I think they should just be made inefficient to the point where it's the absolute last resort. No more mass points. No more room for mass fabs and pgens. Time for RAS SCUs.

Basically remove them from the game in practical terms, but keep them around for the one scenario where they make sense.

@axel12 That doesn't make much sense, though. We're using the steam accounts to verify ownership of the game, not as a unique thing to identify people with.

Besides, if that was really an issue, then ban the steam account from FAF at the same time as banning the FAF account.

There's no reason to penalize a legitimate mistake just for that.

I was under the impression that the people complaining about change are mostly talking about gameplay balance?

As I've said many times when this sort of thing comes up, it's far more realistic (and even then, not that realistic) to get all that crowdfunding money and spend it on developers and artists to reimplement FAF in SpringRTS. Rather than trying to squeeze blood from rocks at S-E or any other publisher.

SpringRTS is already 80% of the way there, so it's the closest thing to FAF that's fully under community control. Perhaps FAF's "steam copy required" thing could be used so that the resulting game just rips its assets from an installed legal copy of the game. That would maybe provide a tiny bit of legal cover to re-use official assets.

Otherwise the typical SpringRTS thing of reimplementing all units models and renaming them would be required...

1. Is your complaint about the siege tank based purely on the name "Siege Tank"? Or its actual intended role?

There's no such thing as a siege tank in real life (apart from the SC2 unit), but another thing with a similar name is a "siege engine", which is stuff like catapults and things. Basically glass cannon artillery...

The separation of UI and Sim layers for modding is a key feature of SupCom and one of the things that makes its UI so advanced. People should be free to use whatever UI mods they think will improve their experience or effectiveness, including coding their own private UI mods.

UI mods should be allowed and part of the game, and if some people are losing an advantage by not using them, then the problem is education, not UI mods.

And if some people know how about the existence of UI mods, but are unwilling or unable to use them effectively, then that's a player skill problem, not UI mods.

We can only decide that UI mods are a problem when their use is universal and we see that the entire game devolves into some unwanted state. That's the time when access to certain functions/data should be closed off to the UI layer, or certain UI mods banned, etc.

@Brutus5000 Thanks for your thoughts!

Maybe it could be useless but awesome. Like:

• Make the model fairly large.
• Make it extremely slow.
• Cannot be loaded on a transport.
• Huge damage in a large AOE.
• Impractically expensive. Low HP. Does friendly fire.

So pretty useless... but the ultimate lulz if you manage to use it successfully.

I was thinking about viable models for company -> community handovers, and this is the only community I'm involved in, in this situation. So I wanted to get the opinions of the contributors of FAF.

Let's say one day Square Enix (or whoever owns SupCom) came along and said, "Hey guys, we'd like to grant you source code access, under certain conditions:"

• FAF project (and other approved projects) granted a perpetual license to use SupCom & FA source code and assets for noncommercial purposes. (The license can be revoked under certain conditions, eg. if S-E deems that a project is misbehaving and damaging the brand.)

• HOWEVER, here's the catch: Square Enix must be given a perpetual license to use all contributions to FAF for any purpose it wants, without credit or payment.

So basically the company will hand over the source code, but in return it can take any code, assets, etc created for the project, and use it for their own profit or whatever.

Let's pretend that FAF takes a vote and decides to accept the deal. As a contributor, would you be willing to continue to contribute under such an arrangement? Or would you leave the project?

@Brutus5000 I guess since we have sigs people can put their old forum name in their sig if they want to preserve that identity...

Is there any way to get a field in the profile where people can enter their old forum name, and it will display when they post next to their current name or something?

Maybe I'm just a forum lurker so I never see their ingame names, but it's confusing now that certain people have different names...