Over the past year or so, we've added a lot of lobby options to the Phantom-X mod on FAF. For those of you who want to host your own Phantom games, I figured I'd take a few minutes and explain some of these new options and how to use them.
Meteors
As I've told some of you before, I don't really like reveal. Sure, it's okay for phantom beginners, but it removes a key part of what makes a phantom interesting. It also forces the phantoms to adopt a single play style (rush, rush, rush), as that's really the only way to win. If you've played Phantom-N, you remember the days when there was no reveal option. One had to rely solely on their skills to detect phantoms. Those games could be quite suspenseful as you never could really trust anyone completely. Unfortunately, this also led to the occasional game of "simcity" with lots of turtling, negative sim speeds, and no end in sight. With that in mind, I created the meteors option. It works like this:
- The game starts with a set amount of time (as configured by the host) on the "meteor clock". The initial amount of time is controlled by the "Initial Meteor Delay" lobby option.
- If the meteor clock goes below zero, meteors (Mavor shells) will start falling from the sky. The meteors will increase in frequency as long as the clock stays below zero.
- To add time back to the meteor clock, a player must be killed. The amount of time added back to the clock is also configured by the host under the "Subsequent Meteor Delay" lobby option.
- Meteors can also be delayed indefinitely by war, as long as a sufficient amount of mass is being destroyed. The "Mass destroyed percentage" indicator displays the amount of mass destroyed divided by the amount of mass produced for the last two minutes. As long as the indicator is green or yellow, the meteors will not start.
- If only two players remain, the meteors stop (at that point, the players should be fighting anyway).
Keep in mind, this is still a work in progress, and that some players don't like playing with meteors. Also, meteors only work on certain maps (meteors are created using the neutral civilian army, but some maps do not have that army). The option will indicate an "incompatible map" if the selected map will not work with meteors. FYI, it's REALLY easy to make a map compatible with this option.
No Reveal After Death
This option does pretty much what you'd think. When enabled, the game does not reveal a player's affiliation (phantom or innocent) when they die. This was created as a hardcore phantom option and was intended for use in no reveal games. As in normal phantom, the game will end when all phantoms are dead or when the last phantom kills off the other remaining player. As you might expect, this option can lead to some pretty paranoid game play.
If you have questions, comments, or if you'd like to see information about additional lobby options, please let me know.
