DFD-R3: 237 vs. 925, 1003 vs. 378

[Renegade]

Fight 1

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The primary argument against remap for overlays is that it's supposedly pretty much limited to walls.
Let us look at this argumentation from two different angles:

Angle 1: Countries in game modes are more useful/make more sense
Do they really? I mean...why do you need this, really? What is the point of having an extra "No Britain" mode, for example? If you don't want Britain in the game, just set the AI to not use it, and tell any humans not to take Britain.
If you're making a "Classic RA2" mod, just fucking unlist Yuri.

Nighthawk's argumentation, in particular, really doesn't make much sense to me:

Many mods implement a "classic RA2" mode, and the presence of Yuri always gets in the way of this.

Independent from the question of how much sense it makes to have a "Classic RA2" mode inside a Not-Classic-RA2 mod in the first place...what is the argumentation here?
That we should implement an entire feature just because the player might see Yuri for three seconds before he chooses some other country?
If there really are dick players who try to select Yuri in Classic RA2 games, just totally cripple Yuri's army in the game mode so that the dick is punished for his behavior and removed from the game quickly.
Or, hell, just frickin mod Yuri into a generic Soviet country.

Additionally, it could make sense if you've done something like a Generals-esque country system where each country has certain special advantages instead of a simple extra unit, limiting the choice to certain countries so as not to harm your game mode.

It could, really? 'cause I'm not seeing how. What does the game mode have to do with it? I mean, the only possible application I could see for this would be situations in which a country doesn't have ships, for example, and the host selects Naval War or something. And even in such cases, the modder could still do his job and simply adjust the country to fit the game mode.
How many times does it happen, really, that a mod has to remove an entire country from a game mode?
If a country is so completely one-sided that it cannot cope with a particular game mode, how does it even survive in normal play?

It could also be used to implement a game mode involving certain countries that aren't even part of your normal gameplay. For example, a game mode in which you have every country addition (or none at all), limiting the country choices to simply "Allies", "Soviets" or "Yuri" rather than having pointless identical countries cluttering the menu.

This one is a valid suggestion in terms of outlining the game mode, but neglects to point out that the "pointless countries cluttering the menu" part would be the only issue with this mode. It would work 100% completely for all countries involved, the only difference would be that you could pick a specific flag to wear instead of being generic.

Sorry, but the fact that the player can redundantly choose a flag isn't grounds for me to add entirely new logic to the game.

Seriously: As much as you've been talking about the supposed usefulness of this feature, I just don't see it. The number of situations in which you'd truly need to limit the number of countries available in only one game mode is extremely small.
Yes, there may be any number of mods which want to reduce the countries in general. And they can do that just fine. This particular feature would only be useful for mods which need to modify the available countries in a specific game mode independent from the main country selection.
And that's just not often.

As such, the supposed usefulness of this feature is totally exaggerated: It would only rarely be used in the first case, and in the large majority of cases it would be used, either not having this feature doesn't make all that much of a difference (as in the Generic Countries case), or can be mitigated by having the modder actually do his job and balance the game (as in the Naval War without navy scenario).

Angle 2: Remapping walls is too small a usage case for the other issue
That sounds reasonable on first glance. Surely one particular structure type can't be grounds enough to implement an entire feature?
Yeah...and then you realize we're not just talking about any structure, but about pretty much the most common structure ever.

Seriously, how many mods are there which don't have walls?
I would be surprised if you could name even one, but even if you could, how many percent of the total number of mods would that be?
How many mods are there in which even a single country has no walls?
In other words, of the total number of all countries combined of all YR mods there are...how many countries don't have walls?

Walls are pretty much the most common structure in YR ever. Sure, all countries also have ConYards, Power Plants, etc., but on average, players build far more wall segments than production buildings.
Think about it: One wall around a ConYard is already 20 segments.

So yeah...it may be just one kind of structure, but that kind of structure is displayed more often in more mods than any other structure or unit. That's kind of a different situation.

As such, I disagree with that angle of argumentation as well.


Now, Alex says remappable walls are already possible. If that is true, the request should be rejected. So far, despite the fact that the request is over half a year old, despite the fact that I already linked remappable wall SHPs last time, and despite the fact that people in here seemed eager to get rid of the issue, no one has independently confirmed that walls alone, or even all overlays, already remap.

Not that I don't trust Alex, but the fact is, right now, it's one person's word against another's. Submitter says it doesn't work, Alex says it does.

Until this is settled, #925 is an open request, and as long as #925 is an open request, there is no doubt it would be used countless times more often than game mode specific countries.

Kill: #237
Support: #925

(Even if #925 gets killed, though, #237 stays rather useless with no good usage case.)

Fight 2

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What Albrecht said at the end pretty much sums up my opinion of #1003 - how many people are going to use this, really?
We don't even have have a significant number of normal single player campaigns, let alone enough of them to fill multiple campaign lists on a significant number of mods.
As I said in another DFD today: Single player campaigns are a niche. It's sad, but that's the way it is. Before we start going all fancy about having numerous campaigns with all sorts of nifty branching and switching and cause and effect and whatnot, we should have certainty that people are actually going to use those features.

YR has been out for almost nine years. How many YR mods with fully developed single player campaigns have there been, really?

As much as I think random damage is superfluous and not going to make much of a difference, the fact of the matter is, it's probably going to be used a hundred times more often than menu.ini, no matter how useless.

Kill: #1003
Support: #378