Multi-unit transports implementation

yes.

and I have more than that. I have a theory and I have practice testing that theory. I had an icon pack mod. one that made the icons much smaller. (I also like @xedi's icon pack).

this would make your idea workable. though honestly I still think the exact position is better. in supcom they were still rather readable when loaded. (a lot of it had to do with the configuration of the pod; seraphim, for example was incredibly readable). In PA it doesn't work because the icons are just way too fuking big. so the two overlap by like 90%

... having the units be picked up one by one takes time of course .. so i think you rather would have the units come to the transport being picked up all toghether in an instant .. that might require the units being in a pickup formation of sort .. so it would be more like which hooks are free than to which hook should each unit go/possition itself to be picked up ..

Although I agree with the sentiment, and you do bring up a very good point, I'll have to disagree with your point about supcom icons being readable. Although this is probably because I haven't played enough supcom, I still have massive issues figuring out what each unit is just by unit icons, and invariable end up finding out by how they act in combat. But that's probably just me.

Right, and that's a completely valid point. Which is why I suggested the one-at-a-time method. It'd take a little longer to load up units, but it would probably be much more efficient and easy to code it that way.

Just wondering.. Why are the units inside the transport also visible? or why did you make it that way? (it's a good one dont get me wrong)

IMO, It would also make sense if you dont know whats inside the transport just that its a multi transport. You need to rek it nontheless.. (Yes this is still WYSIWYG) always giving all information to players is not nessecary always a good thing.

You can for example use dots instead of that particular unit icon.

because you could hide, say vanguards, in one transport, and then fill the rest with dox, boombots, or even fabbers, and then manage to kill your opponent with the vanguards because he didn't know which transport he should kill. Not exactly a fun situation to lose. You could also hide your commander in a transport and randomly bouce different transports filled with a random unit in between planets or different locations, crossing paths as often as possible so the enemy would have to go and hunt down every single transport until he finds the comm, not fun either.

Uber's hesitance on transports thus far has been vexing, but consistent; it's difficult to program. And I'd be okay with that if Uber had the footing to work on that challenge.

Things are shaky right now over there, and we have no idea whether or not we'll ever receive new units; subs might get re-implemented, but we have no idea if the unit cannon or new transport units will be added. So perhaps this discussion is a bit premature, unless modders can handle it.

i dont see the problem ^^ if you missed a transport you missed a chance to kill 2 or more units in a single pass. People have radar so they should see them coming. I personally think it makes it way to easy to identify threat or no threat.

With showing the units you basicly make a choice for the players. If they see a transport coming with 5 vanguards in it they know ok right I MUST take that out. If you won't show it you give players the choice between. Im going to take that transport out or.. I take the risk but im going for that target first. I prefer the last one

And about the commander. If you are on the same planet then u just mass up air as fighters hp is still rediculous high and with enough can take out a comm nonetheless or all transports for that matter. If they got a planet for them selves it's just the same as your comm in a pelican world patrolling.. you wont hit him with SXX / Nukes / Planets / if he pays attention.

right, but that's randomization. If you know where the vanguards are coming from, and you've got a fair chance against their escorts and such, then you can stop them. If you don't then it's completely luck-based, not much strategy involved. As for them being on a planet by themselves, that is indeed true. Now imagine if you had to take out 50 transports that were flying around like that before you could kill the commander. Not fun.

If you are on the same planet and he has time to build 50 transports he loses on either the air field or the ground field as that is a lot of resources and production time invested into it. Probably enough time to get yourself a load of humming birds aswell.. It's a not viable strat allready.

About the vanguard drop. if you have the fighters to stop them. Your choice is clear. kill the transport and their escorts. because else you get dropped by vanguards. If you dont know what it is. you give that player the choice do I take it out or am I prioritizing another target first.

From a diffrent perspective. You can send dummy transports to an enemy base as a distraction to attack somewhere else. It opens up more gameplay choices. And more choises is good thing.

The very idea of "dummy" transports is an issue with the game's philosophy; the WYSIWYG principle is in place because the player can only see the battlefield in very broad terms, due to how thin their attention usually needs to be spread. There's no place for a feature which demands close scrutiny of single units to determine whether or not they're decoys, because being able to give single units that kind of scrutiny when you have multiple planets to juggle just isn't possible.

The proposed strategic icon setup from the first post is a way to solve this - you can, at a glance, get a sense of what's being ferried directly into your base. But the issue remains that getting multiple units to attach and detach hasn't been accomplished yet.

Good point. I haven't thought about it that way.

Total exited to hear something like this...
...try to flesh it out as much as possible and then...
DO IT!

i pray to the progenitors that they bless us with functional multiunit transports and orbital carriers


@emraldis

while it might be easy to code it might not be a good solution ... simply consider how it will look like for when 3 or 4 transports try to pickup unit after unit from a 40 unitpile or 10 transports with 100 units it would be rather chaotic and take needlessly long ..

The tank carrier mock up looks really nice and I hope we can get multi unit transports soon! I also hope that whoever at Uber is looking at balance considers making some sort of transport T1 again. The game has changed so much since they were moved to T2 that it's worth re-assessing their spot in the tech tree.

Or maybe just give a special meaning to the center of an area command when it started on a unit? Drag starting on the ground = wildcard, drag starting on specific unit = unit selector. Perhaps later one with modifier key and snap when the modifier is pressed, so it takes the unit nearest to the center as a sample.

I think you underestimate the speed at which computers can calculate stuff. Look at how many equations per second the game has to do for pathing per unit. I'm pretty confident (ie. I might be wrong, but I don't think I am) that you wouldn't really have any delay issues loading things up until you got to at least many hundreds of dropships and thousands of units, at which point the server would probably be pretty laggy anyway...

i am not underestimating it
... actualy its even more of a reason why i think my suggested method would be faster ... i am sure that this was used in supcom aswell

Could you elaborate on these concerns?