making this game playable

Question for the developers:
How am I going to be able to manage multiple planets and build stuff on all of them while fighting battles and strategizing. I ask this because i felt that in supreme commander, it was rather difficult to manage everything because a lack of hotkeys. this problem is aggrevated because it will be hard to manage everything on a sphere: you cant zoom out and see everything at once. I think making a notification system, and or an overview type of system could help out. also being able to jump to different view rather than scrolling a ton would be really good.

Thanks!

I think part of the appeal is having to split your focus and think about many things at once.

I think that this game is definitely going to need hotkeys, control groups and camera hotkeys. Give me those things and I will have no problem, even with a sphere.

I agree with notification thing. The lack of mini map is going to make them have to come up with something creative.

On the topic of minimaps;

viewtopic.php?p=519683#p519683

Why force this though? If you want to zoom in on one and zoom out on the other ... just do that with two actions. Otherwise you can't do basic things like see two bases zoomed in or watch two fights at once, or be zoomed out on two planets.

Scrolling twice takes twice as much effort as scrolling once. ;P

But just consider that I was replying specifically about minimaps.

By being good. The game isn't here to hold your hand.

It isn't so much about twice the effort, but twice the time. You are fighting not only your opponent but time itself in a rts game. If i almost never have to scroll in a game that is a good thing. I absolutely hate scrolling, to death, it is so slow, camera zoom thing is way slow too. I really hope they are going to have simple but well implemented hotkeys.

You guys can maybe tell i play waaay to much starcraft...

Starcraft is so limiting its horrible, SupCom zoom is so satisfying and I love going in and out the whole time (not sexual)

I don't know how can you feel good playing and watching such a small screen with billions of things happening at once without the ability to do anything about it, I can't watch or play Starcraft exactly for that reason, no zoom ability, feels way too close

Yes it may be worse from a visual tactical point to a newb (as in someone not used to or efficient with the system). But if you have the APM to effectively use camera hotkeys, control groups and stare at the mini map; it is way and I mean way faster. Obviously pa is way bigger so it needs strategic zoom. But it also needs control groups and camera hotkeys to reward high APM. It makes the game way more fun

I couldnt agree more, in FA it usually went like this: to make units (change production), you have to scroll all the way out, scroll back to your base, select the buildings, click on what you want to make; in starcraft: 4aaaaaa, and you can keep watching the battle or do other stuff.
Again, maps in PA will be X20 or more the size of starcraft, besides being spherical, so it will need to deviate from starcraft alot, but some things make playing so much more efficient and work no matter what the map size.

Yes!!!!!! It is going to take a combination of StarCraft and Fa control systems if they want to make this game even remotely competitive at high levels.

..........so you purposely ignore control groups on FA, but promote them in Starcraft? Biased much?

Not to mention you gloss over the fact that you need to go back to starcraft production units much, MUCH more often due to the limited nature of the queue.

Lets look at a proper Example;

Stacraft
4aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa(repeat often)

SupCom
4 Click click click(once per change due to Infinite Repeat)

There's no zooming required. Heck, in SupCom you only need to have one factory of each type selected because you can chain assist them, so you don't have to hit the button once for each unit you want to build, just once.

Mike

Factory Chain assist was the best. So simple to make an army...

Make 10 factories, click 10 times and all of them build insane amounts :lol: Best thing ever

No, that's not what we are referring to. We are talking about the idea of taking one factory, setting up a repeat build queue, and telling the 9 other factories to assist the one with the queue, this means if you are changing your composition, you only need to adjust the parent factory. It also means if you suddenly need like 5 engineers or something you can queue those up in one of the child factories, it will build those asap and automatically switches back to assisting the Parent Factory.

Mike

One thing I would really love is a button that instantly clears the queue. In emergencies I would like to be able to ctrl-z all my factories and tell them to build one specific thing without worrying about whatever they already have queued.

supcom had both control groups and build hotkeys though.

Yea I know I was referring to that too, you only need to click 10 times to link the factories and then just use the parent one to build in all factories. Instead of setting build queues in each factory separately, speeds up stuff significantly

I don't see why you couldn't just click twice to select all the factories....