I remember someone playing it in "hardcore" mode, setting the brain count to 6, handicapping himself to -5 and the AI to +5. In the end, after each attack, he had to evacuate his brain to keep on fighting. Now this sounds challenging.

Also, not using rocklet sniping, reloading the stage if you fail, etc.

i already handicap myself and the computers so they are at the advantage, but it doesn't really do anything beyond giving them more brains and me almost none.

Did you play with only one brain though?

this is the settings that i usually play with.

I think that's somewhat disrespectful to say that the developers won't "bother" to make the necessary changes to make it multiplayer. I think you're forgetting that Data's original intention was never to have online multiplayer in the first place. The game was in a 12 year(?) development cycle. I'm not sure if you remember but 12 years ago online multiplayer was not a huge thing. Most multiplayer games of the day were sit together local multiplayer, hence the games design. Bother also implies it's a 'simple' or 'trivial' change to make it playable online. But that's just not the case. As Bad Boy pointed out the physics are not perfectly determined so things could go wrong in many places. It would in fact be very difficult to reprogram the game to be an online multiplayer game. So much so that making a brand new engine would probably be the best choice at that point.

As for the topic at hand I suggest using the base weaponry, the pistol/blunder buss/smg etc

regardless if it seems rude or not is it accurate word wise, as for games from 2001 there were a lot with network and internet support.

as for weapons that should be fine, smg for the win.

How many of those were of indie developers though? Most that had were part of medium-big companies.

That's a brilliant point but sadly moot as always there will be another person asking that very question sometime in the furture..

as for undead and smgs as they aren't a faction and more of a sub faction and you cannot select free trade "base.rte" i went with dummys and after a few setback i did manage to successfully win it using undead.

You don't need even need a server if you implement the multiplayer like a normal RTS. What people making multiplayer should be doing is sending orders across clients (where the player clicks or something similar). As for cheating and debugging, you can require each player make a hash of important data and send it to each other - if the hashes don't match on any of the clients, you know there is a bug (you can extend this to tell you what piece of code is the culprit) or an attempt to cheat. The only issue with this is a shared random number, but even that much isn't too difficult to implement. The problem with this is that it requires lots of synchronization and a player with inferior hardware or an inferior internet connection will cause everybody to lag.

oh yeah, this also allows you to make small recording of games (replays) and allows for peer to peer games, where a server would only be a middleman.

EDIT: now that I think about this, I might go implement part of it...

Unit tracking isn't the difficult thing to track. It's the terrain and physics. Zalo already implemented a proof of concept mod where only the players were kept track of.

what about using larger blocks? i remember there was a dynamic water mod that mention something like that but i never actually tested it, because instead of focusing on pixels why not group them as a blocks with some gibs to give the effect that they are still pixels.

Because that's not a complete overhaul of the engine. *Sarcasm*

Basically that wouldn't work. Have you ever tried walking on a dropship or something? Object-Object collision doesn't work very well inside the engine. The game was built for Object-Terrain collisions.

Engine Limitations has spouted its ugly head again..

What me? walk on dropships.. No, but i have crash dropships by jumping on them or making them explode for almost no reason.

Engine Limitations are unwanted, but unfortunately needed. No engine can do everything. That is precisely why CC has it's own engine in the first place. Unfortunately the engine began development at sometime in the early 2000 (gameboy advance days). So like I said before, online implementation was just becoming popular. The most successful of which are from large corporations who have the resources to implement online play which is deceivingly difficult to achieve. Unless it was the goal since the beginning. The CC engine is largely developed solely by Data and lacks the manpower from complete optimizations etc... to utilize many things that you see a lot of other games doing. (For example online play or multi-core usage). So before you comment on engine limitations you have to remember that creating new game engines is difficult. Not to mention the game itself was designed as a highly moddable sandbox, which it has inevitably become, as it's main selling point. Perhaps the only notable point in your argument is the grouping of pixels. Loading the game in "chunks" is probably the only realistic way that one could see any sort of multiplayer game similar to CC. By loading to see if there were any changes in a block before performing actions could be a useful tool in creating a multiplayer experience. Unfortunately CC does not have this in it's engine and neither would it be easily to simply implement into the game engine. If you are unsatisfied with the conclusive answer of "No it's not possible to have a 'complete/satisfying' online multiplayer Cortex Command experience", I recommend doing one of the following: 1. Find a different game to play 2. Find a way to mod this into the game (highly unlikely) 3. Create a new engine yourself to live up to your dream (which Data was attempting to do with this game). If none of these satisfy you, neither will trying to bring this point up in this community nor any other community to find a solution. There simply isn't one. So if you could please let this topic go it would be greatly appreciated. There will never ever be a complete online cortex command experience (at least from this game, possibly the future may hold a full experience close to CC but probably not from Data)

This is a common missperception. You don't have to track the physics to implement online multiplayer. The randomness of CC's physics is NOT that big a problem as some people make it out to be. Also, Zalo's proof of concept mod that you mention is old. He has since already shown that true online play is possible: http://forums.datarealms.com/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=45537. In fact Data himself has said it's possible (post seems to have been removed?), just very complicated and time consuming.