In TA type games the queueing system is very useful to help make plans in advance. But it can be easy run into problems with your economy and stall, forcing you to cancel buildings and unit production. This idea is to have economy (income rate) treated like the trade in civilization games, where you can decide what percentage to use for science, culture and gold. So when your spending more than you have incoming instead of all buildings and units being treated equally you could have them split into classes. E.g. Economy (mass and energy + engineers) Production buildings Defence buildings Units (land sea and air) Then you can chose what percentage of your total income goes into which class. So if your economy was starting to stall you can focus on economy. Or if your being attacked you can focus on defence and units. Done without having to cancel your production queues or your plans. If say you set economy to 100%, it will have full priority, but if you total rate income is twice your economy building projects, the other 50% will go to your other building/units. Because of this it might work better with more levels to set priority's, like a alternative vote system. But one just for economy/non economy units would be a great help for more casual players. You could also have a special rush job queue that you could move something giving it first dibs at 100% of your income.
Good idea. It wouldn't even have to be limited to classes. Select a number of buildings (ie. a sub-base) and drag their icons into a group to control its resource consumption rate. I think this is one of those elegance things, where you have to balance functionality against the interface. Maybe hide the functionality by default and expose the hooks for interface modding. Ideas: Instead of having to pause and unpause individual buildings, with this feature you can control resource consumption and output from a zoomed-out perspective Triggers that interact with resource rates of groups/classes; ie. when enemies enter a designated area, nearby factories and tactical silos automatically start building units Handling conflicts when grouping buildings may be tricky
Uber can give us four presets for the economy. Rather then sliders we can have a drop down menu to buttons to select. That way we can quickly make those adjustments while being attacked or flipping between multiple bases. Such as: Balanced: The default spread of resources. Economy: 80% of the economy goes to the building of economy buildings and such. Defense: 80% of the economy goes to defense structures and building units. Offense: 80% of the economy goes to building units. That way we don't have to micro buildings or units in the middle of directing battles. A simple button press and we can help recover our economy if we make a mistake as well.
All three sliders are at 33%. What happens if you slide one more to the right? Do both of the others go down at the same rate or only one? If you want to split one thing up onto multiple things you need a better method than sliders or getting the split you want will be a pain. Not to mention, that the exact functions and effects of something simple which states "80% go to <general category of stuff>" are very unclear and eventually undesireble even though you want to have more directed to that category.
did anyone use the supreme economy mod for FA? that was cool, had a list of the top 5 drains on your economy for both mass and energy. Something like that might help? https://sites.google.com/site/supecono/
I think that instead of sliders it would be a more efficient method if we could prioritize resource consumption to specific buildings/units and then classes. for example You click on a particular unit and then give it priority meaning the game would prioritize giving it resources at the max rate specified unit can consume before taking into account distributing resources to anything else. If the unit is consuming more resources then you are producing then only that unit will receive resources. Then your economy would check if any classes were given priority. If any classes were, then it would prioritize distributing resources to all of the appropriate units before attempting to distribute resources to all non prioritized units! The system would work in the terms Individual priority>Class Priority>Non Priority Units Meaning if resource distribution runs out at the individual priority level class will not get resources. Same goes for class. Just my idea. Would potentially work quite nicely in conjunction with the pause system. The pause system alone however is unreasonable to use by itself especially when u just want one unit to be built asap. Sliders could get very confusing in my opinion.
Zero-K has a priority system you assign to individual factories and units. At default it's on middle, where it functions at normal, but you can set something as high priority (that defense turret you need ASAP) or low priority (a couple extra walls or such). It's not faction-wide like other suggestions in this thread, but it'd be useful for priority projects.
I don't think this would really be a pain. How often do you need to get the split you want exactly right? Maybe you could lock a slider.
I think I'm going to leave this one too the modders. It's not that it's a bad idea, the idea is fine. It's simply that it changes the nature of the gameplay significantly while at the same time adding complexity. It also goes against my general rules that you should be able to see what's happening by looking at the map and what the units are doing.
However some way to limit some factories (not nessesarly in the way envisioned in this thread) to balance your economy, may be a good idea. The current option is only to pause or cancel a factories build order.
I'm hoping mod teams implement some Civ style city management, but instead of having a boring *** "node" city that you click on to open a menu where you fiddle with numbers, use the AI and unit count of PA to simulate and actual town-like base with a population of a few thousand. Civilian units would not be directly controllable, and the commander would construct and customize civilian structures to affect the population. So basically taking PA and shoving Civ and Sim City inside of it this would completely change the pacing of the game, and might be impossible due to added layers of complexity in the AI which might slow the game down too much. I'm eagerly waiting more information on mod software so I can start tinkering.
