Co-op mode (not campaign)

[Saxxon]

Not sure if its enabled somewhere, but is there a way for 2 players to share the same units control. IE< Age of Empires you could have a 1 vs 1 game, with 2 players on each side. This means a division of labor is needed to not crash your economy etc. For instance my brother and I would play 2 other players in this coop mode, one of us was the Chief of Production in charge of resource gathering, upgrades etc so that a smooth economy resulted while the other was the Minister of War and took the fight to the enemy. As the game progressed the economist would have some defensive structures or units, but primarily the offensive player controlled the fighting units while the other player maximized the economy.

I saw there is a coop for campaigns, haven't tried that but seems that means a player controlling one of the allied factions.

Is what I described above possible, can it be made possible?

[Sheeo]

Yes, we have a mod for this actually! For the time being, it does not work with FAF however.

I made an announcement about it here.

It's pending integration with FAF.

[Saxxon]

That's awesome man. Appears it wasn't so easy to implement as I gather it was having to essentially backdoor it into a saved game (ie start, save and restart with mod).

[ZLO_RD]

There is a manual way to do this, but you need cooperation of all players and cheats on...

basicly all players ctrl+k (or better alt+del) except 2 players, one for each team

players that killed themself use cheats to contol army of only one player in their team

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57NQvlNfS40

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaYELwPLOSQ [rus]

[Sheeo]

That's awesome man. Appears it wasn't so easy to implement as I gather it was having to essentially backdoor it into a saved game (ie start, save and restart with mod).

That's not exactly how it works. The engine function that is hooked into just happens to be called LoadSavedGame -- but it could've been any function that was augmented.

It is esentially a 'backdoor', but it's as secure as any other game manipulation secure since it's only callable from the simulation layer.

[Vee]

Is there any news about when this will be integrated? Do you need testers? The way we currently play this with cheats works, but there are some disadvantages:

- It displays "player X is cheating" messages.
- It's hard to explain to people what they have to do, especially when they don't know about the cheat menu (delete acu -> switch to other player with cheats). If they are slow with deleting their acu then they overflow some eco to their ally. Also when people see a game without mods hosted, they often think it's a normal team game.
- ACU gate-in destroys reclaim.
- When you play with people you don't know, and you waited an hour to get a game, there is usually one guy who thinks it's funny to spawn 1000 awassas, or to make all units invincible, or to mess with enemy unit orders.
- Several people unfortunately start to cheat when they are losing, and I only noticed that by chance when I watched the replay (for example one guy duplicated his strat army from 4 to 8). There are many ways to subtly cheat that are very hard or impossible to catch (for example going into the opponents view to get intel).

[Sheeo]

Is there any news about when this will be integrated? Do you need testers? The way we currently play this with cheats works, but there are some disadvantages:

- It displays "player X is cheating" messages.
- It's hard to explain to people what they have to do, especially when they don't know about the cheat menu (delete acu -> switch to other player with cheats). If they are slow with deleting their acu then they overflow some eco to their ally. Also when people see a game without mods hosted, they often think it's a normal team game.
- ACU gate-in destroys reclaim.
- When you play with people you don't know, and you waited an hour to get a game, there is usually one guy who thinks it's funny to spawn 1000 awassas, or to make all units invincible, or to mess with enemy unit orders.
- Several people unfortunately start to cheat when they are losing, and I only noticed that by chance when I watched the replay (for example one guy duplicated his strat army from 4 to 8). There are many ways to subtly cheat that are very hard or impossible to catch (for example going into the opponents view to get intel).

I would like to get it integrated with 3642 -- the only big missing thing is lobby support for it, so you can set up coop-teams prior to the game.

[Resin_Smoker]

You do realize how awesome this will be for teaching newer players?

[Vee]

OMG our back island...O_O

@Sheeo: that's great news!!