Hello to all. I'm really looking forward to this game, but I do have an issue after seeing the vids available so far. The Kickstarter vid showed multi-planetary strategy game. I was certain this meant you wouldn't need to deal with things like base building (at least not much...) or moving every individual troop on the ground. This would mean doing it on every single planet, or playing the same part of game over and over and over again - in a single playthrough. Somehow I thought I'd be able to deal with extraordinary combat, like "superweapons", asteroid throwing and such. So, what I am here to ask is whether we will be able to NOT deal with micromanagement. Will there be a "build base" command, or a "build a preset army" button, or a "attack this enemy base"... Anything to that effect? Regards, SV
There will not be much micromanagement. However, what you're talking about falls firmly under the concept of macro-management, and that is what PA is all about.
This stuff is all semantics but what the OP is describing is definitely economic micromanagement i.e. setting up your resource generators, factory queues, etc. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macromanagement Getting back to the OP, yeah this isn't what you were expecting then. I would take a closer look at the kickstarter visualization and seminal RTS games like Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander for a better expectation of gameplay.
Just something to remember from Supreme Commander/Forged Alliance features, they had a factory repeat build function(queue it up and it will cycle through the list and start from the top), a factory PAUSE function(over-using your supply stream? pause it to give it a breather), and the classic waypoint function(when you're done building, go over there) These all eased the constant micro needs by letting do such things once and forget they're there until you get "Unit Limit reached" messages. Of course, by that point, you'd probably be sending that massive blob of units that puts zergling rushes to shame into the enemy base at that point.
I'm sure there will be build templates like there were in supcom, but if you're looking for completely automated base building and management then why not try a turn based strategy game like Civilization?
Micromanagement in my opinion is important enough to justify some support for it, even if the game is mostly macro oriented. I find micromanaging something that is very possible in Planetary Annihilation already. Split up your forces into smaller groups and you'll find that artillery has a much harder time hitting large portions of your army. The things that I feel that need to be in the game. 1. Proper pathfinding, the pathfinding of units is currently still pretty bad yet it really is one of the most important things to have. Because if you have to pay constant attention to guiding your units around obstacles, it's going to hurt your macromanagement as well. 2. Proper waypoints, waypoints in the game currently work but they are a tad uninformative, it really needs to show connected lines. Macromanagement becomes a lot easier when you can easily see which builder does what. Especially considering you often have atleast a dozen builders on the map. 3. Grouping units, managing large groups of units is pretty hard in this game. I would love to see Planetary Annihilation to have some kind of army setup where you can make squads, platoons, companies, battalions, brigades and divisions.
In my oppion it makes sense that you have the option for different formations. If it is phalanx , securiting your big experimental death ray by standing cycles around or defending a whole preset area on their own and also a spearhead formation. On one hand they make sense on the other hand you do not want that your tanks drive as a konvoi to the enemy base so that the are slaughtred by a single turret one by one.
I'm at this point mostly worried about Uber plans to allow keeping an overview over what's happening, in particular since there won't be a minimap (and it would be hard to transfer the minimap concept to a multi-planet game anyway). It's already quite hard to keep an overview on a single planet, mostly because it's actually a sphere. It's cool, but challenging. Having to do the same on multiple planets will be much more challenging, of course. So I do wonder, does Uber already have a nice plan for how to keep track of and maintain all your bases and armies across the galaxy without completely going mad? I try to think about ideas, but so far I haven't come up with much. A good notification system is certainly be a must, maybe something like proximity alerts radars that will notify you if a group of units is closing in on any of your positions, early enough so you still have some time to prepare... And yes, armies need to micro-manage themselves. They should assume a useful formation and attack in sensible ways, so you can just a-move the army without having to control separate units. I seem to remember there was a game that had a commander unit per platoon which would control the other units in the area...
I'm quite sure that a lot of useful control elements from TA and supcom will be in this game. An interesting idea came into my mind. Developers cannot foresee all kind of micromanagement that the players will have to do. It means that players will always have to do a lot of small tweaks to compete effectively... What if the controls system would be customizable? Suppose that the game has a scripting engine which allows players to add custom commands like "spread out and dodge" (for light units), "stay on the maximal attack distance to the enemies" (for artillery), "ignore fast-moving enemies" (artillery again), "build 20 tanks, 5 artilleries, 10 anti-air units and gather them here, then group them into an army, and go attack enemy base there" (attack enemy automatically), etc. There are a lot of such useful things. At first glance, they are too complex to be built into directly the game and will always require a lot of clicks an any RTS. But all of them can be easily scripted by advanced players (and shared for others). And I have not heard of such a thing done in any game... This is a war of machines, so human resource is the most valuable thing =) P.S. a programmer myself...
Definitely check it out! One thing to keep in mind, Spring games are usually well developed conceptually but not well developed graphically.
Ok, I see there are others who don't want to move every unit on every planet on their own... A system I'd like to see is roughly like this; Previously unowned planet; -a set up base command (pre-set base templates one would do based on the planet's endangerment and purpose) -a build army command with a toggle for pre-set army composition template and a toggle for its size Previously owned planets; -a build army command on an already your planet (composition, size) with an additional marker where to send it and a toggle to secure area or conquer the planet. Optional time setup for multiple armies landing at the same time. Needs a reminder whether the army survived or not. Needless to say - if you want, see the execution and micro all you want, just don't let it be absolutely crucial. -the rest is the same as "Previously unowned planet" This would give you the time needed for special features the game promises.
This is exactly what happened with Spring (open source TA-like RTS engine). Lua scripting was added around 2006/2007. Widgets were added then, they are lua scripts which are able to run without everyone running the widget. They can effectively see and do everything a player can; they can read unit position, economy etc... and can give arbitrary orders. They can also draw things in the game world (of course that only the player with the widget can see) and draw on the UI. These widgets are just as powerful as a player. In theory you could write a whole non-cheating AI in a widget and have it play the game for you. And nobody else in the game has to have the widget installed. This environment is the best customizable commands system you could ask for. Your prediction is fairly accurate in that quite a few people made powerful widgets and spread them around. Widgets made in this way are responsible for most of the great UI features in Spring. Once you've tried some of these it is surprising to see which ideas are useful and which only sound good. In the last few years the flood of widgets has died down, most of the really good ideas are already implemented. Initially each game which used Spring would have a fairly basic default UI and expect users to fill it out with their widgets. Recently (about 2 or 3 years) most games have been packaging the best widgets and set them up with good defaults. In effect everyone now has a powerful UI without searching for it and there is less pressure for players to make their own. I don't know much about the UI modding in FA. I doubt that it is as powerful as the Spring system simply because I am not aware of things such as custom formations and auto-kite in FA, surely someone would have implemented these if it were possible.
