{Suggestions} Controls, Features, and Frustrations

This post will be filled with first impressions and first blushes. Some of which I fully expect to be covered, resolved, inplemented in the beta; but for record here is a list of "things" that I think are necessary.

Controls

• Need function to show which units are selected on the "tactical" map. Suggestion: Border highlights
• Planetary movement controls need some tinkering
  • I frequently struggle with a fluid navigation of the planet. This is particularly frustrating during combat.
• On "battle action", such as new threats, need to have a 'snap-to' function, such as space bar.
  • It's difficult to quickly locate the action, when it starts to unfold
• Need "Find me" function, to locate idle workers. All workers should have distinct icons. It's rather difficult telling the builder units apart from on units of it's respective traveling medium
• Building multiple buildings of the same time, should be draggable. This is particularly useful for building walls; at the moment, it's next to impossbile to build a proper 'wall'

Hud

• Control Group Icons - it would be nice to know how many control groups I have, and what number of units are located within
• Navigation points, such as waypoints in patrol paths, need to be more visible

Camera

• Need ability to pitch camera properly. Like when pressing space bar (to enter free camera mode), but without having to use the space bar. Space bar is great to look at things in a pretty angle, but it is entirely unfunctional, and does not allow me to follow combat.

Units

• Bombers are particularly overpowered - 1 bomber, given the chance, can wipe out an entire cluster of buildings, including the Tier 2s, with next to no effort. Yes, this should be powerful, but they shouldn't be overly destruction. Suggestion: Reduce AoE damage significantly or Reduce overall damage output and keep AoE.
• Unit queues need to be based on when they arrive in the queue.

Buildings

• Needs building shortcuts - short cuts should be based on icon location on ribon.
• Building Queues should have a drawn line back to the intiating builder. At the moment, it doesn't appear possible to know who's building what.
• Must have Shield Generators it should be challenging to attack a base. In effect, one only needs to hold a chunk of land (strategic or otherwise) and load it up with artillerly. Shields will discourage base camping, as it will take significant heavy artillerly to drop the shields. Land units would be able to, once within teh shield, destroy the generator to lower shield.
  • Shields must be linked to energy generation; No power means no shields.

Building clipping, pathfinding and Terrain cleaning

• Pathfinding around buildings needs some tweeking, often units are stuck between buildings. Suggestion: Units and clip through it's own buildings?
• When building on terrain with trees, the trees should have to be cleared out first; or just flat out removed. Frequently trees clip through established buildings, which breaks immersion and looks silly. Trees could be used to generate tiny amounts of energy.
• Weapon fire should continue to not clip through buildings (amazing feature)

It is my opinion that without shields, balancing ranged artillerly and nukes will be next to impossible.

"Nuking" games are by far the least satisfying; it should be easier to prevent nuking than it is to nuke. They seem to be at par right now. This also speaks to the value of shields; at least with a shield it'll take more than one nuke to wipe out the core of your base.

Terrain
Lava Planets

• People should not be able to build on the hot lava; It should otherwise be considered as water and should not support buildings.
  • Lava at the moment allows users to build enormous weapon plateforms that land units cannot reach.

All Planets

• There should be a toggable feature for planetary damage, such as artillerly craters and ground scorching from nukes, etc...

Artillerly

• Artillerly rounds, upon exploding, should release a dust cloud, similar to when buildings are destroyed.

Conclusion

All and all this will be a fantastic game; and I'm excited to see the beta, so I can start getting my piers hiped on getting to play the game.

A great deal of emphasis must be spent on balancing and information. A game like this will be highly based on macroing stuff; the more information it can give me the better off I'll be.

The sleek HUD should remain a focus as well, which trying to build in teh new information. Panels should remain collapsable so i can pick and choose which information is to appear on the HUD.

The sleek HUD puts more emphasis on the look of the game, which is very pretty IMO.

EDIT #1: Thinking about this a bit further one more consideration

Like some RTS, including Supreme Commander and Star Craft, we shouldn't have where we just turtle to Nukes or just spam the map with bots.

Out of the 8 games I played last night, 3 rushed to nukes, 4-5 spammed huge waves of bots and 1 (that's right one!) put up a good "epic" fight, where we fought army vs army.

300 bots charing your base, will result in a lost eventually. It's too easy to just rush into a base, destroy a tier 2 building or two and rince and repeat.

Again, shields will help with base spamming.

Bots are incredibly weak and are easily countered with t1 tanks or laser turrets.

I'm cataloging all the suggestions so Uber can find them sorted and in a unified location.
https://forums.uberent.com/threads/unofficial-official-gui-discussion-thread.52055/

Added!
[SUGGESTION] Strategic Icons ~ Selected units have a highlighted Strategic Icon. Currently user does is unaware of selected units. (Similar to SupCom).

Lots of us are having some pretty heated debate over this.
Some of us are finding the constant panning tedious as well.
You're going to find lots of discussion about a projected view right now.

Added!
[SUGGESTION] Units Panel ~ Idle engineers. Left Click to Select all. Right click to zoom-to and cycle through units. (similar to SupCom).

Added!
[SUGGESTION] Building/Production ~ "Click+Drag" for line of buildings (Similar to Supreme Commander)

Added!
[SUGGESTION] Units Panel ~ Control Groups. Left Click to Select. Right click to zoom-to and cycle through units. (similar to SupCom).

Added!
[SUGGESTION] Keyboard shortcuts ~ All units/buildings to have keyboard shortcut.


Thanks for all you GUI suggestions!
Keep them coming!

Pardon me, but since the recent Pelter, laser and AA tower buff, defense and even turtling got much easier, bit too much for my taste.

A plain bot rush wont destroy a well defended base, some lazors plus arti or well managed tanks eat them up quickly.

The T1 bombers certainly arent. T2 are stronger but even a small group of fighters shoots them down well.
Compare them to TA where a T1 bomber could bring a mex down with one or two runs. How many does it need in PA? Something like twenty?
And AOE damage is very low to non existant for T1.

What you don't build any AA or Fighters... Oh wait I get it you want to build metal extractors or buildings all over with having to defend them... Defending against bombers is super easy and they drop like flies...