I have been trying to get into competitive play recently and there are a few quirks that are making the game difficult to play. I have always seen pa as an intuitive game in its approach to ui, but as my apm rises and learn hotkeys there are a few glaring flaws that have shown themself. Many players will find that when trying to select units via a hotkey while in some micro intense situation that requires a lot of clicks and multiple control groups, they find that no units are being recalled. This has caused me much grief and i thought my keyboard was dropping inputs. It was not. The thing is, if a right or left click coincide with a keyboard input, for example to recall a control group. or other unit selection, THE GAME IGNORES YOUR KEYBOARD INPUTS. This has lost me many games. This is more than likely why your commander takes walks for no aparent reason. This is why you find idle factories you remember queuing units to. This is why awful things happen when microing multiple groups of units. If this was a design decision, i hope it will be reexamined. A related issue is that the game becomes noticeably more unresponsive and does not accept inputs on dropped frame consistently in low fps situations, as if inputs are dropped when they do not coincide with a new frame. The next glaring flaw is when building a nuke. If the nuke launcher happens to be unpowered when the nuke itself is complete, that nuke will never fire under any condition. You must build another nuke. Speaking of nukes, does anybody have any examples of antinukes to share that have fired, missed the nuke, and flown in circles infinately? Im not sure if this one has been fixed. Also the pathfinding for units on the new platforms and csg in general is awful but i cant say that is unique to PA. Units tend to bunch up and hug corners, causing far less agreeable engagements if you dont manually path them. I would also hope that boom bots are made a bit more intelligent somehow. They have a tendency of standing still for a brief moment when issued an attack command. I stream this game daily. Its hard to find it even ethical to try and convince others that a game is worth their time and money when these awful things happen that make the game unfun, even if they may only be noticed by those enjoying the logevity of enjoyment this game can bring. These are the people who are going to be recommending the game. It is sad to say that even those with over a thousand hours put in find the game hard to recommend. Please make these issues a priority. It should not be up to the player to not break the game.
I actually thought a few things were my own fault too I guess its not. High APM does get punished in PA atm. Sometimes I press my hotkeys too often and it ignores my input. pressing for instance grouped hotkeys to often ignores them at some point. (put your comm on hotkey 1 and press it multiple times deselect it and reselect it by pressing 1. You'll notice it ignores the hotkey command from time to time). I wonder if they could fix that. My guess thats the server switching the move order to an attack order. It does take some time from time to time. Two things that bug me also. Building placement checks if there are any other buildings close. I liked it more in the original way where a builder that builded the factory at that spot faster was able to build it. Now sometimes you can't build somewhere because a different builder will build something at that spot in the future so you need to reque that one first before queing the building you want. yeah I know pretty confusing Also when I assist a fabber on a different fabber and after that add a que the assist command will get overrided and thus one fabber wil start on the latest que that you gave. That also never happened before. I personally don't like it like this. I've heard complains about this form other players too.
Yes, say you queue up a few factories with you commander then later want to switch a to different building. You cannot queue up anything in the same location as the queued up factories without first cancelling orders with the commander. I have to use this work around many times every single game. It is unecessary micromanagement. Also alpha. Now that you mention it i have had the same issue with grouped fabbers. I will send out one bot fab to take metal, then have a rally from a bot factory with a second bot fab to assist the other. If you then proceed to queue up more metal extractor with both fabbers selected, your second bot fab will immediately go off to take the new metal extractors queued up. This is because assist commands now are immediately ignored if you queue orders after the assist command for fabbers. This has huge negative implications. Also, bombers have an awful time actually hitting drifters, even when the drifters are not moving. This completely throws off their balance on larger naval maps. I will try to make a video if i catch a pirannah missing 100% of its shots against metal exanctors while not even moving. There are situations ive caught my bolos firing at absolutely nothing. Bombers are also unreliable when being microed. If you try to do a run over a fabricator with only one or two bombs, the bombs will miss that stationary fab because the first bomb does not come from its center. Please make at least the first bomb dropped at least possibly hit something. Edited post for accuracy.
This may be our issue with units shooting the ground for nor reason. https://forums.uberent.com/threads/area-attack-broken.69775/ Aparently if you use an area attack command, your units will target the wreckage... As well as it is more than possible now to accidentally target a piece of wreckage with an attack command... Meaning that i now know why sometimes my units dont stop moving when within range of enemy units when given at attack command. Imagine what happens if you area attack with bombers...
I've got 2 bugs and a controls grievance to report First Bug - Sometimes my screen gets stuck when I've select a unit and I can not longer use my keyboard buttons to move my camera around. This is only fixed by de-selecting whatever I have selected. Not sure if this also happens if you use the Middle Mouse button to move your camera. It's frustrating because it really messes your flow up when issuing commands. Especially when your telling multiple idle fabbers to build something then build something else far away. Now if you click away from those fabbers you can't easily re-select them since they are no longer idle. Happens about once every 2 matches. Second Bug - Sometimes my cursor gets stuck as a building and will not go back to normal. For instance it becomes the white outline for building a Pgen I lose all control on my army as nothing responds when my cursor is stuck as a Pgen. Nothing is select-able or clickable. ESC key doesn't resolve it. it will eventually resolve itself after a while and I haven't figured out why yet. takes anywhere from 5 seconds to 1 minute. Very frustrating when you lose a match because of it. Possibly caused by a Mod but I don't know which might cause it. Doesn't happen that frequently but devastating because you go idle while it is in effect. Third, the controls grievance - the Camera hotkeys for moving your camera around are modified into zooming commands by pressing the CONTROL key. This is a major issue for keyboard camera operators since CONTROL is such a heavy utilized key for commanding your units. I need to CONTROL + Click a lot to send the command to move to a point as fast as possible. Also Control shows essential range information for units. But if I ever press WASD (my camera buttons) and CONTROL then I zoom in or out to an unusable perspective of the ground or the sun. I just want my camera to be unaffected by a key that is used for 2 other essential features so that I don't have to be hyper-diligent about my camera buttons all the time. For comparison, imagine if CONTROL also modified the middle mouse button in the same way. Try to rotate the globe causing extreme zooms because the CONTROL key was being pressed. It would be rubbish. The current setup is rubbish. Please let CONTROL not affect my camera at all. *Things that don't bother me as much but I feel should be mentioned -Shouldn't there be hotkeys for Select All Orbital Factories, Select All orbital Units, Select all Advanced factories. It's strange that there are buttons that are clickable on screen for things which don't have a dedicated hotkey option.
I've come across similar issues pilgrim, I'd like to move further discussion of this threead here because it seems more peopel will read it here: https://forums.uberent.com/threads/pa-unsuited-for-competitive-play.70595/ The best I can say to resolve your cmera problem is to see if you can fiddle with some keybinds
I noticed they changed that around PA:T and it throw me of, too. The best explanation I could come up with is that infinite orders will immediately canceled because it could lead to unintuitive behaviour. Imagine you have 2 fabbers with a build queue and you assist these with additional 3 fabbers. * If you select all fabbers and shift-queue some more buildings everything is fine. (But without canceling infinite orders the 3 fabbers are still assisting the initial 2 fabbers) * If you select 2 fabbers of this group and shift-queue another build queue. Without cancelling infinite orders the result will be something unexpected: The new build queue will either be executed with 1, 4, or 5 fabbers or will never executed at all. I currently don't see how to fix this without breaking infinite orders.
You need to check your key settings, I'm guessing by the sound of it that you havnt changed the uber default keys, undo attack/ stop reclaim etc, as these use the wasd keys. Good rule of thumb: if you don't use it or don't intend on using a hotkey just leave it blank.
The crater bug is one they are aware of, use transporters and reroute units to the other side is better than reclaiming the whole factory. Did this happen after the 21st of September update?: "Fix for segHitPathablePos improperly returning a voxel when the check failed. -This is to fix a specific case in factory build task where the rolloff position would be unitialized, causing units to roll off at odd angles and move on invalid terrain and get stuck." Edit: guessing unless you wear the pirate costume everyday, that this was from the clash of the Titans stream on the 19th, so it was fixed a couple of days later. The game may not be perfect but they are working on it.
These at least were easy to add to Keybind Extensions https://forums.uberent.com/threads/rel-keybind-extensions-1-5-0-88288.68478/
No, unfortunately this was uploaded the day it occured, so it seems it has not been fixed as of that time :/
