OpenRA

Is it possible to ally or declare a war in game? Would be cool feature as it is in red alert 2.

It was possible but was tuned off because of abuse during online gaming.

Backed up by DECENT in game Admin privileges , this would be a great idea =)
hint hint

I can imagine that someone might turn hes weapons against hes ally in game, but is that abuse? It might feel abuse for player who the war was declared for, but that is something which happen also in real wars and real life. It is just something that everyone need to keep in mind, and make playing a bit more complex.

And it is one of funniest feature in Red Alert 2, I have seen dozen of games where allies have different opinion of sharing oil and resources, for example one player build a harvester facility inside hes ally base, and steal hes resources. An ally does not like that, so he start to demolish harvester facility which lead open war.

This would be a great feature!! how could this be abused? its not cheating - so what if someone declares war on an ally? how is that a problem?

btw, I'm new here so maybe I am unaware of certain things. I just found out about openRA and was playing the modded game that allows internet play that was released last year.

but this is incredible! still learning a few things. like how to decrease resolution. its too high on my monitor! lol. pixel doubling is too low and I want it full screen - sigh.

How it would be abusive:
1) There's no "Team locking" feature as far as I'm aware, so if you play online with random people, they can switch on you when you're completely unaware or unready, especially if you didn't expect anything bad to happen
2) This could mean capturing bases and selling them for tons of profit, even though they're allies. Also quick winning.
3) It may be an equal relationship -- if your enemy triggers allies with you, then you are automatically allied with them. That may not be how it is, but it could be abusive that way, especially because then it takes the opponent time to get trigger war again.
4) A lot of the time, developers don't really care about the little features like this. And turning on/off superweapons.
5) Ally with everyone and you win automatically, if it's mutual like in #3.

How to make this unabusive:
1) Make allying require agreement
2) Make a "Lock teams" option like in Age of Empires II.

This also requires one of the developers to give a rat's ass about this over new units like snipers.

This used to be in the engine, but was removed maybe 1.5 years ago. Some people loved it (including me), but the majority of the people playing at the time really hated it (most people would refuse to play matches that didn't have lock teams enabled).

The reason it was removed was also partly technical - we wanted map makers to have the option of forcing team/race/color on player slots, so they could, for example, have one player start with a fully built base, and have everyone else allied against them. We could have easily worked the ability to change teams during the game into this new system, but decided that it wasn't worth the additional effort as nobody actually wanted it.

The ironic thing is that I don't think anyone actually uses these extra map options, although I don't follow the project closely anymore so I may be wrong.