Building Templates: are they comming? With poll!

I remember the supreme commander templates that made the game way easier. Basically u could define templates for building orders so that u don't have to put each building individually. This would make building bases and defenses way easier.

So the first question is: does anybody know if this is in the plans for Uber?
Second question: would you like to see such a feature?

I think this was discussed before. The general consensus (if I remember correctly) was that they'd be nice, but there really isn't a huge need for them like there was in SupCom.

Because each map is randomized, there really aren't a lot of pre-programmed moves going on.

I could see a template for a turret surrounded by walls being useful.

Drag-click orders and the ability to put mexes across the entire globe with a single click are good enough for me.

I missclicked... damn!

Given the terrain of the maps, often I think your template wouldn't work because there would be a mex, mountain, or water/lava, etc. in the way. What I wish they'd fix first is that when you layout a string of factories (or whatever) and they show the blueprints as it being possible, then when you released the mouse button it actually built all of them. Often a bunch of them disappear as not being possible. Also often in the latest builds when you try to build a factory next to another factory (with separate clicks/factory types) it'll only tightly pack it next to the factory on one side of the existing factory and puts a huge space between them on the other side(s).

All templates I used in SupCom were independent of the map.
The map dependent stuff was too complex to be put in a template and additionally was depending on what I scouted from my opponent, so a simple template wasn't helpful for it.

As there's no adjacency in PA, I don't think this would be of as much value as in SupCom. But still, it would be nice to be able to have turret templates.

I mentioned this idea to one of the devs at PAX. He thought that it wouldn't be too hard to implement, but that (a) you couldn't do it with a mod, and (b) they would have to create all sorts of UI to allow people to manage their templates without resorting to hacking JSON.

As far as (b) goes, I think a macro record start / macro record end key combo would work well enough.

It's not totally impossible actually. The only issue is that there is no way to get a world position apart from generating a ping. So if you play 1vs1 and you don't need pings you could have a mod that makes it work. But I don't see much value in this feature for it to be implemented with such hacks.
Also see imbawalls in hotbuild, which uses a less powerful hack, but is enough for that specific scenario as well.

I saw imbawall, and spite being a good addition, u can't really plan ahead since your fabers must be on site to start building the tower or it doesn't work.

It would be nice if we made our own templates. Cause sometimes u wanna build factory, 2 power gens, factory, and so on. Also if u could put a layout of towers and walls, with air turrets and such maybe another with radar it would improve gameplay cause most people can't build them that well since it takes a lot of clicks and attention to set up most of the time is not worth the trouble. This way you can set it up and forget. It would give rise to better base layouts and make proxy bases much more complex yet simpler to build.

imbawalls works fine if the fabber is not on site. You can use shift as normal, you just need to not move the camera while the walls are placed automatically.

I will test this again but from what i saw what happens is if the fabber is too far away he will place all the wall in the base of the tower and the walls don't get built.

EDIT: found out, if u are not holding shift it places the tower as i said before, but if you hold shift for a few seconds it does work properly.

Also could u make the changes work with radar and missile towers?

I havent checked on the code in ages, but I thought it generally works for any building. Could be wrong for the current implementation, but the basic concept that is used should allow any small building.

Could u please implement this for these other structures?

Yep very easy to enable it for all small buildings

It would be good if the building continues where it can rather than stops when it reaches a point where something from the template can't be built. Also, it would be a task for the player to find open space to place (most of) a template.

Templates would be very useful; whatever reduces micro-management in a game, the better, and PA can become a terrible grinding click-fest for just building stuff

Templates would be nice. However, they are not that significant gamechanger alone. This idea has been presented here in the long past, but it would be very great add for templates...

Make it possible to have build ques and unit commands in the templates.

This would greatly change the managepality of the game. Instead of only having a template, which one fabricator will be building in time, you would also have build commands given to the buildings. This would require that blueprints would be selectable, which they are not now.

You want to have certain compination of units in your army. Managing this is now timeconsuming. You can build a lot of factories, but you have to return in place once in a while to set the build quess. This is what I think is biggest reason why people tend to play "one unit armies" is becouse they take less Actions to manage in large numbers. If you have a template for a factory which has already the build que set, then you can have variety in your army with very few clicks. However, preparasion is still required and skill differences between players are still maintained.


Units in the build ques would also have commands already given to them. For example, you could have bot factory, which once built, would strart building Dox which are set to planet patrol, thus harassing everything on the planet. On air factory which would build reclaiming fabricators and thus the reclaiming would be easier in planet scale.

Wait....you could actually place templates? where was this function? lol and honestly the only template i would/could use would be surrounding mex and defensive structures with walls since planets are much smaller and tend to not have a TON of free surface area...(that little rock tends to get in the way)