Separate MP exe that can access all installed assets and toggle them on and off at will.

Then create a single set of values for MP. It's just a balancing issue, and those will come up anyways.

I agree that some balance issues would come up, no argument there. But personally I think it'd be better to have the playerbase united with such a small community - Sins is not and will never be a perfectly balanced competitive MP game that would draw in a large community. Around 100 players at primetimes is barely enough, let alone divided by X.

Also, the game lobby could show which players have access to which expansions, allowing for balancing team assets. Add the ability for the host to toggle which expansions will be used in a game, and you can negotiate with other players what bits you want to use.

Finally, you can always assign different roles to people in team games. The vanilla player could go econ and feed the others, or just do fleet operations, while expansion players could make starbases and anti-SB units, for example. It can be made just a question of teamwork, something that this game doesn't really promote very well.

Each expansion should require all previous ones, in my opinion. Keeps things sane. Also wise from a game balance perspective as the expansions build upon and play off the balances of their predecessors.

I was wondering about the same thing. with so many combinations, if the packs are all independent from previous packs, search mp games would get pretty tedious.

The solution is very simple. The host determines which expansion or lack thereof will be in play. If the host is on vanilla, then anyone who joins via the Entrenchment client will be subject to vanilla rules.

Why is this so hard to implement?

It doesn't even need to be like Dawn of War (that would give Entrenchment players an unfair advantage). If the host does not have the expansion, just limit the rules to those that the host can support.

This is something they need to sort out with the next add-on.  I recall Total Annihilation handled expansion and downloadable maps and units the best - if one player didn't have one they were simply disabled for all players.  Thus as long as everyone had the same patch version, you could connect to each other and play regardless of what extra units you had installed.

It will be interesting to see how Ironclad does this, because this will hurt the online community if we end up with a mish-mash of expansion versions.

How is that implied by what either I, Hack78 or lbgsloan have said? We are talking about the host to starts the match. Sins doesn't support drop-in players anyway. If it did, presumably they would just be subject to the host's rules anyway.

I'm not certain if this has already been covered, but my concern is mods.  Will modders have to release 8 versions of their mods in order to ensure full compatibility?  By the looks of it modders are already having to make vanilla and entrenchment versions.

Okay. I still think cumulative necessity for the expansions is the sanest way to go. KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) as they say...

It's pretty clear this is a major issue. Given the quality of Sins in general, I'm sure they'll work this out in a sane way.

I haev yet to play online or even look at it (still honing my skills ), but the idea of fragmenting the userbase is a scary one.

Requiring expansions to be cumulative is problematic as well - if someone didn't like Entrenchment but wanted the next expansion, then they'd have to suck it up and pay for both.

Alternatively, if the next expansion includes Entrenchment, then they'd probably want to offer a discount to people who had already bought Entrenchment.

Maybe someone has already answered this, but why the hell do you have the option to play older versions anyways? Most of the times when there's expansions or upgrades, the whole community has to take them because that's where the developer (ironclad) wants to take the game.. Balance issue and game mechanics all inclusive.. Mods I could understand, and some of the mechanics discussed earlier on here would work perfectly for solving that. But why for the sake of community inclusion would you have the Option to not use the official expansions/upgrades in the first place? Especially when they're free?

-Prophecy3

lol, in light of the new info and your other post, this tidbit sounds funny now. not that you could know ...

hope we get some info on this issue as the we start getting more details about the next pack in general.

there is also an other way to do it leave it as vanilla and the other as expansions and have the game option where you change fleet size ect to allow you to turn on and off certin expansions so when you load the match you load the stuff from the expansion you selected and of cource vanilla is allready loaded.