one of the annoying micro in game is waiting for the engineer to come out to start giving them orders. I was thinking, what if the factories have an option to give them "engineers build order" so once the engineers come out, they inherit these orders and start building immediately. no time wasted, no idle engineers. this is specially helpful at early game, I can build a factory or two and give them orders to build most of my base buildings. queue as many engineers in a loop while I take care of other stuff. what do you think?
But that's not removing micro at all, it's just moving it to a different time/place. you still do all the same actions. Mike
Wouldn't it be much easier to select the factory and combine the move order with an assist, and all new engineers would start assisting?
How about a "smart assist". Rather then setting it to assist, it copies the units orders. I still think that your suggestion would be good enough.
When I read the thread title, I thought the suggestion would be this. Better idea IMO. If the lead engineer dies, the others that were assisting it should carry out his orders. Also, this way you wouldn't have 1 engineer followed by a group of 5 assisting him. As soon as you tell them to assist, they get the same build orders, and if they reach the build site first, they should put up the building instead of waiting for the guy they are assisting.
Defiantly support the smart assist idea. Actually I thought this thread was more along the idea that if a eng died his command list would be passed onto another eng. Say you have a long low priority build list, say a wall with lasers and air missiles. Its probably not a high priority right off the bat, but after you encircle your entire base with queued build orders loosing all that work sure is a pain in the *** to loose all that work. I'd like to see persistent, or at least semi-persistent build orders, that stay visible even if the unit is killed, and you can select other units to go ahead and start assisting on the queue. This could be shown by having arrows connecting the queued buildings, and when no units are building it have the color change. Also it'd be nice to see how many and of what tech level units are helping to build the queue, and the total resource consumption rate by mousing over it.
I think this is a great idea but why not take it a step further again. Rather then inheriting build orders why not have build orders be a separate entity all together. Sure you still need to create the orders to begin with, but if all the units carrying out the build are destroyed you can later come back and assign a relevant tech level unit to carry on without having to reorder the entire queue. This would have far reaching implications when it comes to expasion planning and base building. In the opening minutes when the game is slow to start you can start multiple queues with your commander that fabbers can later start with a simple right click. Saving precious apm for more front line duties and less base management.
How about this, to minimise micro and help out when on multiple planets. It's not fully formed in my brain, but: a) The 'building construction' are present whether you have engineers highlighted or not. If any adv engineers exist, advanced buildings appear also. b) Clicking to build an item with engineers selected behaves as it does now, so if you want to be specific you can. c) Placing buildings without any engineers selected puts them in a 'queue' of tasks which is worked on in order by any idle engineers. You'd need a couple of basic selectors to control how this operates: - Tasks in the general queue would appear in a listbox where you can drag one or a group of items up/down in the list - An up/down numeric selector would define how many engineers in a group; so you don't get every single one building one thing at a time. - Another up/down numeric selector for how many queue items are worked on at once. We'd need some way to have them hold off if they're crashing the econ. The other issue would be pathing - obviously you want your queue to be structured so the eng's aren't driving miles away to the next item in the queue, when there is another building to be built right there. Anyway, probably not fully cooked yet, but I'm just trying to think about how we can define what we want the base to be like and have it built - while still leaving flexibility to explicitly order what goes where.
I like kattamura's idea of having each 'queue' a separate entity, could be more workable than my suggestion above. Each queue appears in a list with a list of subitems showing what that queue contains. This would suit the Html ui pretty well as it would be a styled <ul>. Then you select some engineers and right click on the name of the queue in the list rather than a physical building, and it joins the group of engineers building that stuff. You can select a queue or item in a queue, hit delete to clear that item or drag it to reorder. Clicking an item in the list highlights its frame on the terrain so you can see if you want to reprioritise/delete it. Selecting the queue and giving a shift-build order adds the order to the end of the queue, ctrl-build adds it to the queue start, etc as per the current arrangement.
I'm going to say both yes and no on that one. Although I was thinking of build orders as being first class entities, I hadn't expanded the thought to normal movement and and attack and factory unit production orders. I can see the point for the patrol command to be an entity. But not movement or attack. Are you really going to send the same attack of 20-50 units to one place 5 times without changing the route or unit config? That in my mind just seems sensless. Adding that system in my eyes would increase micro adding and changing factory and movement orders. But I could be wrong.
I didn't have a specific intention for movement orders to exist in the queue, only build ones as you say. The shift-clicking etc is the common way to add things to the end of a queue, so if you had a queue to build 25 mexes, you could shift-click to add some more mexes to the end of that build queue. Having said that, i don't see why moving somewhere and building would be different. Maybe you know your enemy is on one side of the lake, and a couple of waypoints to ensure your builders all go round the other side to get to a destination wouldn't do any harm that I can see.
I'm in favor of several ideas in this thread. Giving orders to a partially built unit. Giving orders to a factory which all built units follow. Passing build orders on to assistants so they can build on arrival or build upon the death of the lead. Having a setting where idle engineers automatically start building or assisting up to economic cap (the system stops assigning engineers once economy would be negative from it) All good.
Yep, good ideas. Bulletmagnet is right though, there are various threads relating to this that I just searched out as he suggested. In one of them Sorian said this type of idea had been discussed at length in the office but they didn't want to overpromise and underdeliver.
