I have a suggestion for a little tool which you may already have thought of: when selecting a unit/group of units, I would find it very useful to have some sort of readout on the UI telling me the number and identity of the units I have selected. This becomes extremely handy for large groups and mixtures of units, giving an instant overview of your selection at a glance.
Like in a lot of RTS games. SupCom definitely had it, and TA may have done (off the top of my head I can't remember). I just find it handy to be able to drag a big box and say "Ok I have 100 tanks, 50 AA" and then after a fight I see I still have most of my AA but I need to beef up my number of tanks. Fast and easy.
TA kind of had it. There was a config file that you could edit and there was also a patch file that increased the unit cap an insane amount. While this would be a nice option to have to force smaller and more strategic games, the client server architecture negates one of the main reasons for having it. So, I would keep the unlimited units and add in an optional option for a unit cap. I would prefer a text box that I could type a number into as apposed to a slider or dropdown box.
tontow, I think this thread is not about having a unit limit It's about a ui feature that is pretty standard among RTS of the last 10 years. My guess is that PA only misses it currently because we are in alpha.
not exactly, starcraft has a poor implementation. in starcraft you can't see exact unit counts and have silly selection pages. it would be best if you got a count the units you had selected e.g. you select 100 light tanks and it displays a small 100 inside a light tank portrait. if you want to see the welfare of individual units like starcraft then you could select that 100 light tank portrait and see the individual green/yellow/red HP portraits. i'm not sure the latter is even necessary though in this type of game (it wasn't in supreme commander).
SC2 has a very fitting implementation for the type of RTS that SC2 is. In SC2 the health of every unit is very important and needs to be displayed, so the solution to show rows of 8 is pretty good. You can see the health of your army at a glance and counting 1,2 or 3 rows is pretty simple. For a game like PA or SupCom however it is indeed not needed to view the health of individual units, so doing it like in SupCom is probably the best way.
Absolutely. In a game like PA where you will can end up having hundreds of units or just small battalions it will be really useful to know how many you have.
I'd argue that it's mostly irrelevant as to whether you have Seven Hundred bots to Seven Hundred and One.
Yeah just a readout with say the unit icon and the number underneath. That's all it needs. And no nanolathe, the difference between 700 and 701 tanks is not important, but the difference between say 700 and 1000 is, and I don't have time to guess. The commander is a robot after all, he would know instantaneously how many units he is commanding at any point.
You can't tell the difference between Seven Hundred and One Thousand at a glance? That's a Forty Three percent difference. Pretty noticeable to me.
Let me clarify: I'm sure if I had the two side-by-side I'd be able to tell easily, but if I grab a screenful of units that numbered more than a couple of hundred I would not be able to guesstimate how many there were. If you can, then I doff my hat to your superior surveying skills sir.
Haha I see - your skills were honed through much training xD I played a hell of a lot of TA, but I guess I didn't really try to estimate. I really can't remember how I used to do it. Maybe I just didn't bother, but I'd still like to see this feature.
