Key personel in INF (Leaders, RTO, ....)

[Kossuth]

I got this cool idea when thinking about snipers and their usage in INF maps, and already posted this to the Sniper Camping thread, but I think it such an good idea, it deserves its own thread. So here it goes.

Let's think we want to play a game where two military platoons meet. We pick a nice map like Kosovo and start thinkin how we organize the game. Of course because Ut support only 16 players we take up two 8 man teams and give them both 2 reinforcements, so we rack up a total on 24 vs 24. Ok, that's good for normal game, but it doesn't feel very realistic, because in that sized organisations you really should have some leaders and radio operators.

So here's the beef. For both teams there is before game designated Platoon leader, Squad leader and radio operator. Then when one of your team member is killed and needs to respawn, the leaders come in play. You'd get one respawn per minute for every Squadleader or RTO you had in play and three for every Platoon leader. If the platoon leader gets killed he respawns as a normal guy, but the squad leader respawns as squadleader, simulating that you have three squads per platoon. Also we had to decide how many RTOs there'd be for platoon, or leave them out altogether. You could basically have one respawn per minute even if you don't have any leaders left, but the leaders could increase this speed.

The time amounts ofcourse has to be fine tuned to work well, suiting every map and team size, but I think the general idea would bring more tactical play to the game. You could even go farther with this one like having the reinforcement spawn to the closest respawn point the the leader whose respawn power is used. This would cause the leaders to think should they lead from front or the rear of the playing area.

So what you people think?

[Luminuis]

I've been asking for Squad Leaders since my 2nd or 3rd post here!

[JaFO]

Just because you don't see many 16+ player - servers, that doesn't mean it's impossible for UT.

I know that for the Unreal Fortress mod are a few.
I've seen a 20-player server in the server-browser.

It's more a limit on the bandwidth available and the limited spawn-points in most maps, then any engine-related limit I think.

// ---
As for your idea that the time it takes to respawn should depend on the nr. of active leaders/commanders.
I think that's a great idea.
Especially if you respawn in waves of 2 or more players, instead of 1 by one.

[perrin98]

BUMP

[HanD_of_DarKNesS]

UT allows up to 32 players per game. The reason you don't normally see this is because most games and mods use the UT player setup, meaning that there is a maximum of 8 players per team, and in DOM games 4 teams can be setup.

As JaFo mentioned, I'm pretty sure these player limits are simply imposed by UT, and aren't limitations of the engine. With some recoding I think that a Mod team could raise the limit of players allowed in a game anywhere up to 32 (though I'm no programmer). Again, bandwidth limitations are the biggest concern, though I've never really experienced much server lag in INF.

----------

As far as the squad leader role and such. The only real problem with that is that people will fight over having the commanding positions and such.

However, I think the team said something a while back regarding wave-respawn: where dead players would all respawn at once in predetermined intervals, instead of spawning right after dieing. This would mimic reinforcements and thus emphasize more team gameplay.

[LordKhaine]

I've seen a 32 player UT server running CTF. As said before, its bandwidth that restricts the players on servers, not the engine.

[Kossuth]

Ok, the amount of players Ut supports wasn't the main point of my thread, so we can drop it from here, right fellas?

But what if we first simplified the system so that every squad of 6 to 8 players, gets a randomized squadleader, who has the effect of boosting the team spawn speed by pre determined amount. So when he gets shot, he goes to the end of respawn line, and has to wait for the respawns to catch up with slow pace until he gets back to game. In the case he gets shot enough times, then the team has to get by with the slow spawning rate.

If we couple that with the idea of pair-spawning, we could get a nice basic version of this leadership system. So all you coder-gods out there, how hard this would be to implement in a mutator. I don't know what the mutator system can do in UT, but I would really wan't to test this kind of leadership-mutator.

[The_Fur]

Don't like random assignment of squad leaders, because that would put you in situations like: 1337 4$$|\/|4$t3r being your squad leader, he runs off and get's riddled within the 1st 10 seconds every time he spawns now the team is doomed because some braindead rambo wannabee feels like ****ing over his team.

[Excelsiore]

Just like real life fur :=)

Some sort of key personel system would be fun.