Building units : Single units or squadrons ?

Hopefully someone has not allready posted about this.

In TA & Supcom/FA a factory will only produce one single unit at once.
There are other RTS like Dawn of War (1&2), Company of Heroes, and many others which give you the ability to build squadrons instead of single units.

And i was thinking :
1) what about having the ability to choose between both options in PA, where actually, building a single unit would be faster but would cost more resources, and building a squadron would be a little bit slower but would also cost less resources ?

2) How do think this would positively/negatively impact the gameplay ?

3) how many of you would like to have this option ?

Single unit's if you please as it makes braking them into smaller squads eaiser when each unit is 1 entity.

It'll slow early-game scouting and combat, because early resources are critical. If you were to attack early, it would be an all-in strategy.

+1 had not thought about early-games.
Was much more thinking it could make the game a little bit more "Nervous". But that could be an unlockable option in the middle of the game (based for example on your economy level) where battles are supposed to have much more units engaged.

I was thinking about having this to have much more units engaged simultaneously and faster for huge battles, with less micromanagement (needing to have many factories to produce many units in parallel)

There's nothing micromanagement about having lots of factories running.

Real micromanagement is having to build five more tanks in each factory. It won't matter if you have five factories producing one tank each or one factory building blocks of five tanks, if all you need you need to do it tick a box saying keep building these forever.

right, to me, squadrons are about to be able to counter more efficiently an attack you did not see comming and you know that it will be a little bit slower to produce a squadron, but you will have more units in a single step. Another option would be that squadrons are faster to produce but cost more resources . I was thinking about a good alternative to counter skirmishes you did not see coming.

also, why a factory could only build a single unit at once ?

Thinking also about this regarding transport : Transport Unit being built by land factory, coming out from the factory allready holding land units to transport

Normally many factories in co-operation works pretty well and is fairly balanced. No upgrades required and only the tiniest smidgen of micro. You can scale it to your economy so its easier to avoid an energy or mass stall. Only downside I can see when compared to the upgrade idea is that it would require more space (presumably). Which for balance reasons wouldn't be too bad.

Of course this is all theoretical but I am basing this off of how things worked in Supreme Commander.

In Supreme Commander you could tell factories to assist other factories.

Example: (In this example assume I have infinite mass & energy)
I have four land factories (A, B, C, D) and I want 4 K-Bots as fast as possible. I can set B, C and D to assist A. Then I queue 4 K-bots on A and A, B, C, and D all start building at the same time & finish at the same time and send the bots to A's rally point. If I say, want 6 K-Bots at a time I just build and then assign two more factories to assist A

Also, you only have to set the factories to assist once. In combination with the repeat build order function you can have those four factories spitting out squads of K-Bots consistently without needing to tell the factories to keep building.

If you can't support 4 factories at a time, stop one from building, the others chug along without a hitch (assuming it wasn't A you paused)

Yep but this means a good ability to manage your factories, which of course can be decided as being a critical aspect of the gameplay. If you can decide which way you want your single factory to build your units, you can react in a more efficient way and faster. Now of course i did not consider the impact on production flexibility.

I would say single units. I don't think much of PA will be cover based skirmishes like the examples you mentioned. Additionally I think it adds an extra unnecessary layer of pathfiding complexity for the devs (especially with tank squads, which will look very weird when trying to stay in formation).

if anyone remembers C&C generals mob units, they used all kinds of work around and were quite buggy. As long it is not the entire game that is designed about squad type units, I wouldn't do it. I also don't think it is fitting as infantry unity types are probably only a small fragment of the unit types (if there are even going to be infantry).

Seems needlessly complicated. The great thing about the assist mechanic in supcom is it allows you this type of flexibility without adding the complexity of a squad/single unit division which just clutters up the ui. We can already build units as quickly or slowly as we want with additional resources, I think it can just be left as is.

How big do you want your squadron? Build that many factories.

In practice you want multiple factories anyway because even if we were building squadrons you would want multiple factories pumping them out.

Part of the general design concept for the game is the idea that you create functionality by composing units, instead of making the individual units more complicated. For example what if you want your squadron to made up of units that different kinds of factories produce? Our system handles that case with the same ease that it handles the regular case. In practice it's very easy to build fairly complex groups of units.

Got it

Will the game have commands which help the player establish a squadron of different units?

E.G. when will a squadron of units know to arrange themselves into a particular formation.

Sup com had selected units form into formation.

SupCom 2 even had a cool mechanic on the stratigic view where units formed groups and had a 'squad' icon to eaily select them, changeable by simply selecting units and giving them an order to create a new squad and even keep the onlder one by subtracting from the first.

It seemed cool at first, but in the end it was more of a hindrance than a help. (And the non-smooth zoom out didn't help.)
Squads and the like are fine for small scale, tactical games, but in a strategic game, they just become too complex a representation for the scope.

I dunno, it quite like them.

It makes it easy to have two groups over the same area while retaining the ability to induvigally select them, but I suppose it does over lap with the whole "Ctrl 1" way of grouping.

I wounder if with some improvments the SC2 squad thing could still be a cool addition?

This.

It was more the execution than the concept. RUSE had a very similar feature, and I never found that as clumsy as Sup2's.

Correct. Ruse's method was a bit more elegant, and allowed better differentiation, whereas Supcom 2 just clumped stuff together. It's a concept that can work well enough, but how well it would work in PA, I'm not so sure. My main annoyance with the feature in Supcom 2 was that it got in the way if I just wanted to select a specific group, but the autogroup had included more than I wanted. In Ruse, units aren't selected and utilized the same, so it wouldn't become an issue.
Since PA is more like Supcom 2 than Ruse, it may end up encountering those issues if that same system is used.

When I read the OP, I was thinking less the "ordering around entire squads" aspect of games like Company of Heroes and Dawn of War and more that the factory simply produces multiple units at once. like, if I hold Shift and click a unit, it not only queues up five, it also causes the factory to begin building all five simultaneously. maybe they build a little slower since the factory has to share its facilities. but it might be more resource-efficient, and you get all five out of the factory at the same time, useful if you're say...getting air-transports to take your army to the front line. none of that "I'm going to carry one tank at a time because that's all that's waiting for me" crap that I got a lot in supcom.

Practically speaking, savings on this batch-production method would be something like the cost of an extra tank in every ten or 20 or so, but it'd mount up

For contrast, building individually you'd get it substantially faster, but it costs you slightly more on an individual basis.
perhaps for a limitation, you could only build batches of the same type of unit because they have to deploy at the same time and need the same production-time.