I have a simple question I wanted advice on. I am building a complex version of Buyers n Sellers that will be based on BGH. You purchase pre-existing units from a player and they would be moved to your base and given to you. The purchasing concept of the Buyers n Sellers will remain the same. I want the game to be as balanced as possible on a map that by design is not balanced. I need to identify where purchased units should spawn for a player. I can see only two options that have positives and negatives. BGH has relatively small starting bases that could cause obstacles.

Purchased units spawn at a pre-placed special building.
This building may interfere with a players natural building layout. This may also run into obstacles when purchasing large orders of units. For example if they never moved the air units from a previous purchase and try to purchase more, the new air units may not have anywhere to spawn.

Purchased units spawn at a specific unit (i.e. civilian, dropship, vessel, or other non attacking unit)
This would allow a player to decide where the units he purchase spawn. It would not interfere with building layouts but creates some elements of lameness. The players now has a cheap way of scouting. If I use an air unit there will be issues of what happens when purchasing units while the air unit is over water. Lastly when selecting your recently purchased units by scrolling the mouse, the player would constantly have to unselect the purchase spawn unit. Most of the issues could be remedied by setting boundaries for the purchase spawn unit, but BGH is not exactly rectangular.

Both the unit or building where purchases are moved to will be invincible. The target of the game is to destroy opponents buildings, not their spawn unit.

Thoughts?

Buzz

So if I'm understanding correctly, you have 3 players that sell units to 5 other players so those 5 players can have a regular melee battle with some added heroes? I think having a hero building (similar to WC3) may be best. The issue with this, however, is that players can't build or move it (so if a main base is destroyed, there's no way to move it manually to an expansion. One way to get around this is to make a blocky location at every expansion and essentially move the building to whatever expansion is occupied by the player, if it resides in a location that say player 1 has no buildings in. That could take up a lot of locations, but it may be the best way to do it.

A unit as the spawn location may be tough, especially since it has to remain invincible. If you use a Terran Civilian or some non-attacking unit, that would be great, but easy scouting would definitely be an issue.

I suggest using a terrain civilian with 1 life. This unit is easily killed by a worker. Then, if the current play controls 0 civs, center a civ spawn location on their town hall building, and create 1 civ at that location. If the player has 0 town hall buildings, then center the location on any building that player has. This way, the civ should always spawn at a safe spot.

Alternately, using a building, do the above, where you move a building to an expansion if the player has a town hall building there.

Else, if you want a permanent spawn building, to avoid air clog, order all men at that location to attack to a target place (ie: town hall building, 1 tire building (rax, gate, pool)) every time a unit is created there. So units can be on/around that area, but are ordered to move away when a unit spawns there.