Creating arbitrary team sizes in Single Player versus AI games

Question

I've searched all over but there seems to be no way to create a single player versus A.I. game (i.e. one that would allow cheat codes) with arbitrary team sizes, e.g. 1 versus 7 or 2 vs 6 on an 8-player map.

In Starcraft 1, I enjoyed playing against many AIs with cheat codes enabled to give me a chance. In Starcraft 2, the UI acts as though I'm allowed to drag team members arbitrarily, but in an uncharacteristically poor UI design by Blizzard, simply fails to add them without any indication that I did anything wrong. I've tried changing the game mode to custom game, custom teams, etc. And it still doesn't work. Any clue?

Answer 1

It is possible. You just have to drag the hell out of it until it works. But do note, there are only certain maps that enable this. One of them is this map, Forbidden Planet v1.10. I don't know about other planets but you gotta do some trial and error. Have fun!

Answer 2

As of 2020, I've tried this successfully on about a dozen official blizzard maps with success. Not sure if all maps support this or not.

1. Create custom lobby
2. In lobby, change Category to Misc
3. Mine defaulted to Custom Teams, but this is required so double check
4. Carefully drag a slot to the HEADER of a team and it will add the slot to that team

Normally when you drag slots and drop them inside a team panel it will swap with whichever slot you dropped them on. However, if you carefully drop the slot on the header (the lighter blue bar that says the team name) you'll perform a "move" instead of a "swap".

You can then make teams ranging from 1 to [map size - 1]. You can also drag slots onto the empty "New team" and initialize a 3rd team etc. After 3rd team is initialized, to add more to this team, be sure to drop onto the header and not the interior.

Answer 3

You could quite easily make a map for this in the editor, but seeing as you cannot host custom maps in singleplayer, you would need to make up your own cheatcodes and code them in.

No way to do this through the standard interface as far as I know.

Answer 4

Why not create a game vs. 4 and play it without cheating? To each his own I guess...

AFAIK you can't create two teams, one with the size of 1 and 7 or 2 and 6. However you can create a FFA game against 7 AI, or - if I remember correctly - a game 1 vs 3 vs 4. FFA is probably closest to what you want?