Engineer and Commander Deadtime

I am creating this thread to bring to light the fact that if you have more than a few engineers and commander on the field at the same time, trying to keep them all busy is difficult without some sort of apparatus/sidebar to notify the player when they complete their current build cue. Currently the player has to constantly track and monitor each engineer individually, and if he/she were to lose track of one, they could potentially become useless for the remainder of the game. I understand you can identify the different types of units by their strategic icons, but I believe that there should be a more effective solution for accessing the most necessary and useful units in the game in order to achieve better gameplay for the players. If anyone has any input or would like to forward this onto the designers I would love to chat it out. If this is something that is already in the works that I am just unaware of, then my bad.

I do also hope that the UI will be expanded and that it is a work in progress for either alpha or beta.

WJ, get an image, man.

You could have a notification button that takes you to idle units, kinda like the idle villager button from AOE.

I'm actually kindof surprised that the UI hasn't expanded more than it has. Sure, things like the build bar getting tabs, and I believe combine when different fabbers are selected as a group, but in general, not much has changed.

I know they're working on it, but it seems strange that it hasn't iterated as much as the rest of the project.

Probably because there are more pressing issues, like multiplanetary battles and orbital units, the rest of the biomes/planets, etc. UI is important, but much easier to iterate on later when there is more time to spend on less critical features.

I'm guessing a lot of the UI also depends on exposing things from the engine. Even building nukes/anti-nukes is hacked in (hard-coded) at the moment, if you look at the code.

In TA (with the Demo Recorder anyway) you can hit Ctrl + B to cycle through idle construction units. Worked pretty well for me.

To be honest I don't see anybody zooming in and out and rotating the planet constantly if you've got keyboard shortcuts in there. The main problem is going to be trying to keep the player orientated properly so they can remember which way is up and where the enemy is with all this constant jumping around.

You can press F to cycle through idle constructors in PA so that's allready there.

Together with a little icon that shows up whenever you have idles will make it even easier I imagine.


As for the UI, I expect lots of improvements in late beta when they/we know how exactly the gameplay is ending up, how big the scope really will be etc. so UI features can be modelled after what is useful, is really needed and so on.


Edit: Speaking about commander deadtime... raevn's (I think it was him) little mod that shows the commanders health all the time. That's what I first thought about as its a great idea to keep the commander's being dead-time lower.

Apart from an alert upon an engineer becoming idle, will there a repeat build order button eventually?

Also, something something 200th post.