Globulation2

This is an obvious one. Every time a game is started, each players starting location should be random. This is what they do in all commercial RTS games and prevents players from knowing exactly where his opponents are.

hi

i put it here:
https://savannah.nongnu.org/bugs/index.php?24098
right now, color=position. don't know if this can easily be broken.

greetings, giszmo

I suppose because the colors are already made to decide the starting location, implementing random starting locations is not as straightforward as it may have seemed (but still not too hard). So how about letting players set random colours? You will be given a random colour, and the colour you get will determine your starting location. This way you won't have to remove any features or code and it builds on top of the current system.

that would be alot better then what we have now. The only problem, which is really minor, is once a enemy unit walks by, the player will know exactly where he is based on the color of the unit.

That's acceptable... you'll find out eventually anyway. And in this game it's not as easy as most other RTS games to send out a scouting unit as you can't guarantee the outcome of trying it here.

In reality, this is actually more of a challenge for the user interface then it is for the code. The code is written such that team=color, and this isn't easy to break. The user-interface, like when selecting options for a custom game, is done the same way. If we decoupled team from color, each "team" has basically three variables, the team number, the team color, and the alliance-number. If we adopt a user interface similar to most RTS's, we lose the ability to easily put an AI on the same team as the human, which is something you can do now very easily.

PS:
The alliance number is a new feature in Beta 4, it allows you to ally yourself with other players/AI's before the game starts. This is a common feature in most RTS's.