So, a thought occurred when watching some Day9 videos of Starcraft 2. Team monobattles are a silly thing that he does for fun with his viewers sometimes, and he'll have his viewers monobattle on ladder as well. What's a monobattle?
In a monobattle, you only build one military unit. Anything else that has a gun that isn't a building is not allowed to be built at all. You can still build workers, you can build one queen per hatchery, and you can build detection. That is all.
However, in AI War, you can't just do this and expect to get off your homeworld... so I've begun to think about rules to make this silly playstyle work in the environment of AI War.
1. Enable cheats, use the cheat "More More More" at the start of the game.
2. Set up your queue of your only unit for the entire game. This unit can be any military fleet ship, or starship, even bonus fleet ships. Once you've made the choice, you are not allowed to build any other fleet, star, or bonus ship whatsoever. For the purposes of this game, ships of different marks count as the same ship, meaning you can build mark I, II, III, and IV of the ship you've chosen straightaway.
3. You can't set up beachheads on attacks. Using turrets for defense is fine, but for offense it may compromise the point of monobattling. (which is to say, being silly)
4. I haven't decided if warheads count as military units.
5. Re: Spirecraft/Golems: If it is a direct attacker, you have to choose it as a monobattle unit to use it. Otherwise, if it's something like, say, a shieldbearer or Spirecraft Scout, you can use it just fine regardless.
6. Bonus ships used for utility (Munitions boosters, speed boosters, or whatever) need to be your monobattle unit for you to be allowed to use them. Spirecraft kinds of boosters are fine just because they're hard to earn. If you're effectively getting infinite of two fleet ship types, suddenly that becomes the optimal way to play.
7. Try not to abuse your infinite ship caps on turrets and fortresses.
8. Don't set up an infinite build of your monobattle unit, lest you magically run out of energy on the several-thousandth fighter you've finished.
These are really just some basic guidelines for how it would possibly work. Maybe you can add rules to it, like ARSs adding one ship to your monobattle limits, or whatnot. Maybe some AI War vets can help flesh out this idea more. It'll be fun to play around with, probably most fun in a co-op environment. What do you guys think? Self-imposed monobattles sound fun? What can we add to this?