General commands and timed orders

A couple of small ideas that have been bugging me:

General Commands:
One of the things I really loved about Supcom was the transport system and I'd love to see something like it in PA but the main thing that bugged me about it was the way the whole transport route and all of the transports assigned to it were attached to one specific transport and if that unit went down the whole system would just delete itself and all the units attached to it would just stop in place.

My solution is to have a system in PA that allows you to give an order by itself from the UI directly onto the map and just assign units to it. Want a transport line? Simply click the option and make one and then assign units to it. If everyone dies it will still be there ready to be modified to meet the new threat. Set up multiple lines of invasion and logistics and just shuffle units around it freely without having to worry about accidentally deleting it.

Having the system be built to allow orders to exist separately from the units you would assign them to could also slightly ease automation difficulties. For instance in Supcom if you have an area you want to patrol with fighters every time you need to add more fighters to the command you either have to have then assist a fighter already in the loop and risk it getting shot down or completely redo the order every time.

If the patrol order was independent, in addition to the previously stated ease of resuming patrols if you lost all your fighters, you could also add new fighters to the patrol by simply selecting them and clicking on it to add them or setting the factory to add all produced fighters to the patrol.

This concept would also include the previously suggested area commands idea where you can select and area for say wreck reclamation and assign units to the area. In fact I think we could greatly improve on it. How about LZs? Set up an area where any unit dropped off there or ordered to move there would automatically drive to the front lines.

How about build orders? Instead of having to worry about an engineer dying and losing your whole epic building plan simply design the complex as a general order and then either assign engineers to it building by building as usual or just set an area command to it for construction and assign engineers to that.

How about filter options? Need a firebase on the front lines? Pop a few engineers into the transport loop and set the LZ to filter out engineers and send them to a safe place for you to allocate them instead of directly to the frontlines with everyone else or better yet, have it direct them straight to the construction site.


Timed Orders:
Simply have the option to construct an order but delay its execution until you click a button on the UI or press a hotkey.

Example: You want to use an amphibious force to knock out the AA of an enemy coastal base then bring in gunships and use the area as an LZ to invade inland. You would click the delay order button and select a number slot for the order to be executed on before each command:

1. For the amphibious force to target the AA (either the good old fashioned go through and select each one manually or by making an area order over the base, setting it to attack, and filtering it for AA)

2. For the gunships to attack everything in the area.

3. For the transport route to start bringing in units.

Then when you were ready you could simply click on, or press the button associated with, each order and they would be carried out with exactly the timing you command. No delay between each command for you to click everything as fast as you can allowing you to set up complex maneuvers and execute them at leisure so you can watch the situation play out and respond to changes instead of frantically trying to get the next part of the plan going in time.

I believe these idea could be added with minimal clutter to the ui and without adding bloat to the commands structure. General orders would just be what would happen if you give an order without having a unit selected. Area commands and delayed orders could only be a button each with delayed orders having a dropdown for selecting the slot and area commands either operating "vanilla" as general engineering orders (construction, repair, reclamation) or by selecting it you could add orders to it like a unit.

These ideas are obviously from a very Supcom state of mind so they may not apply at all to this project but they've been bouncing around in my skull for a while and I felt I had to get em out somehow lol. I think these concepts could apply to a lot of situations and help ease automation a bit, improve command options and flexibility, and generally just open up options for commanders. At the very least I hope they give people some good ideas.

If You've managed to actually read all this, thank you and I hope nothing hurts too badly from the experience

This has been discussed in many other more suitable threads,
Search for "Orders as first class entities"

I am 100% behind you. And in fact I would go further and say we should go ahead and try and come up with a truly advanced and powerful abstract command system that gives us far more than just a ferry system.

I want a system that allows me to give high-level commands to units and have them be obeyed without a great deal of management. I think the best way to do this is with a class/instance structure for a variety of UI objects that can, if you wish, govern unit behavior for you according to your specifications.

Still a work in progress, though.

Wouldn't it be awesome if you could completely control your forces via a client side mod? Namely, that modders would be able to make AI which you could assign to a set of high-level orders and it would take care of mundane tasks for you. Not everyone would use it, and it's darn near impossible to make a 'good' AI, but mundane repetitive tasks should be doable.

The general command ideas are fantastic, I've found so many moments in SupCom where those would be useful. In particular the transports, the transport routes were always annoying to have to re-setup once you lost your transports.