Controlling Allied Commanders

Okay so me and my brother have been playing a few games together in a number of team games and He's constantly flipping out because I'm constantly giving his commander orders without realizing it.

The way this works is that I'm a big fan of keyboard shortcuts and am constantly hitting C and F to select idle fabbers and the commander to construct my base with, however when pressing C it not only selects my commander but selects his commander too.

Now I understand part of the problem for this is that the game is beta, another part is that the game does not differentiate between my commander and his commander, and as far as the game knows both commanders are mine. I like the idea of sharing control of units and armys and even bases, but the commander is a personal thing, I'd like it so when I press C the game finds and selects my commander and not those belonging to my team. I do NOT want each persons commander to be only controllable by that person however as that kinda ruins teamplay coop when moving your allies commander out of the way might be a good thing when an attack is inbound and that person is off looking elsewhere in the system. Being able to cover each others slack is an important aspect of the game but accidentally ruining 2-3 minutes worth of build queue placements because I used a hotkey is a bad thing.

Would love to hear what other peoples thoughts are on this.

You're playing the army game type. Everything is shared. There is no differentiation between what's yours and his.

You have to remember that when playing the army game type. Everything is shared. It's not a problem, it's just a unique game type.

If you don't want to share things, then wait for the Alliance game type. The devs have demoed it, so we'll probably see it sometime shortly after Christmas.

The Alliance game type will be more like traditional teams. Shared vision, but not shared units or economy. Though you'll be able to gift economy and units to your teammates and you'll have shared vision.

Yea..... I think you glazed over my point.

I like the game type, I just feel the game should differentiate between whats mine and his as far as the commander goes in terms of selection via hotkey.

Imagine the frustration when my friends commander is found wandering the gap between his base and mine possibly getting himself hurt in the process.

Edit: Additionally why would it be useful to have all commanders on your army bound to single hotkey... I know the AI use commanders in formation as a single unit but that's almost never how players will choose to play.

So select your commander at the beginning of the game.

Bind to one of the control groups.

Problem solved for the remainder of the game.

While this is a good solution, I think he does have a very valid point in that, with the current setup, the commander select key is near useless in team army games except for some rather specific situations.

It might be an idea to rework it as he suggested (though how would this work for drop-in-drop-out games?) or to disable it for team army games to encourage people to use solutions like the one you just posted.

Not really. . . The commander is such an important unit that you always need a reliable hotkey to find him. Hitting C and then Track Camera on Selection cycles through each commander separately.

If you are playing team armies, you need to be aware that you possibly have multiple commanders in the team, and you need to be able to quickly find all of them just in case someone goes AFK.

His problem is ENTIRELY solved if he changes the habit and uses a different hotkey.

How about, instead of having C select all commanders, have it cycle through the commanders? Seems less work-around-y than select and use track camera cycle.

Obviously this is how i've been working around the problem, however this method forces me to hit another problem a little earlier in that there is only 10 control groups and i've already got this bound to things

1 = Ground Factorys
2 = Air Factorys
3 = Army
4 = Airforce
5 = Naval force
6 = Naval Factorys
7 - 10 = Nuke Silos

or alternatively I've used the entire hotkey system for nothing but nukes to ensure i can quickly carpet nuke an area.

The point is in a team game, you shouldn't have to look after all the units yourself, more than this, you shouldn't be giving counter intuitive orders to your collective forces that may win or break the game.

I find the short sightedness of some people here a little frustrating so let me explain again how the hotkey can be improved

First Press: Selects your commander, and tracks
Second Press: Selects ALL commanders, and tracks nearest one
Each other press thereafter will find the next commander in the group and so on.

If you read my original post i stressed the fact I did not want commanders to be ONLY controllable by their player, but rather simply not selected by the 'C' Command. The are many graceful solutions to this problem, I trust that uber will find one without the help of naysayers

There are already hotkeys to select all factories, as well as all factories on screen.

And then you can left click or right click to further refine that selection.

There are also hotkeys to select all land units, all naval units, all air units, as well as all of those on screen.

So now you are being a naysayer. I am giving you a valid and sensible suggestion for getting around your difficulty. If you choose not to use it, but just disregard it entirely, that's not my problem, nor is it ubers.

If you want the type of team gameplay you envisage, play the Alliances gamemode.

The point is it is a team game. Sometimes you are forced to look after all the units yourself because your teammate is doing other stuff, be that in game or out of game.

I am not particularly shortsighted thanks. I am able to figure out how to make the existing control scheme work for me.

If you cannot play cooperatively with the same army, wait for alliances.

Yes there are, but no hotkeys for:
all factories on this land mass
all factories in this base
some factories on this land mass
some factories in this base

When sharing resources and bases its important to remember other people may wish to use those factories too or have plans for them, the way we play is to build two bases and each player controls one of those bases, of course when the battle shifts from when base to the other our attention can become focused on the same area, but when our attentions separate again, me selecting all factories and giving them an order can mean factories are building something closer to him that may not be relevant for his unique situation.

more micro

Not sure how that is relevant when talking about commanders. but yes i know

I recongised your valid and sensible suggestion as an obvious workaround to which I also said I've had to take this route, It doesn't mean I cant want a change in the way the game works in the future.

Gamemode not available yet so I don't see how that's an option, at least not afaik and not without mods.

I am not advocating a separation of control to your units and mine, simply a shift in priority to how an existing feature in the game works.

I feel you're taking criticism where there is none, you're shortsightedness comes from that you refuse to accept what could be a very welcome change.

Nobody said I cannot play :/
We just find the existing control system mildly frustrating as described with a single hotkey behavior, not its function or intent.

The game is in beta and subject to change, that's a good thing and you should welcome changes to the norm of how things are.

I didn't glaze over your point.

My point is everything is completely 100% shared. There is absolutely no differentiation.

I don't have to imagine the frustration.

(btw, you should use the reply button so I get notifications)

Except that when the commanders spawn, YOU pick the location for ONE of them and he takes the model from the one YOU had selected in the lobby.

Ergo, it is your commander. The team can control him, but you picked the landing spot and the model.

So I think it's a bit counter-intuitive that "C" selects all commanders and not just the one you landed.

I believe it would be better if "C" always selected your commander and some new command, like ALT-C, selected all team commanders.

This makes "C" act consistently across all game types, while ALT-C is a special command relevant to Team mode.

I meant no offence.

The issue is that your problem is a problem only unique to "Team Armies", in the current iteration of the game, if you choose NOT to rebind "1 - 10" as the commander that you specifically want to control.

The commander you spawn is not your commander, in a team armies game. It is the one belonging to your team, that you choose the location of. The difference is that when your commander dies, you are still "in-game" (as opposed to Alliances, where you die).

Basically if C always selects "your commander" - what happens if you decide to "switch commanders" with someone else - the game has no way of knowing that happened.

If you are playing Team Armies, you need to hotkey your commander to control group 1. It's not "not intuitive" that it selects all commanders belonging to your team. Everything you own belongs to the team. If you build factories, they belong to the team, not you. The select all factories hotkey selects all factories, not just the ones you built. The game has no way of knowing if you are building those factories for your teammates, or vice versa. The same argument for changing the way the select commander hotkey works should be applied so that everything is consistent in team armies.

The problem is primarily created because you don't want to dedicate one control group solely to your commander, in which case your issue is that there aren't enough control groups.

I'm not resistant to change. The problem is completely solved by allocating a different hotkey to your commander.



I say again, you are playing Team Armies. It isn't "your commander" - it's "one of your Team's Commanders". If you want a game mode where the commander is solely yours and yours alone, wait and play Alliances.

The suggested improvements I made for the C key would still allow quick and easy access to the other commanders. I'd rather the game try to 'know' which is my commander and not bother 'knowing' if we've swapped our commander roles. I've always imagined in the finished game the commanders will display their players name underneath so i cant imagine this being something allot of people will do.

If this is really the case then there needs to be a new hotkey for selecting your commander instead of wasting an entire control group on an individual unit.

I did mention this at the top of post #8

Or by improving the way the existing hotkey works... creating a new one when there are already so many to remember seems counter intuitive to me.

I don't feel this way at all, I picked the skin, the commander represents me, and in the final game my commander will likely be a special commander from early access that players on release wont be able to choose. I don't mind my team being able to control him, I just want it so when i press for C for commander it highlights and selects him, rather than selecting all and showing the first commander alphabetically (ie Alpha > Delta > Quadruped > Raptor Class )

I really do feel in some ways you are right though, in some cases you would want to select all commanders if you wanted to do massive retreat or fallback together to a single location, but these cases are rare and less common than the countless times I select only my commander at the beginning of the game.

somebody suggested even holding a modifier key to make C select all commanders instead, either way sounds good to me as the entire hotkey system should be rebind-able in the future so for example

You could keep 'C' to select all commanders
and I could make 'Shift+C' Select all commanders and both of us are then made happy.

I'll stress again, an entire control group for one unit seems very awkward to me, and as a workaround its fine, but as a planned way to control the game in the future after release? I say no.

There will also be a issue of people accidentally selecting commanders but the need to use friendly units remains. The C cycle fix would work pretty nicely, or some sort of effect to say that the unit is use?

Personally, What should be disabled is the commander suicide by delete. No idea why that is even a thing. Had the last 3, 10v10 matches end within 5 mins because of some troll killing our commanders ;') Pretty badly abused these days and matches are ruined often because it, eck.

Like brian said, in team armies, you share EVERYTHING in the game: Commanders, eco, units, factories. There is absolutely no reason for people to even have the idea of "their commander" in armies, if it's idle and I take it, then move on. The only real issue with the C to select commanders is that you select all of them, even if they are not relevant to your task.

That's a very nice attitude, If my computer is faster than yours I'll pickup control of your commander and never allow him to go idle, goodluck trying to play when I simply take over all units under the idea everything's shared.

You must draw the line somewhere and cooperate.

My original point is that cooperation is difficult to do under the existing control scheme.

If in team army's everything is shared as you say, then the HOST as part of the process of setting up the game should choose all the commander models and the team should 'vote' for starting locations and instead of landing 'their' commander in a location they find suitable. Additionally everything is shared why even spawn extra commanders :/

Honestly just because team armies works this way now doesn't mean it will forever or that this is the best way.

Rippsblack, I agree with you entirely... I had some posts about exactly this a few months back. Pretty much same response from the community. Don't sweat it. Haters gotta hate. I think you have a very valid point, and I think a lot of people feel the same way. I hope they make the change.

I even posted this issue under the task list a few months ago:
http://pa.lennardf1989.com/Tracker/...ned=rockemsockemrobot&order=history&sort=desc

Upvote it? Not sure if that will help. I called it players "touching" each other because of an argument between two opposing teammates which sounded more like a pedophile trial than anything else. It was hilarious, but really highlighted how much this UI issue bothers people (including myself.)

It's clear to me that early backers getting their own commander + picking your own color + picking a name + picking a spawn location => there is in fact personalization of the commander even though it's not the exact current implementation.

Commanders, heros, or whatever you call them are really a projection of the player onto a virtual battlefield. That unit reflects players' personalities, style, intelligence, and character. It's a small change, but really makes a big difference. I hope that ownership of the commander, in every game type, will make the release version.

Rippsblack, just reading my tasklist item, it's a little different from what you suggested. I was suggesting locking the commander by default and then having an option to share. I think what you are suggesting is related, but different.

I suggest you post your own task so it's documented somewhere in a meaningful way.

Sorry brian, you just glazed over his point again.
His point was that even in team army mode commanders should'nt be shared. At least that's how i understood it. And tbh i couldnt agree more with that.