Area vs Line commands

This is a good point. With air actually being useful early game, you do have to worry about protecting the power fields now.

Oh don't get me wrong, if apple can come up with unique qued controls for fancy mouse patterns and such, i am sure you can.

I am just glad to hear a confirmation towards selecting density of area build, and torwards freeform drawn commands.

If the quality of life for players increases dramatically with just the last patch, then it will be hard pressed to find an inconvenience when those come.

Advantage of using the mousewheel is that it makes the task a 1 hand endeavour. Plus you get the analogue precision of the mouse wheel.

And we're kind of running out of buttons too.... especially as by default the control scheme doesn't support clashes, even if those clashes are contextually impossible.

On the other hand, after seeing how yuck area commands have made rotating buildings...

I guess perfect compromise solution for me would be to have the controls for density attached to page forward and page back.... but at the moment nothing can be bound to those controls on my mouse.

I think halleys should be build in a circle.

The problem with this is all it takes is one raiding party (or a nuke) to punch through a huge amount of your pgens (even in 3 clumps, losing a 3rd of your power is pretty devastating). I always have (and still do) build my pgens in long spiralling lines around my base - they're more exposed but even if it takes me 20 seconds to respond to a raiding threat I've only lost a small fraction of my energy generation.
I do the same with advance power, dotting them throughout my bases at random so a nuke could only take out 2-3 at most.
However, the argument is moot seeing as we now know we'll be able to line build or area build as we wish so... yay!

The build notes for Beta 59549 didn't include this but there are several new features to area build commands. There will be a post pretty soon to the modders forum giving some more detail about the changes but the one people on this thread might be interested in most is that the server now respects the "area_build_separation" value from the client. So if you want to spread out certain unit types, find it's json and add that value (look at "land_barrier.json" for an example). The default is 2 so make it larger to increase the distance between area built units or smaller to decrease it. This is the first step towards having a live game ui and such built around custom area builds, so look forward to that!

Awesome thank you!

Really awesome changes to area commands. I must admit that I was sceptical at first, but area patrol commands are really nice.

I know that area and line building commands make it so that buildings are : Click->Drag and a line or circle of buildings get spawned from the point of the click.

I was wondering if this will ever get expanded to free form line drawing. Similar to this screen shot but instead of units its buildings.


Source Post

Yes, experiments with free form lines are happening.

Much want

Is this really a good idea? I'm just wonder because can't you exploit the spacing between something like a well such that it messes with unit pathing? Correct me if I'm wrong, maybe my comprehension is off.

no, there currently is a mod for spacing out turrets, and it does not affect athing at all.
plus all these changes are probalbly in by now.

I'll ask this here: is a "build range area" planned? A sort of radius that the builder unit can build in without moving? That's a very useful and time-saving feature.

edit: there's also less potential for pathfinding problems with units not needing to constantly move to build.

That would be legendary.


It could be nice to make comm AI better too... it just randomly walks to place Mexes instead of rotating sometimes. Quite annoying at the beginning of the game.

This would be excellent! I was going to ask for a grid type area tool for defenses but a widely spaced circle would do nicely

Ok, how would I go about modding the space value between walls on my client? I want to test this out.

I would suggest clicking on my sig to get the mod manager, download the spaced turrets mod and in the mod manger's options open the mod folder then open the spaced turrets folder.

(in every mods folder the PA tree will be represented and you'll be able to see what files were modified and how, most of the time it's just one number at a certain line. and all the files concerned are only javascript (or html and css for purely cosmetic stuff))

@tatsujb
I'm changing the ""area_build_separation":0.5" to 10.0 and nothing is changing. I decided to look at an example of a file that was done and working, and the only difference between the mod file and vanilla file I could find was this: (for air defense)
"TEMP_texelinfo":9.09853} in the mod, vs "TEMP_texelinfo":9.4493} in the vanilla file.
I don't really know what I'm doing. Maybe I'm doing this in between patches where all the mods are broken and I don't know it yet.


edit: ok, I got it to work, but only once. I was under the impression that you could update the file while in game. Looks like I have to restart my game every time I want to try a new value. Is there a workaround?

2 drachmes .... nukedanger or not i would like to be able to switch between both modes honestly