Suggestion: Tracking commands and events

Hi all, long-time lurker (and backer), first time poster.

After playing SupCom for a while, there is one thing I really miss in the interface (which in general is absolutely fantastic). Late in the game, there is a lot going on and you probably have multiple 'projects' running and it is easy to lose track of them.
Say, for instance, that you send a transport to the other side of the map. That could take 2 minutes and in the intermediate time, you're of course going to do other stuff. It could then be that the transported units are idle for a minute before you realize that the transport arrived already. I imagine this isn't a problem for the pro's amonst us, but for a casual player like me, this happens a lot and the game could help me prevent this.

I suggest a system where you can give an order and 'track' it of a sort. So, say I gave the transport command, I could then push a button (for instance, the 't' for track). If the transport then succesfully arrives you should get a message or an icon pop-up which you can click to zoom the camera automatically to the command.

This system could be made very generally. You could track a nuke-launcher (getting a signal when a nuke is ready), or a commander (when an upgrade is ready). You could track build-orders and such. I don't think this is really hard to implement. SupCom, for instance already had ETA indicators when you held shift. You could just give the signal when this reaches 0:00.

I can also imagine this system being very open to modders, so that they can add custom events that trigger messages, that you can click to zoom the camera to specific area's.

Just to be clear, this would be a UI only thing. It would be optional, and if you don't want to use it, you wouldn't have to.

A bit long for a first post, but I wanted to be torough. I haven't seen this kind of suggestion posted before, and I felt it missing.

PS: While you're at it Uber, what about implementing an actually working Coordinated Attack?

Nice idea. But it should be easy to mod, though. Haven't you looked for corresponding mod for FA?

Setting alerts on certain events, such as building completion, unit arrival, etc, would be very handy later in a PA game, where the player might be spread across several planets. In fact, a method of keeping track of all notifications would be very handy. Several of the Close Combat games do this:
http://www.gamershell.com/static/screen ... 1_full.jpg

If you take a look at the bottom right of the image, there's a notification box (it says "Germans Request Truce" at the top), which lists all recent events in the game, with more urgent events in orange/red, and ordinary events in green. Clicking on an event will take you to the location where it occurred.

A system like this shouldn't be too hard to implement in PA, and if you add your own alerts, they would be flagged in the notification box to get your attention.

I definitely think it's an idea that merits looking into.

It reminds me that in TA, I was used to often finish the build queue of a constructor by a radar.

The radar is low cost, quick to build, always usefull and when the build is finished, you eard a very specific sound. This sound was very usefull to indicate the end of the queue.

Unfortunatelly, it worked only with constructors.

So I find this idea really good !

Bump, because everyone in the thread agreed with it, and I would like to see if devs agree as well.

And another suggestion: if you track stuff like a nuke launcher, it could also display an icon of the unit on the right side of the screen, with a small bar on it that fills up as the nuke reaches completion.

This sounds like something that could be done really well with the multiple-window concept. A simple button that lets you open a miniature window viewing that unit and whatever it happens to be doing might go a long way to letting you track it.

Not to mention that you can easily select it for new orders as well, because you can just click on the small window. (And I assume give orders by clicking somewhere in another window.)