Yesterday I added another mod onto the MHM4 server named "Slave Master", but someone asked me about the rules of the game. Well here is a copy-paste from the original ReadMe, but it's quite long:
Gameplay
HUD
At the left of the HUD, there is a list of the current players in the game. The names are color coded by status. Dark gray means a free players. Dark red means a player owned by somebody else. Gold means that the player is owned by you. White is used only when you are a slave, and indicates other players owned by your master. When you own somebody (gold), or they are owned by your master (white), the amount of favor they currently have will appear next to their name. A name in light blue means that you have soul flare attached to that person.
Below the list of names is your rank – what this indicates is different depending or whether the game is being played to a frag limit or a slave limit. In either case, it shows how far down you are on the scoreboard. Below the rank the HUD shows how many total players there are, and how many of them are currently free. The number of free players will tell you how crowded the level is.
When you are a slave, your HUD will turn white, and will show you the items and status of your owner. This is so that you know what your owner needs so you can get it for him.
Soul Flares
Soul flares allow a slave to earn favor by marking the location of free players for his master. A master can see soul flares through walls, thereby allowing him to track the free player through the level. Slaves can not see the flare through walls, but can see it attached to the free player so the slave know who is marked and who is not. Flares earn a slave favor over time, so marking free players who are difficult to hunt down is more valuable. Also, favor is based on how many free players are in the game, so if there is only one player left to kill, the favor rate for marking him becomes very high. If a marked player dies, the flare is gone and no more favor is given. If the slave who marked a player is freed, any players they marked are unmarked.
Being A Slave
When You Die
If you are killed, you will spawn as a slave at the location that you died in. You will have no weapon. Your HUD will show who owns you and how much favor you have. It will also show you how much favor you need to be set free. Being a slave has an upside – nobody can hurt you. If somebody have a problem with you, he will have to take it up with your master. You can be blown around easily by explosions, however, since you don’t weigh much as a slave. If you commit suicide or are thrown into lava or otherwise cause yourself to die during the time when you are fighting somebody, you will become a slave and volunteer to the player you were fighting. Fighting is defined as 'been injured in the last 5 seconds.'
Collecting Favor
There are basically two options as a slave. You can hang out, and assume that your owner will be killed before long. Or, you run around and collect any power-ups in the level. Any power-up you touch will be sent as a gift to your master. If he does not need it, you will not be able to pick it up, and it will be worth no favor. As soon as you collect enough favor, you will be free, and will respawn normally at a random location. When your master sets you free, either from his own death or from your hard work, he will set you up for your new life according to how much he liked you. If you gave no favor, you will start with the basic 100 health and an enforcer. If you were a good slave though, mindful of your master’s needs, you will start out with some armor, extra health, nice weapons, whatever your master happens to have available for you. Do not underestimate the power of kissing your master's ass. When you start off with a shield belt and a damage amplified flak cannon, you will know where the hard work went. If the freedom cost is set to zero, and inheritance is turned off, slaves will not be able to pick anything up, because favor is useless.
Attaching Soul Flares
Pressing 'Fire' while a slave will shoot a bright flare in front of you. If you hit a free player, the flare will imbed itself into the player's soul, where it will stay until it dies out after a while. You will get a message that you have marked that player for death, and your master will start giving you favor according to how helpful it was to know that player's location. The player's name will turn light blue in the HUD list to indicate that the player is marked and can not be marked again until the flare dies out. If you attempt to mark your master, you will receive an electrical shock from the feedback loop, a small reminder of your place in the world as a slave.
Soul flares can also be used to open doors that require being shot in order to open.
Death And Slavery
If you do happen to die as a ghost, usually from falling off a cliff or drowning, you will respawn randomly in the level. Even if you die at the hands of somebody else (as in the pressure chamber), you will simply respawn.
If you manage to kill somebody as a slave (again the pressure chamber is the most common case), they will simply respawn in the level.
Vengeance
In some cases, it may happen that you are able to posthumously cause the death of your owner. The most common case is: You fire a missile at Bob. Bob nails you with the shock rifle, and you die, becoming Bob’s slave. A second later, the missile finds Bob’s forehead, and he explodes in little tiny bits. This is treated as vengeance, and you will be set free; however, Bob will not become your slave. A more tactical case is the pressure chamber, in which you as a slave can actually attempt to exact your revenge upon your master by locking him inside. Again, you will be freed but your master will not become your slave.
Favor Table
Item
Favor
Health
1 point for each point of health gained
Armor
1 point for each point of armor gained
Weapon
With WeaponStay: 20
No WeaponStay: Weapon Refresh Rate
Ammo
10 (Note: Weapons the Master already has and are picked up for ammo, count as ammo.)
Damage Amp
130
Jump Boots
10
Invisibility
24
Unknown
(Mod Items)
Item's Inherent Desireability
(As determined by Item.BotDesireability(Master))
Soul Flare favor table (Amont of favor given for marking player)
Players Left
Favor/Sec
>4
1
4
2
3
2
2
4
In general, the inheritance cost for an item is the same as its favor value, so if you get your master a shield belt, and get 150 favor, you could respawn with a shield belt and nothing else, or a combination of other things that add up to 150.
Being A Master
Getting A Slave
When you kill somebody, a small, fat, white soul will pop out of the body. This is now your slave. His name will turn gold in the HUD, and the favor they have given you will appear beside the name.
If you are fighting somebody, and they cause themselves to die, you will get a message 'So-and-so Volunteered' and they will become your slave.
Getting Favor
When you have a slave, you will begin to get messages like ‘You got a health kit’ and ‘You picked up the flak cannon’. This is your slave doing his job. Notice that weapons your slave has given you will not auto-switch, to avoid interrupting you in the middle of battle. If you’re not using your favorite weapon, be sure to glance down to see if your slave has maybe picked you up a better one.
Using Soul Flares
When one of your slaves attaches a flare to a free player, you will hear a sonar blip, and that player's name will turn light blue to indicate that they are marked. If the marked player is behind a wall, you will see a flare marking their position, as if the wall did not exist. If there is nothing blocking your line of sight to the player, the flare will disappear, as the brightness of the player's entire soul will drown out the flare.
If another player's slave marks you with a flare, you will receive a message saying that you have been marked for death, and your screen will flash blue. This means that that slave's master will know your location until the flare dies out.
Losing Slaves
When your slave has collected enough favor, he will be set free. If you are playing to a slave limit, you need to act quickly to win so that your existing slaves will not have a chance to get free before you can get more.
Whenever you die, either through being killed, suicide, falling into space, whatever, all your slaves will be set free.
Winning The Game
Different End Games
There are two types of Slave Master: frag limit and slave limit (there is also a time limit, as in other game types, but you must still decide what count will be used to determine the winner.)
A frag limit game is essentially the same as a deathmatch game, except that the time you are a slave is time that you are not getting any frags. In this case, it is good to set a low freedom cost, so that players are rewarded quickly for doing their services, and can get back to the game.
The heart of Slave Master, though, is a slave limit game. The first person with the target number of slaves wins the game. If the limit is small, the game can end very quickly. If the limit is higher, a game can either be over quickly or can last hours into the night. Fortunes can change very quickly, as the slave master of today becomes the slave of tomorrow in no time.
You can also play with both a frag limit and a slave limit. This is a good way to avoid games that last an infinite amount of time with high slave limits.
Frag Major/Slave Major: If you have both a frag limit and a slave limit, you must still decide whether the frags or the slaves are more important. This is so that the scoreboard can be order correctly, the ranking appears accurately, and if there is a time limit, so the winner can be decided at the end.
Being the only free player always wins the game, even if there is no slave limit. This is to avoid the game becoming a stalemate – slaves refusing to do any work, and a master with nothing to do.
Options
On the Rules tab of the game, some extra options appear in addition to the normal DeathMatch options.
Slave Limit
This is how many slaves a player must own in order to win. If it is zero, there is no slave limit. Owning all other players will always win, however, as mentioned above. You can therefore use that as your game setting – zero means you have to own everybody. In this way, you do not have to necessarily set a frag limit, slave limit, or time limit.
Freedom Cost
This is how much favor a player must earn before being set free. Zero means that a player can not earn their freedom and must wait for their master to die.
Earn Inheritance
If this is checked, a slave who is being freed will earn extra starting power-ups based on how much favor they had with his master. This gives slaves a good incentive to do work, even if they think their master is going to die.
Slave Major
If this is checked, and there is both a frag limit and a slave limit, a player’s slave count will be used instead of his frag count to sort the scoreboard and to decide the winner in timed games.
Good Options Settings
We can't tell you what you like, but we can tell you what we like. Our favorite settings are 6-10 players, 0 frag limit, 5-6 slave limit, 150 freedom cost, inheritance on.
One of the things we've discovered is that if the slave limit is 5, its not really much easier to win with 12 players than with 7 (6 gets a bit difficult 'cause you gotta find that last "Expletive Deleted"...), so slave limits scale fairly well.
CheeseNip's Guide to Slave Master
This is a guide to my general strategy to win.
When I just start out, I run around like wild trying to kill people. I'm a bit afraid of dying, because being a slave is not as fun as being free, but I don't worry about it because of this fact: Everything you grab for your master, you are actually grabbing for yourself (as long as inheritance is on). There is a 1-1 between the value of items picked up and items you receive after getting free. So being a slave is actually a free-grab time when you can stock up without retribution. Use this time wisely. While I'm a slave:
I always try to grab my master the redeemer. It's worth a whole bunch of favor, and my master is likely to not even notice he has it, unless he's a bot. If he does notice, there's a good chance he'll kill himself with it, odds that go up to about 80% if he's a bot. This plan can backfire - more than once I've freed myself by getting my master the redeemer, only to respawn on the wavefront of a redeemer blast. But it's pretty good.
Of course, I always try my hardest to get my master ammo for weapons he already has lots of ammo for, and weapons he couldn't possibly want. Many levels are more than adequately stocked with bio sludge ammo for you to offer up.
There is often the problem of whether to get your master armor that he doesn't need all that much and won't give much favor, or to leave it for another free person so that they can kill your master. I almost always get the armor, and here is why: If my master has a small number of slaves, then the game isn't close to over, and the quality of life for the free people is not my concern. If my master has a bunch of slaves and is about to win, it may seem like a logical idea to help out whoever can kill him by leaving them the armor. But there's this thing called human nature, and if I don't get him the armor, one of the other slaves will (this is especially true for bots, who lack strategic thinking like this, but its almost always true of humans, even though we should know better. Its often referred to as the prisoner paradox, if you want to do further research.) So I get it, otherwise it will be the other slave who has the leg up. Of course, I try to never grab armor my master doesn't need at all, because then I'm just helping him out by removing resources without getting any favor.
While I'm winning:
I know I'm going to have to go through a few slaves before I make a move to win. Its too easy to get free when your master only owns the gun he killed you with. Whenever I win, its usually because I had a few slaves who stocked me up on everything, got free, and then I captured a bunch of players who couldn't get free because I already had everything.
I stay wild and free for about the first 2-3 slaves. Then I start pick my fights with more strategy. Once I have 3-4 slaves, I don't take a piss unless my slave does it first. With this many slaves, you can afford to wait a little and try to get to 100 health before you battle anybody, because you shouldn't have to wait too long. You will usually have some armor too.
If you think you are close to winning, be wary of tough battles against somebody with a flak cannnon, or other spray weapon. Even if you win the fight, if you lose your armor, that's another slave out the door before you can wrap things up. When I have a few slaves, I like fighting people who are using the shock rifle or the missle launcher, because then its a win/lose situation.
If you are feeling crazy, you can try the ending I call 'Final Redemption'. If you only need one more slave, and are worried about getting in a fight because you don't want to lose it all, get the redeemer (check to see if your slave got it for you first), and fire at somebody in a small room at close range. As long as they die first, you win.
