Inventive Dingo forums

I'm attempting to make a set of singleplayer maps for mayhem.  Its turning out to be pretty hard to do considereing that I have no way of controlling spawn points.  I know I've requested some better control for that before, but I have a slightly different suggestion to ammend to it.  Why not have a way of putting the planet under a player's control at the start of the match?  Basically a field on the map called "initialcontroller=" would be in the map file.  Then a color or number representing the color would be filled in.  A 0 defaults to neutral, 1 to blue, 2 to red, ect.  Obviously modding the number by 9 would be required (to deal with numbers greater than 8).  If there are enough players in the game, either an AI player is added, or the planet defaults back to neutral. (I'm not sure which would be easier to implement).

Part of the reason I'm stressing single player is that i've heard some complaints about the game not having enough replay value when there aren't pleople online. I know that your working on upgrading the AI, but something like this would allow for some more interesting maps and games offline.

EDIT: I was thinking about intereaction between this and the start priority fields.  Start priority would have to override this, to prevent errors if all the planets were given to one player.  It would be interesting to have a map where one player controls almost all the planets with very low production values, and have the other 7 players start at different areas of the map with high production values.  This would also allow for maps with systems of planets controlled by different players in which the beginning game was skipped, and for siege designs.

Something very similar is on the books already. :)  Scenario-style functionality, which would incorporate this, is listed as the next-most-important "big" feature after revamped AI. There's plenty of smaller stuff to do in between of course.

I need a cloning machine so I can make copies of myself and get everything done faster. :P

lol I'd offer to help if I knew D =D.
Just curious, will the senario functionality be single player only, or both single and multiplayer?

I imagine both, since it'd just be built into the custom map parsing routine.

Coolness!