When Your Ally Quits

When someone on your team quits or has his internet connection drop in a RTS game, it reduces your chances of victory dramatically. You only have a limited amount of concentration available and when the units you have to control suddenly double you will not be anywhere near as effective a commander. Resources to build troops won't be harvested as efficiently, units won't be built in sufficient numbers, and your army won't be managed as effectively in combat.

Unfortunately, many RTS games add even more penalties to a player when their teammate quits. There is usually a limit to how many troops you can have at a time. For example, in Company of Heroes, you can only have a certain population number worth of units fielded at once. As you take territory on the map, this number rises a bit, allowing you to build more troops. Different units also have different population values. A squad of pioneers, the basic worker unit for the Wehrmacht faction, takes up 2 population. A Panther heavy tank, in comparison, takes up 12 population.


In the German army, pioneers were the rough equivalent of combat engineers, not these guys.

In team games, each player can field the same population of units based on how much of the map your team controls. However, if one of your allies quits the game, the maximum population of units you can build does not go up. This basically means that if you were playing a 2v2, you now have to fight their combined force of units with half the number of troops. Additionally, you may be stuck with some of your population tied up in units you don't want, such as pioneer squads, which prevent you from building better troops. This is not a recipe for success. If an ally quits the game you should still be able to build as many troops as you could when he was still playing, otherwise the contest is completely unfair.


You get very little out of losing an unequal battle as well. Unlike the Alamo, no one will want to paint a heroic scene of your outnumbered last stand in Starcraft.

Another major problem in some titles is that when your ally leaves you no longer have access to his resources so you're forced to use your own resources to build troops from his buildings. This is a huge problem if your ally had been hoarding resources the whole game, as his reserves of gold, lumber, and other items are not available for your use ever again. This poses an imbalance wherein your opponents now have more resources than you and can thus outnumber you easily by building more soldiers.


Breaking open his bank to get his resources is rarely an option.

The worst error a game can make is that when a teammate quits, their units and buildings aren't transferred over to their team's control. They just stand around wherever they were when he quit for the remainder of the game. They don't even attack their former enemy if they are in range. This means that you are definitely left facing multiple opponents at a huge disadvantage as you're now one army short whenever battle occurs.

Warcraft 3, in comparison, does things the right way. When an ally quits the rest of the team is granted control of their remaining units. They preserve their resources and population, allowing the remaining teammates to use their resources to build troops from their buildings. The team is still at a disadvantage by losing one player's concentration and skill, but they have a much more fair shot at winning. It is inexcusable for any RTS game to use a different model.