AI War + Expansions "Wild Idea"

[Spikey00]

A wild idea indeed, I was thinking about the players who have the expansion, and those who don't.  This idea is for when Arcen becomes far more successful.


Concisely, instead of penalizing players who have the expansion but have friends who don't, have them be able to use the expansion-only units, while having the others play with only their base units?  
eg. Person One has Expansion, can use all ships.
      Person Two has Base-Game, can use ships from the base game.  Cannot obtain expansion-only ships, but they can see them and other players including the AI use them.

I imagine then both players would be happy because player one could play with person two without sacrificing his expansion to play with player two (and going through the hassle of disabling), and the other player is happy because she can play with her friend and see the extra content she would otherwise not see without first buying the expansion--while she cannot control these units herself, she can see what they all do and enjoy the experience without the three hour time limit.  This could eventually become an incentive to purchase the expansion her friend has.

This could be for all your upcoming expansions, though again, for the future when the game is perched up high unless you decide otherwise.

EDIT:  Forgot to mention, but in the context it means the community would be less divided when expansions are released.

[x4000]

I've already done as much as I can to keep the community from being divided when the expansion comes out -- the unified binary system, continuing support for those who don't buy the expansions, the pretty generous trial system for the expansions, etc. 

One thing I can't do is give away copies of the expansion for free for those people who don't feel like paying for it but still want to play it, which is essentially what you're suggesting, in the end.  Because only about 50% of the expansion ships are those which are bonus starting ships, the rest of everything is capturables, or new AI types, or ships that the AI uses, or new map types, or whatever.  Having those things on would presumably be a must in order to really get to the crux of what you're asking, and that becomes something where it's just giving away the expansion free to the secondary person.

Aside from that, players that don't download the expansion (or expansion trial) separately once the official release comes out won't have the requisite images to show those ships, anyway.  Those would then just show up as pink squares.

I always hate to say no to requests, but this is the sort of thing that I just can't do.  The way the expansion works as far as with players who do and don't have it goes, is pretty set at this point.  There's simply no way to get around groups of players who want to play together with different expansions of the game aside from the solution already put in place -- simply disable the extra expansions that all don't have, if everyone doesn't want to add them.

[Spikey00]

Of course, this was just a crazy suggestion--I always understand your position and I was just throwing this out onto the table for discussion.

[x4000]

Oh, I appreciate thinking out side the box -- sometimes some unusual stuff that turns out to be just perfect comes from that.