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.

Edit function is borked, so let me just add that basically I mean the same thing that was suggested by others here, but instead of a loader make it a separate MP exe.

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 also have a hard time to imagine how game balance is supposed to work if the expansions aren't cumulative. Not to mention the difficulty for the player to keep in mind which strategy worked under which setup - doesn't sound like fun or something many people will want to do.

That said, I vaguely recall that it was said that the expansions were to be independent from each other, but I might be mistaken.

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.

Dawn of war had 3 expansions.

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.

Which as was stated above is what we understood the implementation to be, except that rather then the host setting the parameters, the game worked out the lowest common denominator and used that.

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.

Cumulative necessity... I wouldn`t want a *single* drop-in player to be capable of downgrading my entire group`s game experience...

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.

Probably best to keep the online community at 2 different types.  I can't say it'll work for sure, but in terms of what we know, obviously one community for every expansion will kill the game's online community as a whole, instead there should probably just be Vanilla and Full expansions communities.

Optimally, all the expansions can exist online together, however, if a player without an expansion attempts to join an expansion game, they are not permited to join the game?  I don't know, it's quite a large problem.

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.

That's why the manifest feature was included in entrenchment.

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

Good discussion.

Based on what i read hear, and what makes sence to me, this is how i think it will shake down.

Sins-entrenchment

Sins2 - entrenchment-2

3 "expansions" to the orginal game except starting at expansion 2 its a new standalone game with the finnal installment being an expansion to version 2.  Think Supreme comander and Fordged allance.    FA is a compleatly stand alone "expansion" for SupCom that doesnt even require SupCom to be installed.  FA/SupCom also handles mods well being able to turn them on/off when you are setting up a game and who has what mods that are joining.

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.

Automatic switching is a silly idea. If I'm launching Entrenchment, it's because I want to play Entrenchment, not vanilla. If I wanted to play vanilla I'd be launching vanilla. I don't need the game to downgrade me, if I was willing to accept a game of vanilla instead I'm more than capable of dropping out and re-launching it myself.

 Showing the version being played in the server browser would be convenient in letting me see if it's worth dropping back to another version in the first place, tied in with that an option from the main menu to restart Sins with a given expansion/selection of expansions enabled would likewise be helpful.

I'd go for cumulative too for preference, simply to avoid seeing six or seven gig of hard drive space wasted on redundant versions.

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

Prophecy, the Entrenchment expansion cost $10, and the next two expansions will also cost $10 each.  Also, another reason for wanting to be able to seamlessly play the non-expansion would be if one of the expansions proved to be less than online multiplayer worthy.  The other reason is that it's possible that not everyone will want to purchase the expansions and that playing normal Sins might be the only way to keep the community from fragmenting.

So far the Entrenchment expansion seems to be working out and I'm under the impression that most regular online players have bought it by now, but that's not to say that we'll be able to say the same thing about the next two expansions.  What if the next one is all about single player diplomacy and thus useless for online multiplayer?

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.

CenturionJixra,

   Yeah I realized it was $10 just after posting that, still though, Ironclad has made an impressive game, so far the 1st expansion has been (imo) very good, and I could only assume that the same diligence and care will be put into the next ones. That being said, it would make sense to have a battle.net type system where you can visually see what each player is playing on; vanilla, entrenchment, exp etc..

-Prophecy3

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.

I'm gonna reccomend a single executable file, rather than one for each expansion. (such as we have now)

When starting a new game, in the Game Options menu, there should be a list of expansions and a toggle for each one. Default position should be 'on' if every person has the expansion, and locked to 'off' if at least one person dosn't have it. Each player slot should have an indicator to show what expansions they have.