We tested quite often with shared units and shared resources now, and I have some questions/concerns about it:
Two resource displays are complicated and there is not enough place on the display in my opinion. For example the network status is unreadable using it and I am sure it will break many HUDs.
Shared units mode:
1) Why are there 2 resource displays in shared units mode? Is it not enough to see only one showing the resources of the first units faction which is currently selected?
I know you always see your own resources by this, but I personally think thats not needed.
My suggestion would be to only show one resource bar and if its not your faction, underlay the resource display with team color, so its very obvious its not yours.
2) Why are there displayed all resources? I would prefer to only show the resources of the faction. This means if you have a non-food faction, there is no food display. Maybe if we stay with two displays just leave some space.
( as I said above only one display would just render the resources as they are. )
Shared resources:
3) I see no reason to see my own resources. It's all calculated/played on a team basis, so I see no need to display my own resources. ( just for debugging )
4) maybe resources can be shown based on the first selected units faction as I said above so not all resources are shown at once typically.
Bug?:
I think there is a bug with calculating the team food, if its like this we should split this to the bugs section:
Somehow the calculation in an update is done like this: first calculate food for each faction, then sum it all up to get the teams food state.( which is used to calculate the damage if negative )
but when a factions personal food state is calculated there must be a place where the food is set to 0 although it should be negative for the overall team calculation. But something i wrong there, because if you have many hungry units and they starve, suddenly the team has nearly no more negative food and can survive much longer than it should.
Cheat possible?:
Is it possible that someone with a modified client can control units of others factions now? This case should result in a "out of sync" or a proper error message.
update: I added some debug and I think he does not cheat.
Bug with resource calculation ?
This is just a wild guess, but using the current beta/git version the CPU player plays a lot better than before and has tons of units. Maybe it is just that we played bad very often, but I started to think about it what could cause this. One thing that I could imagine is that the CPU-players maybe work with negative resources now somehow ? This would explain a stronger CPU. But as I said its a wild guess....
