I can imagine that with large Systems you can get overwhelmed with micro management. Will there be some abstract interface to manage your bases without having to zoom in? I imagine something like this. You create a base from a selection. If you zoom to planet level you can then see an icon where the center of the base is. From there you can manage production, building and energy consumption. If you queue up buildings the AI would choose a location for you. So you can say "build me some T2 power here." And it would do it with all fabbers assigned to that base. Dungeon Keeper 1 had an AI assist. You could turn this on and the AI would control the things you allow it to. If you could build something like a subcommander which you would assign to a base or a planet and then give him some directions it would for example build a small base for you. You have to live with it that it is not nearly as efficient or smart as a human could do it. But the nice thig would be that it is fire and forget. You could focus on more important regions in your empire. If you think about it, area commands are a step into that direction.
When you start going for interplanetary war micromanagement goes out the window. You stop commanding individual fabbers, you use doubleclick or "f" or other methods for selecting large masses of fabbers. You stop making batches of scouts to keep an eye out, you command what would previously have been a large army's worth of scouts on a constant automatic scouting patrol. You stop placing individual buildings, you drag lines and spam clicks to cover the surfaces with the infrastructure you need. This is the nature of periods of exponential scope increases, fine grained control becomes untenable lest you do not wish to achieve large scale goals such as winning the overall war. This is not so much a problem as just the nature of the game. These examples are just the mere semblance of the skills needed to deal with that change, which I attempt to grow and add to every time I play. Auto-managed bases in any portion of the game stops the game being about a mix of tactics and strategy and makes it almost entirely about the tactics, the execution of force deployment. If that's what I wanted to play I'd go pick up... Ground Control, or something? Some game that doesn't have bases, or at least not manually managed ones. Maybe Company of Heroes. Those are good games, just not ones I crowdfunded.
there's this mod that automatically produces offensive units from every factory you have. and picture in picture allows you to select all of the units on one planet or on multiple planets.
Pip is amazing!!!!! Especially being able to control units in it independently. Aside from it currently killing my frames to half, I fawking love it!!!! Multiple fronts are much more simple now.
As has already been pointed out the current way of doing things is just to spam lines of whatever you want built on the remote planet. While this works, this game was meant to have a focus more on the combat and overall strategy rather then AMP to quickly spam out buildings all over the place. With mass extractors, you can already do an area command to have your engineers build mass extractors all over the planet. It would be cool if you could do the same sort of thing with your power generates, so that they are not all sitting next to each other in a line ready to be picked off. The only issue with this idea is how to properly implement such a command into the UI. Obviously creating a button just for this would not work... Another idea is to to have the build templates similar to what was in Supreme Commander. You want a whole bunch of factories power generators built on a planet with defenses around them, then lay down your template and away it goes. If any mountains etc get in the way then I guess those objects don't get built. You come back, and part/most of your new planet/moon base is ready to go the way you want. Anything that can help automate tedious tasks if the player so chooses they can focus more on the overall tactics and combat would be a good thing.
I agree up until this point, but this is where UI changes and improved AI will help exponentially. With UI improvements like build templates I can set up a self sufficient resource "Node" with defenses and production or an expansion base to with a teleporter all in 1 click. With Improved unit AI if my base is under attack and I have forces scattered through it they can all respond to the attack automatically, or attack enemy foreword bases within artillery range all without looking at my base. PA has enabled us to build spanning empires, now Uber needs to give us the tools to manage them.
We had the circle build for PGens when area commands were implemented, but people decided that it was inefficient to have to turn at all, when spamming in a straight line (or making PGen snakes) was better and faster. They may be easier to pick off, but the construction is more efficient and it increases map control.
