Vastin

[quote]As a surprise tactic it can be effective but once people learn to counter it spamming will go out of style because it will stop working.[/quote] In my experience, anti-rush countermeasures need to be rather liberal and heavy-handed before the strategy falls out of style. Rushing is [I]very[/I] effective in most RTS (and a number of turn-based) strategy games - it can become an issue in any game that forces you to make early decisions between economic and military

[quote]Sins actually has ways to counter spammers unlike games like Starcraft.This part of your post boggles me. Starcraft had one of the best counter systems in rts history. What single unit in that game could someone spam tirelessly that couldn't get them totally owned? I can't really think of any except for maybe a very late game unit like a carrier that you should never have let him get too many of in the first place.Zerglings, carriers, dragoons, zealots, cruisers, tanks, and hydralisks. I

Spamming = Standard RTS Rush (also commonly called 'Zerging') A tactic where you build an early unit in vast numbers and jam whatever upgrades apply to that unit and immediately attack your opponent(s) in an attempt to immediately eliminate them from the game. Because of its speed, it can reduce the defenders options greatly - up to the point where the only valid response is to rush in kind. This is referred to as a 'degenerate strategy' if it is allowed by the developers to do

BTW, this isn't to say that there aren't memory issues or hardware issues AS WELL - just that the types of crash that most of the people on this thread are reporting sound an awful lot like undetected de-syncs by their description of the symptoms.

Most of the crashes people are describing on here sound like classical 'De-sync' errors, which are a long term bugbear of the RTS genre. Your computers aren't actually playing the 'same' game at all. They are each playing their own completely separate game which JUST SO HAPPENS to have the same starting point, and your clients each send each other all the [I]orders[/I] you issue - but not much else. The RNG(random number generator) seed on each machine is also locked so that all the 'ra

Another note on the front of competitive games - unless you are restricting your audience to highly organized 'guild' teams of relatively small size, you really need to restrict your game format to something that can be completed in under 1 hour. Anything longer runs a rapidly increasing likelihood of being disrupted by events in Real Life - especially if it can't be paused. Expecting 8 players to dig in for a four hour game is kind of ridiculous. Sure, some people can do it, but it bec

I'd suggest sticking to Player Team vs. CPU teams, just for casual amusement. You'll only rarely get a Player VS Player match that results in a fun, competitive game without a well-designed ladder matching system. Alas, too many otherwise brilliant 'competitive' games are quickly passed over by the user base at large, because the designers don't build all the complex matching systems needed to validate them and create any sense of true competition. Even WoW took 2 years after launch to