Special thanks to ledarsi for the idea In standard supcom/ta/zero-k you select a group of units, give them abunch of waypoints and they'll do that. Let's label that "low level orders" You could also give units the ferry order, which others would help with, but still ordering individual units in this "low level" kind of way. Let's take it up a notch What if, either alongside or in place of these "low level orders" you could instead place "order waypoints/markers" and at a later time assign which units shall follow these orders. Let's label this idea "high level" since it does not necessarily act for single, small units. Instead these orders would exist until you remove them, and at any time you could assign a new group of units to perform the tasks, just like adding units to a ferry order in SupCom. I personally think these "high level" persistent orders will be necessary to utilize the massive scale of this game (and once I figure out how to start a poll I'll have one up )
I actually have a lot to say on this subject, but I'll keep it concise since this is your thread, archer. I think RTS games are running into the limit of what a player can accomplish when they are occupied with issuing order literals, like move and attack, to individual units. The player is essentially acting as squad leader, and in bigger games they are doing this for multiple squads, possibly in different places. A general doesn't really ever give those kinds of orders. They set up the structures and policies that govern a large number of big forces in parallel. I think it is preferable for the player to spend most of their time managing structures that govern a lot of units in parallel, rather than manually controlling each. Making a modification to the framework will be reflected in big shifts in many units' behavior. A trivial example of this would be waypoints, as above. Creating abstract points which exist as logical entities that units can interact with has tremendous power. Rather than manually update all my factories' rally points, I create a point, call it Point Liquid, and assign my factories to rally to it. If I move Point Liquid, it updates all the factories' rally points without issuing any orders to them. More importantly, what if such logical entities could give units orders? Units ordered to move to Point Liquid might be ordered by the point to go to another point, creating a chain of waypoints of arbitrary length which you can assign any unit to follow with one command. And you might set this up well in advance of using it.
Exactly where I was going with the "high level" orders. Maybe even have options to "wait for X number of units before continuing" would be a sweet function for having all your units form up into groups rather than long trails
Being able to properly command an army like a general would has always been an rts dream for me. I'd like winning to come from strategy and planning. Why don't I go play a grand strategy game then? Because driving around my robot armies to blow stuff up is just so darn fun too It is really frustrating in an rts to know the grand plan I want to execute, but have to endure so much tedium just to make it happen because I can only give low-level orders to units that need babysitting.
Ai war did something like this: they had a structures called Rally posts, which units entering a system would gather around, certian rally points could be given orders (say patrol to another system), using these you could set up patrols, invasion forces, and even beachhead. It would be a neat system to see in PA, specifically if it was tweakable, IE tell the units to attack move once atleast X amount of units are at the location
