Ancient Shadows - Coop only? (Answer: No! Everything works in solo also)

[Tyakraman]

Hey there,

well, the title says it all: I was wondering, if the Ancient Shadows addon is coop only. Of course, as an AI War fan, I've bought it as soon as I saw it was available, and now I'm sitting in the ingame lobby, eager to try it out, but getting the message

"Host can not start the game until at least one player selects the "Normal" role".

Is that a work-in-progress thing? Will I be able to play it in singleplayer later?

Thanks in advance,
Tyak

[tigersfan]

You can play it in single player now. You need to set player 1 to "normal" and then player two can be set to "Reserved for Champion" then you play both parts.

[Wingflier]

Arcen you need to make this clearer.  Sticky this solution or something.

To use the new "Champions" in single player, start a game as a "Normal" role, then press ESC, go to "Manage Players", and add a reserved slot for "Champion".

[Diazo]

Because having the Champion destroyed is not a lose condition, there still has to be at least one human Home Command Station in the game to give a losing condition to the players.

However after that you can have as many Champion players as you wish, how's a game with one 'Normal' player and 7 'Champion' players going to work? (Hint: It'll be epic regardless of what happens.)

D.

[TechSY730]

Since this seems to be a big potential stumbling block, why not automate it?
If there is only one human player (connected, reserved, or otherwise), and that human player has chosen the Champion type, then choose the next available open slot (should be player 2 in this case), make it a Champion player (that is reserved), make the human player a Normal player, and then you basically have fulfilled what people are expecting.
A few wrinkles I can see: player color (as the Champion will be under a different player, an automatically set up one, who knows what color will be chosen for that second "player"?), player name (Who is this "???" in player 2 slot?), and player count (why is it listing two human players when I am the only one playing?)


This would only fire when there is one human player in the setup screen. If there is more than one player (again, connected, reserved, or otherwise), you need to start caring about player assignments and details, and thus you must figure out who will be the "regular" player in this case.

[Tyakraman]

Wow! Thank you guys for that lightning fast response!
Although its around midnight here, I'm off to play now!
Thanks!

[relmz32]

Arcen you need to make this clearer.  Sticky this solution or something.

To use the new "Champions" in single player, start a game as a "Normal" role, then press ESC, go to "Manage Players", and add a reserved slot for "Champion".

You can also do it from the game lobby screen as well.
In game as a single player, you should be able to control the champ naturally, however, i have shared team control on normally, so if you have trouble issuing orders, try turning the shared team control option on.

I am so excited. This thing stomps on fools. Now i know how the Hybrids feel. <3

[keith.lamothe]

One alternative is to have player slot 2 default to a champion so people don't miss the option, but I forsee many bug reports of "what's this strange ship I didn't ask for?"

[Martyn van Buren]

How about renaming reserved for champion to something like "ally-controlled champion"?

[keith.lamothe]

How about renaming reserved for champion to something like "ally-controlled champion"?

I thought about something like that except it's not ally-controlled, it's you-controlled

I think the main difficulty at this stage is people are not realizing that the "reserved for champion" option even exists.

[Martyn van Buren]

Oh gosh this looks really confusing; I just installed and even having read the explanation it took me a bit to work it out.  I think adding a first-load popup would be a good idea if the interface is like this.  Otherwise, how about just adding a new role or a button somewhere that says "Single-player with champion" and letting it give you the proper settings?

[keith.lamothe]

Oh gosh this looks really confusing; I just installed and even having read the explanation it took me a bit to work it out.  I think adding a first-load popup would be a good idea if the interface is like this.  Otherwise, how about just adding a new role or a button somewhere that says "Single-player with champion" and letting it give you the proper settings?

Are you on 5.052 or 5.053?

[Martyn van Buren]

5.053; Open (Add Champion) doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

[Kemeno]

Why not just put a giant button someplace that says CLICK HERE TO ADD A CHAMPION, with a helpful tooltip explaining what it does, and maybe a (CURRENT CHAMPION COUNT: X) right below it? This could be somewhere in one of the setup panes at the bottom, or maybe even in a new pane (CHAMPIONS). It would just manipulate the player fields, yeah, but it would make the functionality a lot more obvious.

[keith.lamothe]

Why not just put a giant button someplace that says CLICK HERE TO ADD A CHAMPION, with a helpful tooltip explaining what it does, and maybe a (CURRENT CHAMPION COUNT: X) right below it? This could be somewhere in one of the setup panes at the bottom, or maybe even in a new pane (CHAMPIONS). It would just manipulate the player fields, yeah, but it would make the functionality a lot more obvious.

I thought about it but there's another approach I'm going to try since there are post-lobby problems with the current setup too.