OK, I plan to make a big great structured post out of this, but it's late, so it shall be done tomorrow. This was a discussion in the irc channel about the game, which I found interesting (though admittedly I was talking the most):

http://pastebin.com/DNgNY9sb

Post your criticism, thoughts, and ideas! I'll make a great whopping big nicer post tomorrow.

I'm afraid I didn't read the whole thing, but I like the idea of a huge map.

Another possibility would be several normal-sized maps, but when you reach the edge of one, you jump servers. So server 1 has the NW map, server 2 has the SW map, server 3 has the NE map, server 4 has the SE map, and when you hit the east edge of server 1, you jump to server 3, etc.

Once victory is reached on one server, you can still run through that map, but you have to take all the other servers before all the servers re-start at once.

There are numerous obvious disadvantages and technical difficulties to that approach, but there are a few maybe subtle advantages over the huge map approach:

- No need to scale with size and number of players (a potentially huge issue for server software)
- Instead of "huge" the map could end up being infinite, limited in size only by the number of servers
- It would be neat to be able to add a server and say "this server contains the map that connects to the northeast corner of all the other servers X, Y and Z" -- i.e. grow and shrink the meta-map in real time.

OK back to reading the brainstorming chat...

I like the idea, or possibility, of having a server per map for a distributed war system. I was thinking about it too, but decided to go for the campaign mode implementation first, which allows a server to be set up so that maps are completed one by one, mostly with coop in mind.

The biggest problem of having a server per map is attacking to a fully occupied map. How does that happen in an organized way? Where will everyone spawn?

^That's when you implement the helicopter when you try to spawn in occupied territory, you get a helo insertion on a random spot (or preset) and try to fight for the zone. When you cap the zone, then you can start your war to capture the whole map

ComJak

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ComJak's house... stay out of it

That might do it. How do you choose which occupied territory you enter, from the serverlist? You'd probably want to do it synchronized with a group of players or bots, sounds like there should be certain intervals of entering the maps. Also it sounds like the commander AI's in the fully occupied maps near the enemy maps would organize bots to join attacks, somehow.

Wow that sounds too epic, a small fleet of helicopters coming in, with their gunners shooting out the windows, and landing a small army of troops.

You could also have maps that involve ship landings, maybe a D-day style map?

Those are my plans for map7