Voice Over: What Alerts Do You Want To Hear?

You should just keep looking at everything. This alert would be horrible when you have a dozen groups all moving somewhere at once.

Every alert should have a delay timer before it can be heard again.

I wish that PA could be played at a level of micromanagement where you could surveillance and be notified every time a group of units went idle. A group consist of 2 or more units so you are gonna have a lot of groups with different orders, not just on 1 planet, but sometimes on several planets. What is the difference between a large group and a small group, early game, midgame and late game and how are you gonna know which group that just made the "Destination reached" sound?
Sure, if you get a Picture in Picture that displays the group that just went idle so you can locate them but how do you guarantee that the player don't get overloaded with PiP screens?
You might play the game at a level where you don't get overloaded with PiP screens or can know which group that just played the "Destination reached" sound so if the game can be modded or customized to behave like you suggest then I think that is good because I support player customization but I don't think the behaviour is suited as the default behaviour.

This is arbitrary. What if the 2 scouts that just overflew the enemy base played the "Destination reached" sound when you have an army that just stopped infront of some enemy turrets and gets blasted to pieces? There might even be units under attack at other places so you might not even know that these unit are under attack.

Simple sound effects are better candidates for these. Like you can have a charge sound effect when the Uber cannon is loaded. The Uber cannon reloads in 1 second so I don't think that you even got time to play "Uber cannon ready" before it have reloaded.
Don't you think it would be annoying that if every time you gave an attack order it would play the sound "Attack ordered"? Now unit responses are more a thing if you want to give the units a character like in Starcraft or Warcraft or many other games. However TA and SupCom typically only have short sound feedback when you give commands. Sound feedback is good and is pretty much necessary as it can be played before the unit have actually started moving due to network latency and if you contextualise it by giving the unit different sounds for different orders that is good.

Define "area". Does the game define it for you or can you define your own areas of interest before the game starts or ingame? It is harder than you think but if you do manage to define it in a clear and transparent way that is intuitive to new players then I think it could really work. This applies for most of what I brought up here. It could work with a good implementation but in isolation those sound cues do seem superfluous.

Edit:Actually unit responses in TA and SupCom gave the units character even if the sounds were just robotic sounds. I guess we are still lacking those in PA. Something that will be added I hope.

To deal with spamming messages have the same message with plurals, it would go like this

Time-outs should be the case for all but the rarest events, have a sliding scale so every-time an event occurs it has a longer timeout, naturally gives more triggers early game when certain events are much rarer while filtering out too much information later on.

A couple which hasn't yet been mentioned yet:

• "Enemy commander detected" - whenever a commander becomes visible
• "Enemy commander fleeing" - first time a players commander is spotted in an aestraus
• "Enemy moving fabricators to other planet/moon" - first time a player is spotted moving orbital fab or carried fab into a transfer orbit.

• "The enemy has detected our commander" - If you LoS can see an enemy that can see your commander.

Modification to existing suggestions: to give extra useful info

• "Enemy x (construction) detected" - adds detail if detected high importance building is complete or in-construction

I guess they are talking about the specific click-drag area attack command. Would be also useful to have confirmation for completed construction queues for both factories and fabbers.

under 50% efficiency: "Additional resources required"
under 10% efficiency: "Resources required for building"
over 50% wastage: "warning: overflow"
over 200% wastage: "critical overflow"

First sight of enemy commander: "Enemy commander located"
Full intel on orbital body with no enemies: "Planet conquered" (bonus points for naming the planet)
Last unit on a planet (beside walls) dies: "Planet lost"
Enemy unit detected on friendly planet or on orbit transfer course: "Planet under attack"
Enemy concentration jumps dramatically in short time: "Invasion detected"
Halley activation: "Planet acceleration detected"
friendly structure takes damage from an enemy artillery structure: "Under siege"
Player has nuke silos, is not building nuke silos and all nuke silos full: "Missiles ready"
Friendly building activity concentration drops dramatically: "Construction complete"
Friendly idler concentration raises dramatically: "Objective complete"

Derp. I call that "Area attack".
I don't use the area attack in that high level fashion. I rather use it tactically to target specific units. So a better term IMO would be "Area cleared".
As for you other ideas, I think it could work. Although the whole "rarest event", "sliding scale", "high importance building" seems like it should have a default that can easily be changed by the player if they wish. Customization for the win!!!

Some of these suggestions seem to be assuming that there isn't constant action going on everywhere. I don't think a lot of these will work out well in an intense game.

Godde,
I appreciate the thoroughness of your reply but it is unnecessary. This is a suggestion thread. We are not working out all of the minutia that would go into the perfectly optimized announcement mechanic ever made. The question was, "Voice Over: What Alerts Do You Want To Hear?" I answered, you could do the same. Make some suggestions of your own rather than arguing over whether mine are going to work or not.

Both user customisation and clever timeouts/prioritisation(that get longer/more selective as the game progresses) should help fix voice spam.

• time-out prevents repeat burst of activity (perhaps after voicing "repeated launch detected" etc...)
• prioritisation could be implemented with some combo of a stack and a grading system (don't mention something minor when something major like a nuke is launched)

I've already upvoted all suggestions that I think are generally useful and suitable for the scope of PA.

Brad did specify that the challenge is to limit the amount of voice played. Separating the wheat from the chaff so to speak.

Nuclear launch detected.
Planetary movement detected (i.e. halleys on a planet activated)

of course we need JP Lowrie for the bulk of the voiceovers.

but:

for "nuclear launch detected", I think it needs to be a female voice.. unassuming, uninterested, almost bored. as if she's opening a can of green beans. perhaps 15% sensual. something a lot like the voiceover here;

I've played enough DEFCON: Everybody Dies to know that this would become depressing...

Planet... Annihilated!

Is John Patrick Mason no wait that was the dude from the Rock.

If Jon Patrick Lowrie is voicing, Then please make the units yap all game long.

But yeah, its important to find a balance, since this RTS is on another scale. but im wondering how was it solved in the other game like say Supreme Commander, i know its not quite on the same scale, but its certainly the nearest i think.

One thing is certain, i cant wait for units to say something.

I like, as most players do, i would assume, put units into groups ctrl 1 to 9. Unit formation 1 is under attack, or some other awesome designation for each control group. So you know it that group thats under fire..

It would be nice if units or well groups, would relay the message back about how the actual battle is going. Its so annoying in say Starcraft 2, when your not looking at zealots, even if they are winning like, 40 zealots vs some marines or whatever, its always WE CANNOT HOLD, WE CANNOT HOLD, why cant you hold ? and what cant you hold ?.. Stuff like that should only be said if the unit formation is actually losing the battle, not when winning or still undetermined. Threat terminated or annihilated.

Instead of out of metal or energy. It should be production slowed.

Overall it might be very important to have a small text window as part of the interface, where stuff off planet gets written down, so you only hear stuff by voice and sound that is actually happening on the planet your are viewing, unless ofcourse its your commander, that has to apply no matter where you look, because thats game ending threat.

The reasoning behind a chat or log window, is you can easily scroll up and down see the event logs, and click on them to take you to the spot even if the event has passed.

Obviously it would make sense to just do some quick recordings nothing perfect, for a first pass, to then nail down when and what becomes to much.

Commander threat level high, i kinda want it to be a bit more robotic instead of so human, i mean robots, do they really see each other as allies, again english isnt my native, but maybe there is a more computerish way to describe it.

I wonder how two commanders would see each other, i doubt it would be a friends or allies. More like just another component of the whole.

Commander under threat.

Maybe just use one tbh, i mean its equally important, i doesnt really matter if its your commander or your allies commander that is under attack does it ?, i mean either way, shared army or not, its a huge lose if you lose a commander either way.

All alerts should have a growing tolerance. As a specific alert is called repeatedly it's priority is reduced. In the UI settings we should have a slider to add an alert priority threshold ranging from Reserved to Prolific, and options for each specific alert to always or never alert.

edit: Some alerts, such as enemy forces spotted, or "base under attack" should have a multiplier based on the value of the enemy force. That way you can get alerted over a few units in the early game, but each time you spot the enemy the minimum force required to sound the alert again will rise.

Here are some words I wanna hear from ya: the unit cannon is finally in.

A very simple suggestion:

Commander destroyed: [color] [enemy/friend] commander destroyed.
2 commanders destroyed in sequence: DOUBLE KILL
3 commanders destroyed in sequence: TRIPLE KILL
4 commanders destroyed in sequence: MULTIKILL
5+ commanders destroyed in sequence:


GODLIKE

After entering the game:

Welcome back commander

playing a backer/preorder commander:
Thank you for pre-ordering (can be shut off afterwards)
thank you for backing
(etc)

when encountering one of the 100 unique commanders:

Unique commander detected.

Strategic Launch detected