That's actually interesting idea. Obviously there should be a per-room option whether it's possible. As for how would that happen, the new team should just appear on new turn on positions determined by game settings (in most cases - randomly). Ofc the new team shouldn't get unfair advantage, so maybe it would have hedgehog number/health taken from average of other teams.

I have no idea how “joining a game in progress” would work. This immediately raises the question of how, when and where to place the hedgehogs of the new team.

This is not even a question of technicalities. It's a major game design thing, and I don't see an obvious approach here.

It would throw the game off-balance if anyone could just randomly spawn a team mid-game. It also eliminates a lot of assumtions the game can make.

I'm afraid the game just simply isn't made for that.

As for the 2nd suggestion (couting kills count): That would be actually be fairly easy to implement with Lua. But who will be the winner? The first clan to score X kills? And how would the mode be fair to the other clans? I'm not very convniced by the idea. Note that with AI Survival and Mutant we kinda sorta have something that goes in the direction.

I don't think it's too difficult to imagine how it might work. Teams wouldn't spawn right away, but maybe at the start of the next turn. Locations could be pencilled in so it would be known where they would spawn. I see no reason why "the game isn't made for that", other than at a technical level.

As for second point, yes, first to X kills. Let me ask the negative... how would it not be fair to the other teams?

I like innovation, but even ignoring technical difficulties I feel like this would be a veritable pain in the ass trying to balance conceptually.

KoBeWi's idea of giving a player who jumps into the game an average number of hogs/health is nice, but it hardly ends there. What are you going to do about all the scripted game modes? In Highlander winning isn't so much about hogs as it is about weapons. A player who joins a game late is just going to get squashed as he has no weapons and there are lots of super hogs all over the map. You'd need to somehow randomly assign the new player an "average" amount of weapons, too. And so on for points in Space Invasion / Mutant / CTF, etc. Which hogs would you choose to give the new player in modes like The Specialists?

It would take a staggering amount of special casing to implement this fairly, and even if you did all that, what would stop me launching a 2nd instance of Hedgewars, changing my username, and then joining a game I am already in, as soon as I start to lose, just to "get back to even" / abuse the system and gang up on a player who is beating me?

Let the game modes themselves handle it. A callback for new joining player should be enough.

Well, that's a risk that comes with this option. Room masters should decide whether they want it or not.
But if it was available only for registered users, it should be possible to e.g. bind logged in user to current machine, so you can't log into another account.

Welcome back mikade. I really don't think we need to care how each scripted mode will handle it, just to be able to try this out in any mode would be nice. And a joining player will have to accept that they'll probably be at a disadvantage (I guess even more so in something like Highlander), but they might want to join in anyway.

I agree it's not clear which weapons should be assigned in some modes, that might need more thought. Doesn't mean there's no solution... one idea might be just to scale somehow based on the number of turns that have elapsed. For something like BRW or Shoppa (or even Highlander), this wouldn't be a concern.

As for people abusing it, maybe we could wait and see if that's actually a realistic concern. I think it's probably more important just to have players playing at this point, when the community has all but vanished.