Can I marry this post?

mikade an easiest way to show your love to this post would be to play default with TheArtisan

also, TheArtisan, you can create a room, name it : default, or no highlander and wait few minutes for someone to come

In case you want to play a normal game, create your own room. The players usually come to the official server at 3.00 pm UTC so try to play at the right time.

Highlander mode on Hedgewars become the most popular gameplay after Random Weapon. The ratio of gameplay : room are estimated like this;

Random Map (Highlander) : 6
Customize Gameplay : 2
Shoppa : 1

I wonder if my information is true? :p

I'm sick of Highlander too, to the point where I almost suggested putting a limit to the number of Highlander games there could be at once :p.

If you want to play default then just host your own game, then just surf the web until you hear the "Hello" that plays every time someone joins.

Highlander is very popular (when i go to online, i usually only find Highlander rooms lol).

btw, you can create your own room, and set it with the game mode you want to play, then, just wait for someone to join

The issue is that no one wants to play default because it actually takes skill. If you are unlucky you might wait for hours before you actually someone who wants to play something other than highlander.

Well, Highlander takes skill too, but the element of luck allows bad players to win from time to time. I've noted w/ bad players that, if they, say, win a couple of games out of luck, then lose like the next 2 or 3, they'll just quit.

But. Agreed. Personally, I've been focusing on creating rooms w/ other rules just to offer variety.
I'll create it, then go do something else until I hear a "Hello"

Usually I'll create a room for Clean Slate, The Specialists, Thinking with Portals, Default
Lately I've added Mutant, just 'cause I enjoy having an AI team join in from time to time.
I've also been experimenting w/ a semi-silly mode which is basically Default, only with the following weaponset.

One%20of%20Everything=11111191111111111111111111111111111111111111111111110101111111011111111111111111111111111111111111111111111101010000000000000001100000010111011000000000001000000100000011111101111111111111111111111111111111111111111111110101

Reasonably playable on a large map, esp one of unc0rr's new large caves, with teams of 8.

Oh, it's also possible to play against yourself online, sometimes I do that until someone joins my game.

I find a good challenging game is medium map, 2 allied teams of 8 AI hogs on max AI level on default settings against either 1 or 2 human hogs. 1 hog means AI will probably win quite often. 2 hogs, can usually beat AI almost all the time.

I don’t know it either.
Your question is an equal difficult question as “Why is Nyan Cat a meme”? (This was an rhetorical question.) I don’t know it. (This was a rhetorical answer.)

Normal is cool.

Normal mode is cool but I think it has a few fundamental mistakes that make it not so fun. I will talk about these.

Before start playing online on the server I played only normal, offline hot-seat with friends and I did not care about modes, putting custom behavior and and all the good stuff.

Here i started by playing highlander an entire night with a very good player on this mode who beat me in almost every game.
In highlander game-value is very different than normal. I was dealing high damage always (like in normal) but loosing in the end.
In highlander, positions are very important, number of hogs that you dismiss with kamikaze, knowing when to suicide with all the good weapons. The fun part is that you might kill a dozen starting with seduction or with cheese.

In normal you can only attack once and you have 2 more seconds to move around after the attack. Instead of a combination, you only have one shot. It is much more boring

But... the biggest problem in Normal mode is the power of weapons. And the bad luck of having hogs on the edge. There are many many ways to kill.
Think about:
- Flying saucer + 3 switch hogs + mudball + weapon in the first round. You can position your hogs properly or killing stuff on the edges before your enemy has the chance to take his turn.
- Baseball or cake - next rounds
- Dynamite in the beginning with huge damage
- Girder + portal on the edges (always kill 2-3 hogs)
- Keeping drill strike when enemy hogs are weak in sudden death.
- Supplies are very powerful. Always with ballgun, helish grenade, melon.

"Take a portal! I killed you. Sorry bro!! Now it's your turn"

For those reasons Normal only makes sense with 8 hogs on big maps and 1 vs. 1 or team vs. team and is a great mode that way. But in this time you can play 3 games of highlander on medium maps, full of action.
Think about playing Normal or Specialists free for all! You cannot call it a game. Teaming against a single weak/strong player is something awkward.
Highlander mitigates all these factors with a lot of action and interaction and positioning, suicide your own hogs just to win the game.

Normal with pro mode, clean state, with different tweaks is a nice node. But in the way introduced by Worms, with all the weapons in your hand at every turn is a fundamental mistake.
Normal is all about (average damage/turn). The player with the highest damage wins. No special workarounds. You only have to hit hard and harder than your adversary.

Playing highlander, the specialists or Random Weapon feels like a totally different game and requires a lot more. Normal feels so old fashioned and bad and time consuming knowing that you will lose.

Just the way it is.

IMO normal is quite playable on a large map w/ 6 hogs per team.
Portal gun does require more than 4 hogs.
However, that's hardly why people avoid normal, and clean slate, and specialists and shoppa and thinking with portals and all the other modes.
It is, simply, the random element that draws people to Highlander. Highlander evens the field between noobs and pros some.
Also, the fact that the hog that grabs the weapons is likely to be targetted helps cut down on alliances a bit, and further even the field. Highlander is just more noob friendly.

I think there should be a version of highlander where you start off with bazooka's and grenades and maybe some other simple weapons, and a delayed random strong weapon. Everybody is equal, you all fight, suddenly delay runs out, CHALLENGE TIME, everybody deploys their super weapon. That would be cool.

I don't think is a very good way to do highlander. Bazooka and grenades are not basic weapons. They are pretty strong and effective with big explosions.
You cannot define basic weapons. Might be Whip, Shoryuken, sniper, desert eagle, mine, mortar, blow-torch etc.. as well. To follow its purpose, you have to be able to kill hogs to steal their weapon and rethink your half-turn strategy.

You can play highlander with minimum damage, min-explosion; kind of boring.

I am also wondering why Hammer is not included in highlander.

Basic doesn't mean weak.

After the first extended bout of play-testing I received many suggestions/complaints about Highlander. Among these was the notion that certain weapons were close to useless and a severe detriment to the unlucky team that ended up with them. In order to balance this I removed the weapons I considered the most useless for Highlander (Hammer and Mudball), and added Kamikaze to each hog's ammo to help balance this and the issue of being "stuck" with a useless hog.

Vampiric and ExtraTime were also removed for balance reasons.