I'm not sure if this has been mentioned already: there have been so many suggestions and forum topics that I simply can't keep up. Anyway something that has always annoyed me with TA and SupCom was the fact that you had to select individual buildings in order to queue up units. If you had three or four of the same buildings, it started to be a bit of a pain. So my suggestion is a type of global build queue/menu where you can simply order, say, 100 k-bots and that order will be automatically evenly distributed to all buildings capable of building that unit type in that particular theater of war. So if there were four capable buildings, it would automatically assign a 25 unit queue to each. This global build menu isn't designed to be a replacement for individual building queues - so micromanagement can still happen on a building-by-building basis (if the player wishes), it is more an optional system that can be put in place in order to minimise micromanagement.
There was queue sharing? Huh... I played SupCom like it was TA with a zoom function. That'll learn me :S.
Unless I've horribly missed something, there was no queue sharing in SupCom. You could however order several factories to build a certain amount of units at the same time. Selecting 4 factories and then clicking a unit to build 10 times resulted in 40 units.
Yes, basically you have the Main factory, it was the one you gave it the repeat build queue you wanted, then you just set the rest of your factories to assist the Main one and voila, all the assisting facs would build based on the Main's orders, to top it off if you needed some engies or AA really quick you can select any of your assisting Facs and give it say an order for 10 AAs, it would then finish whatever it was building, then build the 10 AAs and afterwards switch back to assisting the Main Fac. It was pretty swell. Mike
That is pretty damn useful. I would still like a method to select what to build WITHOUT playing hunt the factory (or assigning the factory to a key) - especially in a game with this great a scale, I imagine that searching for the main factory on every single world/moon would slow you down. Maybe a method where you can select the base as a whole or something, and access the build queues from there..?
but then to give out build orders to separate factories would require to to "hunt them down" anyways. Frankly you shouldn't have to be hunting them down anyways, You built them, you gave them their orders, you should remember which is which and there are(or should be) always the option of control groups, meaning you don't even have to move your screen at all to adjust the build order. Mike
So what happens when there are 11+ separate bases? You only have 10 control groups. Unless you want to assign letters/symbols as potential control groups. But then what happens when you are playing a game so massive that you have used ALL possible assignable control groups? And I very much doubt that you would want all control groups dedicated to building management. Or do you plan on having a set of control groups only work on a particular planet? This is a game built around fighting over solar systems. I seem to recall there was mention of potential 24+hr team games. I'm sure that people would forget build orders, building locations, etc in that time... If this game is to retain a macro-strategy feel to it, while the player has to manage war over multiple fields of battle at the same time, it will have to deal with problems such as these. That said, a suggestion is a suggestion and I have no experience designing games...
Wouldn't you need one of those keys to assign the control group? Anyway, this is kind of my point. How do you make a simple interface for factory/base management and not run the potential of forgetting which control group is assigned to which factory on which world :S. EDIT: I don't mean to sound confrontational and I'm truly sorry if I come across as being so. I just think that it is a complicated problem that merits some thought.
I don't understand the problem. In SupCom, I'd regularly have thirty to forty different factories in 11+ bases, and several hundred units at a time. Never needed control groups for them. Build queue sharing means that you only need to click on one factory in each base. You just need to cleverly decide which factory. Since I was lazy and built all my factories in a line, without giving thought to exactly where they should be placed; I just decided to use the factory at the end of each line as the master (to which every other factory was slaved to).
You're not coming off as confrontational, don't worry. You've got a good point, it definitely deserves some thought. There are multitude of ways to approach the problem, and I think it'd be beneficial to discuss how it could be handled.
