Structure placement, building sizes & defense

So I can think of a lot of differences between TA and supcom when it comes to placing structures. In TA, the unit filled the entire construction block and if you put them side-by-side, your units could not navigate between them. It was common to set up walls and/or block passageways with buildings in TA. This could cause unintentional clutters, however. In supcom, the buildings had the extra space between the structure and the end of the "blueprint," and allowed for units to navigate between them even if the buildings were built right beside eachother.

Also, the way we put down defense in TA was different. It was common to randomly shift-click several entire screenspaces full of missile towers, as they provided anti-air and ground defense, but contained little or no armor. In Supcom, we had specialty towers (anti-air, anti-ground), and very often they were supported by walls instead of randomly thrown around the map.

I liked the way that Supcom improved over TA in draggong a shift build queue, and this may have made the latter example easier to accomplish. But it was also great fun to set up fields of spread out defense that you would have to plow through in order to reach the enemy base.

TA had an overall more spreadout base pattern with tight building queues used for cluttering navigation (in addition to dragonteeth), whilst supcom had a tighter base pattern and defense pattern, with clutter instead being left as a function of wall building.

How would you prefer it? I'd rather have a choice between the two. I enjoyed throwing down a wall of solar gens in TA, even though they weren't as effective as DT. But I liked Supcom's organization: for example, you always had the right amount of walls to fit properly around buildings and defense (and no spaces left over)-- in TA, this varied too much, e.g. you would have leftover spaces that you couldnt fit dragon teeth into when you tried to put it around a structure.

This is what I am thinking: The walls should be like the were in supcom, but we could also enlarge or tighten the blueprint around the structures in PA. Lets say you click a structure to put down for a queue. You can hold ctrl and scroll the mousewheel to make the blueprint larger so that you can still lay those buildings down in a line, and your units can still navigate between them. You do the same thing except make the blueprint right up against the structure so that when you place them in a line, your (and enemies) units cannot navigate between them.

Variable structure sizes? Do not want. A particularly meaty structure can break game balance like no other. Or result in games where bases of equal power are two completely separate sizes.

Variable wall sizes? I would like that very much.

I'm referring to the box around the structure as variable in size, i.e. the space between it and another structure

Supcom style buildings, everything else is a waste of time and coding, not to mention the micromanaging it'd require

Having some space around the building would be useful. There is few things more frustrating than having your factory production blocked because you put that damn powerplant closer than you thought. Sure, with enough practice it's the kind of mistake that you mostly stop making, but it is still bad for new players. And I want to play a RTS, not an urban planning game. Also, making walls of solar panels is kind of bizarre.
Obviously, if there's walls, they shouldn't have this pathable space around, that's kind of the point of walls. But if there is terraforming, then walls are redundant with the ground raising tool.

Now, I wouldn't be horrified if they chose to make "compact" buildings like in most RTS, but it would be a slightly better idea to let some space around buildings. If you are concerned about how it will look, this space can be decorated as well to be made looking like it's part of the building. Concrete, pipes, half-buried devices, the kind of thing you would expect military vehicles to be able to drive/walk/hover on.

If you want to wall stuff off, use Dragon's Teeth. Safer, cheaper, and more effective. (Make a smaller hole when it is finally removed.)

It wasn't perfectly implemented in TA, but the eventual implementations in the mods made them work quite well.

SupCom Style, this isn't starcraft where we need to wall off ridiculously small ramps or anything, and when walls are needed, we have....you know....actual walls!

Mike

How useless of a player do you have to be to manage to block off your factory exits? If you actually believe not having forced building spacing is a serious issue in games then you're the equivalent of the player doing what's shown in the image above.

Wait this isn't supposed to be a base planning game? Building placement (especially turrets) can allow players to make important decisions with little micro requirements. The ability to block passages through your base increases the options available for this so I like it.

I could go either way in terms of SupCom and TA buildings, but I see no point in being able to vary building 'areas'. I did somewhat like the careful placement of buildings that you had to do in TA, but it's really an artificial difficulty that doesn't really belong in a game like PA.

True, however, the possibility of creating a wall of solar collectors was quite fun (and sometimes even useful).
I understand that there's walls for that situation, but being able to design your whole base to lead enemy units into a chokepoint was undeniably useful sometimes.

That said, I have no strong preference towards either the SupCom way or the TA way.

There was already an incentive to to place walls instead of structures without forcing structure roles; walls were dirt cheap and resilient. Although, I found the real cost to building walls was sacrificing engineer time to it when engineers could be doing many other important things.

People are throwing the accusation of micro but I don't think it was ever an annoying part of the game that people hated. How you positioned your structures actually carried important ramnifications throughout your game. And if unit movement and positioning is going to be important in this game then I don't see why structure placement shouldn't be either.

Hardly 'artificial'. On the contrary, forced spacing in structure blueprints was pretty artificial.

In the Spring engine(Zero-K for example) when you drag a line of units you have the ability to change the distance between thoose units by prezzing Z or X.
So if you want to space out your turrets so they don't die to splash you draw a line and press X to increase the space between the units.
This allows the player to choose if he wants there to be space between buildings or not but still makes it easy to queue up a line of units fast.

While not the brightest, the AI in TA did spread out their resource gathering. There would be solar panels and metal extractors all over the place, so attacking one specific location didn't knock out all the production of that one resource. The drawback was that they'd often build themselves into a corner and units would be stuck in their factories, or that the locations they would build in blocked their armies from getting where they needed.

If the building footprint allowed units to get by even in dense construction, then that would allow the more random placement and higher density, which I think then allows for fewer "wrong answers" to help both new players and the AI.

I would also submit that part of the problem in TA was bad path scripting, in that when they increased the number of active requests for a path the game could handle, all of the sudden even with the original code the units all become much more efficient at getting around.

So would we have the "footprint" of extra space being a half of the distance needed for a unit to pass by? Would we base it on the largest units?

Actually, with the exception of buildings that could only be built on certain locations (geothermal, metal extractors), the location of buildings was random for AIs, except that it was confined to a grid with passages in between each square.

I replicated the TA AI building in sup com, and it looks like this:
http://i25.tinypic.com/3508ig0.jpg
http://i38.tinypic.com/ml58d4.jpg (bigger view, later on)

You can see distinct "grids" formed, although the edges of the squares aren't perfect as the buildings can overlap into the passages a bit. The top left of the zoomed out view shows it fairly well.

This.

Also, another thing I loved in TA was that wreckages impeded unit movement. So that borrowing from thapear's idea of a wall of solars, even if the solars were killed, you had to keep shooting them or reclaim them to allow units to get through. While this would make pathing a nightmare, the pathing technologies we have now should be able to overcome them.

I really missed this aspect in SupCom's iterations - it really hammered home the importance of reclamation, and would especially do so for new players.

This works well.

I like the ZK approach.

I don't like the SupCom approach. Leads to too many grids. I don't like grid cities.

I am in favor of implementing this idea as described by "veleiro" or in any variation that Uber decides on. Keeping in mind that there goal is to make the game more awesome where possible.