammates...

" I don't think you can find a battle in human history where one guy died and the whole rest of the army went, "ok, fuck it" and went home. "

WW2 (hitler) and chess, many other wars and battles

I don't agree with your premise that full share = annihilation.

I would argue that the full share is a compromise between annihilation and assassination. therefore, it should exist as a legit option to play with.

also, the replay you shared doesn't prove anything. I don't have the statistics ready but I imagine that most of the time when an entire army goes poof! . the game collapses quickly after in favor of the team who scored the kill.

@zob said in Why does Fullshare exist?:

" I don't think you can find a battle in human history where one guy died and the whole rest of the army went, "ok, fuck it" and went home. "

WW2 (hitler) and chess, many other wars and battles

Hitler died April 30. Combat operations ceased on May 8, by order of the German High Command. There was still someone at the top issuing orders after he died.

Is that why fullshare exists?

@thewheelie Yes, Hitler died to give FAF fullshare.

Well there's a sentence I never thought I'd type.

EDIT: I think this thread has long since run its course and probably should just be closed.

Fullshare sucks, because it basically punishes snipes in many instances by giving the best player, furthest away, even more eco. And the way eco scales in this game is exponentially, not linearly. I don't tolerate it on anything other than Setons, where I suppose it kind of makes sense.