Lengthy intro:
So, the other day I was playing a 4v4 comp-stomp custom game with two friends. My PC - erm - potato had some issues that day, but ended up hosting the game including the five AIs.
Quickly, the game became less and less responsive for me although for the other two it seemed ok. We were on TS, so after checking we found that my game was running about 15% slower than for the other two. Surprisingly, it didn't crash or desync. The other two were telling me that we won at one point when I still was about like 7 minutes away from that victory (so I could observe the events that I before only heard via TS).
What was most interesting is that my commands seem to have been registered instantly when I clicked. Like, when I would issue a "move" command, the other two were telling me that my unit indeed started to move. I myself, however, could see that movement only a few minutes later. So, it wasn't really input lag, but actually more an output lag
This caused some issues for abilities (e.g. a barrage ability would become available again only in my UI after I saw the barrage (i.e. a couple of minutes late) and the cooldown wore off locally). But otherwise it was kind of ok: With the direction of my teammates I managed to move my Jagdtiger around and get some shots off.
So, while the lag was annoying, it gave me kind of a cool "General in a HQ" feeling, where you give orders but don't see directly how they pan out. New gamemode inc?
Maybe something along the lines of:
In teamgames, all resources go into a pool and then are distributed to the individual players. The players only see within the sight range of their own troops (maybe with the exception of recon abilities).
The teams have one additional player which can switch between
- helping one of his teammates micro his units (while also only see what this players units do) and
- having a complete view of the battlefield (only subject to FOW of the whole team) while also being able to adjust the resource allocation between teammates but not being able to micro any units.
Switching between helping different players and/or to the second mode should take a few seconds. Could be a via an animation of a jeep with an office transitioning between player bases or driving off map...
Optionally, it could be made so that pings by the players can be seen only by the player in overview mode, while his pings can be seen by the whole team.
Could something like that potentially be interesting?