Making Area Commands Even More Useful

You know what's fantastic? Landing on a moon and finding out you have it all to yourself. What's even more fantastic? Build a bot factory spewing Dox on area patrol and you don't have to worry about pesky intruders. You know what isn't great? If you want to tell a bunch of fabbers to build extractors on every single spot, you have to click each one individually and give them an area build command. If you don't do that they all group up and use the power of teamwork to crash your economy while they all work together.

What would really be nice is if we could select all our fabbers, give an area build command and have them all go on their separate ways. That would be nice.

If anyone's played Star Ruler there was a really useful hotkey where you could select all your scouts and press X, which would scatter all of them in different directions.

A thousand times yes! It makes more sense that way.

Ive would love to see this Except, Wouldnt it be the same considering the build power/time ration and the fact that it does things shortest route possible?

Awesome idea, thought of this a few times aswell already.

Not really, since there is a point where traveling from point to point takes more time than building the extractor itself.

Dox patrol kills the sim though... unless it was fixed with the pathing update

was it?

I dunno that's not the point.

If we can't have a sophisticated algorithm for this, at lest split the fabbers evenly across the mexes and create random chains of mexes with minimum path lengths between them. The number of chains could be determined by the ratio of [fabber count / mex count] maybe.

I like the idea and have wanted it myself in the past, but I think it should be a special key combination as there are times I want all my fabs working on each project together.

I especially want this for walls. Currently, if you get a group of fabbers to build a long line of walls, they all focus on one at a time. The wall would go up faster if the wall was divided into segments and each fabber took on one segment.

*nvm

If you don't take travel time into consideration this would be an easy thing to do indeed. Because here [fabber count / wall section count] = wall sections 1 fabber needs to do for decent speed for doing whole wall is indeed an okay solution.

It could be useful for some situations but not for the most. It may be an option, not the standard, but anyway it's cool. +1

I reckon it would be a cool standard addition - say, hold down shift + ctrl and drag, and fabbers will spread out to build your line of stuff. You could use it for repair too - shift+ctrl+drag area -> spread out fabbers in your forces to repair individual units.

Only downside is the slightly more complicated job of what to do when one fabber is done and the others are not - you'd have to put in some smarts to move the fabber on to the next nearest target, etc.

An option for distributed construction would be neat, yeah. But not as a full replacement of current behavior.

Nobody said it should REPLACE anything.

Fascinating. Do want.

Fabbers should split up into groups to build mexes when asked to build all over an area, especially the whole planet.

I think a modifier key would be best to switch between the two options - there might be situations where you have a ton of fabbers and you want to create a row of factories/pgens/whatever in parallel fashion.

UBER PLZ!

Mods anyone?