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The multiplayer game (the thing available now) will remain free including all the updates and improvements to it. What will be behind a one-off-payment will be the campaign. We've had a few bad actors spread word that the entire thing is going to be behind paywall, microtransactions, pay-to-win etc but none of that is true.
The current version isn't on steam due to a variety of (mostly infrastructure related) issues, the free version _will_ be on steam in the future though you will still be able to get the free version from the website for those who want to avoid steam.
We have support for a variety of ways to limit who can join you (passwording lobbies, locking lobbies etc). I get a lot of value playing with a regular group of friends on a Sunday night in part because of it.
It's completely free to play (though they/we have recently signed a publishing deal and there will be a paid for campaign mode later) with a combination of GPL and MIT source code.
I'm one of the contributors and from everything I've seen it's not a sell-out situation. The game is GPL so will be remaining open source, the paid-portion of the game will be developed solely by funds from the publisher (I do server stuff so won't be involved in any of that bit.
Yes, it also has a lot of co-op mode and a non-trivial portion of the player base focuses on that instead of PvP/competitive modes.
An anecdote which may be of interest. Speaking to Elixir and Erlang developers I found those who started with Erlang preferred its syntax while those who started with Elixir or didn't know either preferred the Elixir syntax.
Recoil (previously called Spring) - https://github.com/beyond-all-reason/spring
We've had 3 people request temporary suspensions to allow them to focus on their studies this week. We see that as one heck of a compliment ;)
I think that's intentional and is from a lot of PvP balance over the last 10 years of development (mostly from the games preceding BAR)
AI yes, very much so. In fact if you can get over the rather steep (for now) first step of getting them working I think we'd welcome AI submissions.
Units we want to and there's currently something called "tweakdefs" that gets you halfway there.
Spring is an open source engine
Recoil is a rename/fork of Spring
BAR is a game using the Recoil engine (ZeroK is also a game using the Recoil engine)
I've passed this on to our web-dev chap on our discord. Thanks for providing the feedback; I suspect mobile wasn't fully tested!
May I present, Beyond All Reason - https://www.beyondallreason.info/
Like OpenRA it's open source too.
Disclaimer, I'm one of the devs for it.
Can you suggest some of these less positive reviewers please? I like to have a broad range of reviews before deciding and all the ones I normally look at came out today (though were not overwhelmingly positive in every area).
I'm one of the devs for that, thanks for mentioning it!
My biggest issue with the language. I make use of typespecs where possible but it's a far cry from anything enforced.
Commandline tools yes (though that's not it's strong point). Desktop GUIs could be done though I've not looked into it, if I were then I'd look at making a desktop Electron app and use something like Phoenix LiveView with that to create the GUI.
Games are a tricky one, it all depends on what you are doing with the game. I develop a middleware server for an RTS and for that it shines but it would not suit the gameplay side of things very well (you can of course still use it for anything!).
Repo for reference: https://github.com/beyond-all-reason/teiserver
As a sample size of 1 I can say I didn't have an issue finding an Elixir job and those I did speak to were keen to get an Elixir dev asap. For context I have a few years in Elixir and over 10 as a developer in general. Better yet, the jobs in question were remote only.
Like this? - https://beam-wisdoms.clau.se/en/latest/index.html
BAR supports Linux natively, I'm running it on Mint right now. We're hoping for a steam release "some time in the future".
If you decide to try it again and get a similar slowdown, please report it on the discord and we'll look into it.
How many units did you have at that stage? We're finding games with 8 or more players a side can slow down after an hour; though this is because of the number of units present (often in excess of 4000).
You are able to play with multiple players controlling one team (Archon mode in SC2 I think). I've used it once or twice for coaching and it works pretty well.
In a team game you can gift units to allies so if one ally gets knocked out but the game isn't over then you'll often find them being given units to rebuild with.
I'd try the BAR Discord, AI channel - https://discord.gg/uNDxk5MX
With the 50fps issue, was that in the lobby or during a large battle? Secondly, how long ago was this. There have been some improvements which may have resolved this issue.
As for the AI, depending on how long ago it was we've either made lots of improvements or a few small ones. Unfortunately it's one of the areas we have fewer devs.
That's accurate. BAR's roots are indeed with BA but split in part due to this copyright concern. We've since implemented a number of improvements and a huge amount of remodelling.
These mechanics are very much present in BAR. Micro can certainly play a role but it's typically in the context of the macro.