Managing Production at Interplanetary Scale

I'm wondering what ideas people have for managing production across multiple planets. I'll go first.

My Idea
A production window for queuing structures within a specified area.

The Details
Here's the concept played out as a story: you'd start by building a command post, which creates a ring of command around the surrounding area. All structures (factories, mexes, etc…) within this ring of command are considered a ‘base’. When zoomed out to an orbital level you can click bases to queue unit production of all factories on one screen (see visualization). This would allow quick management of many bases from orbital view. Taken a step further, bases could support queuing structures as well as units, for example: if a structure is queued from the ‘base window’ an engineer will automatically place that structure within the bases ring of command. This would allow the tried and true production gameplay from Supcom and TA to work seamlessly while this new base method works on top of it to manage massive battles in mid to late game.

Your thoughts?

Updates
People recommended managing production by entire planets. This would be helpful once you've conquered a planet or two. Imagine, the option to manage planets, bases and single structures would smooth gameplay through early, mid and late game.

Its interesting, i can see it working, however if you are just saying build this without specifying a location how do you know show what is and isnt an area to build? What if you exceed a boundary?

The AI would need to be smart enough to build in valid locations.

As for what to do once a base gets crowded, here are a couple ideas: (1) the boundary of the base expands as you queue more structures, (2) if there's no valid locations left then you'll need to build another base (3) you can try to squeeze the structure in manually, the old fashioned way.

Ah, seems solid then.

I think one thing that needs to be added is an infinite build button like in Rise of Nations. In that game you push one button and a barracks, etc, would keep building what ever was in the queue.

So for example if all you wanted out of one factory was light tanks then that's all it would build. But if you wanted that factory to build 2 lights tanks and 1 heavy tank then you would queue that up and bush the infinite button.

Then if you wanted a constant stream of troops to the front lines you place a way-point.

You could use your idea with way-points and an infinite button. Always sucks when you are concentrated on a battle and then loose it because you forgot to keep building troops. Not to mention it gives you more free time to enjoy the game.

I vote 'love it' because the higher level we can make decisions, the better all around. Obviously the implementation of the idea won't look anything like the nice sample image, but that would only evolve to be better as people have an interface to work with.

Uber already seems to suggest a 'base' organisation feature of some kind, this is just a good extension of that idea.

oh, and Oldlaid

This is already a standard feature of Supcom. Plan out a build queue, put it on repeat. Even assign other factoryies to guard your main factory and they'll build pieces of the queue too.

"Sorry you have to wait 15 minutes till you can deploy more units, please play some fb games till then" lol, sorry gotta thing about that ui. Too many bad games... well I ask myself, for what should I specify click at units from a base, on Interplanetary Scale, when no one of them can move out?.. I mean wouldnt make more sense, to make shortcuts, for these types and when you type them on the planet, you get the units selected?

ps: 3 light tanks? i guess thats a extreme example of a planet, where you would normally search your units and with that you want select them fast.

yours Yourtime

Thanks for comments Yourtime. It sounds like your assuming by clicking 'light tanks (3)' in the visualization it would build 3 tanks—which isn't what I intended—I can see how that could be confusing. I intended each bar to represent a separate factory build queu. In the visualization it shows land factory one building three light tanks, land factory two building a single heavy tank, and land factory three building two light tanks. All this construction would happen simultaneously, so in the visualization three land units are being constructed at the same time with more queued to build later. You can also see the progress of the units construction by the different colored background.

Does that make more sense?

I understand now and yes good idea, but not for every factory of the same level a new button, because maybe you have some station with more than 10 facotries, dont know :/

Just have something straightforward. Instead of making factories near each other into groups, just have something showing

For example, on the right hand side show the queue of each and every factory you have (maybe you can hide these by pressing a button), and the ability to add more queue at any time thorugh that interface, or to rightclick on it to switch view to that factory.

Popup window on middle of the screen is a big no-no. And so is implementing some rings of command which don't seem to be a very useful concept, if you want to categorize factories by something, maybe do it by planet.

I don't know if I want the system to construct structures. It is very hard to make an AI place buildings correctly all the time.

I would support the automatic division of unit build queues among all nearby factories, if you can override the system and control certain factories manually without having to check if everything is still in the build queue.

I'm really not sold on the benefit over assisting one master factory.

Managing production on a planetary scale would help a lot. One of the difficulties with Supreme Commander is coordinating production on such an epic scale. Planetary containers would certainly help to manage that tedium.

For a gross example, you could have planets in the galaxy dedicated to air, land, and naval units. If you're not getting enough land units for that next conquest, you'll need to setup another planet or consider diverting resources from one of the other planets.

Total Annihilation, and Command and Conquer seemed to make managing resources less tedious because there was a limited scale. Sure some of the levels were, but limitations in technology made it comical in some cases. Game play requires some sort of balance and planets just might help.

Honestly, when we're an hour into a SupCom game, I couldn't care less where power generator/factory/mass storage #45347 goes. I'd love it if they expanded support commanders to work like this - assign them an area to govern and when you click on them they give you a list of what they can build in their assigned base.

In the stream yesterday I believe Mavor mentioned PA being a 4X game. Another 4x game, Sins of a Solar Empire, lets you click on a planet you control and from there access the build queues of everything there. If I need one more military lab, I can click the planet while zoomed all the way out, hit the military lab button and the game will auto place it. If this were early game I'd be careful with building placement, but after a while it stops being as important and sometimes I just want to quickly build a structure without needing to hunt down an idle engineer and place it.

Grouping by bases would allow more flexibility compared to grouping by planet, especially for really large battles on a single planet—which Uber has hinted at. That being said, managing at a planetary scale would be helpful—and there's no reason why base grouping can't happen simultaneously. After a few planets are conquered it'd be helpful to queu production on an entire planet in one go—though I'd still want the option to manage a single bases production—or even manage a single factory in the usual Supcom manner.

Mavor said it wasn't a 4x game =p

Anyway, I hope it has reason to build on a small scale sometimes. Not all the time definitely. And when we're talking interplanetary wars, I care less about where stuff is put and more getting more power/mass/production built. But I always saw the cool defensive formations that got build by ais in the supcom campaigns and wished I could do that too, then went right back to spamming my formationless grids of random junk.

Great thought! Perhaps when building from the higher scale 'base' and 'planetary' command windows the AI will automatically build in smart formations.

I believe we first need to get an impression of what it means to manage a large PA game, then look for a fix to it. Since this is mainly a UI element it can be added later on during development, perhaps even in Alpha phase.

Let's wait until the game is in a further stage, then try some battles, then see how we can improve on it.

The idea is not bad, though, and having buildings grouped into bases would be useful for more than one reason.

I think the production should be menaged depending on the zoom out level.

I like the base idea, but it could be expanded: On basic zoom, you get to select individual factories and menage production. On orbital view, you have whole bases from which you select production, just like in the idea. On solar system zoom, you select planets/asteroids/moons and give them global commands. In the case of galactic warfare, you could go a step further and issue production commands to whole solar systems.. (I am new here. Is this how galaxy conquest is going to work?)

It could be done without any menu segregation. Just by zooming out enough base icons appear, then planet icons, then solar system icons.