Possibly reducing the lengthiness of large games?

[MushrooMars]

So, I was thinking a while back that one of the reasons I don't play FAF more is because of all of the Seton's Clutch games. They are so big, long, and drawn out that it really isn't fun to see one through to the end. I mean yeah, you have your initial clashes, hovertanks taking out naval factories, submarines securing naval superiority, T1 war at the center of the map, but past that it gets rather boring.

One player secures air superiority and begins on some sort of long, spindly plan to kill another player with bombers, air scouts, a naval force, tactical missiles, stealth and cloaking, teleportation and waffles. One player is left entirely useless because he gets bored of constantly micromanaging his economy, and just ends up sitting in his base throwing experimentals at the enemy team, and eventually gets sniped because the other guys is just like "I'M TIRED OF YOUR SHIT". Both of the naval players end up vying for naval control in a war that is actually somewhat interesting, until one secures naval superiority and just throws Seraphim Cruisers/UEF Cruisers/Aeon Tacmissile boats/Battuuuuships at the other guy until something blows up. And all of this takes anywhere from 1-4 hours.

And Seton's isn't the only map like this! Hell, any map bigger than Fields of Isis has a bad tendency to turn into an Experimental/Nuclear slug-fest, where whoever can spam the most extreme-range units wins. Even Isis does this some time.

I played a map a while back, called Radiator or some such. It was ridiculously large and had next to no mass aside from that which you could find in-base. There were 8 mass extractors not inside a player's base, on the entire map. Early-game snipes were impossible because by the time you could get a single T1 Bomber to the enemy base he already had 10 ASF and a SAM turret. And at the beginning of the game, I was sitting there with by far the best economy, best defense and best potential to win the game and I just thought "This will be fucking boring, I have dinner waiting," and left. I came back 4 HOURS LATER and then the scorecard popped up in chat. That game was a grueling ~3.5 hours of teams chucking swarms of hundreds of ASF at eachother, Experimental armies with such quantity that a T1 Land Spam army would cry in shame, and artillery. And I'm guessing the sim speed was something like -5, so the game probably only lasted 1 hour in-game time.

I guess my point in posting this is so that we might come up with an idea to make late-game less boring and more epic-battley. It's just so tedious that most players will only play 2v2 games at the maximum.

[Yama_Dharma]

U like fast games - play 2x2 or play smaller maps.

U like long games - play seton or omg what u want.

Why on Earth would u suggest to other ppl how to play? They play seton - they like it.

[Ze_PilOt]

Some people like these games.

It's also more a map problem than a balance/game problem.

[stalewee]

I find that most seton's games are done within 45 minutes. The longest I've ever played was under 90 minutes.

[ColonelSheppard]

ingame time maybe xD

[MushrooMars]

Yeah, it wasn't clear in my OP, but this rant is more about playtime than anything. I mean seriously, who has the time to sit down at a computer for 2 or 3 hours? I'm just wondering if there are possible ways to increase sim speed aside from "buy a new computer, n00b."

[Wakke]

I seem to recall a mod that allowed to save multiplayer games?

[Raghar]

You can't have 10 ASF and T3 AA on a map that has 8 mx outside of base, as long as base has 4 or less, you'd be have hard pressed to have one T2 mobile AA. (Do you remember that famous video when Voodoo loaded himself into T2 transport and combombed enemy base, because his opponent by an accident build a CG just before Voodoo arrived. That happened much faster than his opponent would be able to even get T3) Few mass extractors are actually encouraging tactical gameplay.

As for your question. Yes get source files and modify it to use better and faster algorithms, and remove LUA processing. It will be MUCH faster, but you'd need to force the original developer to release it as a noncommercial freeware and release source files for both supcom FA and supcom 2 as well.

[FunkOff]

I seem to recall a mod that allowed to save multiplayer games?

Sadly, it is not very user friendly... and there's the problem of getting the same exactly 8 people showing up. (Although this is not required... 8 new players can resume the game of 8 other previous players, hah!)

[MushrooMars]

As for your question. Yes get source files and modify it to use better and faster algorithms, and remove LUA processing. It will be MUCH faster, but you'd need to force the original developer to release it as a noncommercial freeware and release source files for both supcom FA and supcom 2 as well.

Umm, yeah, totally. I'll just walk up to GPG in their economically crippled state,

"Hey guys! How's it goin'? So, I was wondering if you could like, give me the full source code for every iteration of the moho engine on like a flash drive or something? I don't have any experience or anything, I just wanted to make a few changes which I think would be beneficial to your outdated game which doesn't make any money for you anymore. It's not like you're using the moho engine anymore, right?"