Need help assigning players within sides

A friend and I are creating our first module and the game involves 2 sides, red and blue. On either side are up to 3 players. If only 2 people are playing then they need to control 2 players on each side. That’s the part that threw us in a bind.

We’ve noticed that sides are distinguished by passwords within the Vassal engine, right?

The only work around we can think of is making sure the Red side players share identical passwords and same for Blue side. It works but sucks for game joins and setups.

Within the game, Red and Blue needs to have selection restrictions to opposing sides, yet share all functionality with players on its own side. I hope I’m making sense but I’m scatter brained so not sure. Basically my question would be, is there a way to have players choose a side, and then choose specific players within that side, while owning individual passwords?

Thanks for any advice or requests for further explanation.

Make individual sides (like Red 1, Red 2 and Red 3) and two ‘composite’ ones. An example of this idea is in a World War II game, where there are US, UK and USSR forces on one ‘team’, and Germany and Japan on the other. So in a five player game, it’s easy…each player takes one country. But for the case of a two player game, you also define an ‘Allies’ side and an ‘Axis’ side. The Allies side controls the combined US and UK and USSR; the Axis controls Germany + Japan.

The way you would implement this in your module is something like this: define sides like ‘Red Team’, ‘Red 1’, ‘Red 2’, ‘Red 3’, and the same for Blue. ‘Red Team’ or ‘Blue Team’ would be the sides each player would take if there were only 2 players in the game; otherwise, in a game with a large number of players, each player takes their own side (Red 1, Red 2, Red 3, Blue 1, etc.)

if you define a private window, you could define the possible owners as
Red Team
Red 1
Red 2
Red 3

This way, in a six player game, any Red player could use that window, but Blue players couldn’t. And in a two player game, the Red Team player could use the window too, but his opposite number couldn’t.

You definitely don’t want to have -any- sides share passwords. That’s just going to be no end of trouble. Each side should have a unique name (you can’t have multiple sides named ‘Red’) and password.

Thank you, mycenae. We’re going to attempt a join game setup where you have to choose a Red or Blue player 1-3 at the start. Like you’re WWII example. I’ll let you know.