Intro ignore this if you just want to read my ideasNo matter how long you think it will take you to read this post; it took me longer to write it. So please read, there is a reward at the end. But before you do that, know that I am not making this thread to whine. I am offering potential solutions to all the problems I am bringing up. Potential solutions that I believe will better the game. I would appreciate your input on the following ideas. The issue I want to discuss is unit and factory controls. While the raw mechanics of the game itself are coming along nicely, the controls for commanding units is where I believe the game needs the most work. As my army grows the amount of units I have to manage increases exponentially, but my ability to multitask sadly does not. Some people in the community believe nothing should be changed and see this difficulty as a feature. They think that the ability to minutely control huge quantities of units, giving them each individual orders, is the fundamental skill needed to play the game. I do not believe that constantly zooming and clicking on tiny units should be necessary in a game of this scale. I don't think that's what makes a skilled player that ought to dominate others; feel free to voice your objections. Furthermore, I believe this kind of control scheme limits the game in scale. No human has the ability to control thousands of units on different sides of the planet, and indeed, multiple planets. Players should be able to fluidly control there armies on multiple fronts with multiple battles taking place simultaneously. Grand armies fighting all across the planet, true planetary annihilation. Controlling your army and economy should be easier than making the decisions on what they ought to do. I am aware that improvements to the control scheme are already in the works. I still feel like the following ideas might be beneficial to the development of the game if something like them wasn't already planned to be put in.
Area Controls so much to shoot at, so much to build Problem: One of the biggest control problems right now is that when I order one or more units to do something the order is specific to a fault and they all follow that order exactly. This is the way it should be by default, but sometimes I want to give looser orders. If I have a group of units selected and want them to attack an enemy base, I should be able to give them a general order to attack the base as a whole. Currently you do this by either giving a move order somewhere in or just outside the enemy base or an attack order on one target in the enemy base. Then you supervise your glob of units as they shoot at any enemies they happen to get within firing distance of. If you chose to give them an attack order they would all attack that one target first; probably leading to quite a bit of overkill on it. I don't know if splash damage is in the game yet, or if it will ever be, but all of them running/driving/flying around in one big glob just doesn't seem like the best way to launch an assault. Plus it just doesn't look right. You can mitigate this by separating them into smaller groups, but this just makes it harder to control. Each group needing to be told where to move, what to attack, et cetera, and even then you're left with globs. The only way to get rid of the problem completely is to issue orders to each unit individually. In the heat of battle with dozens, hundreds, or even THOUSANDS of units, you can see this is quite impossible. While your doing all this your ignoring the rest of your army and economy, and those things don't just take care of themselves. Solution: I propose a way to designate an area for units to attack, and do other things in, that I will tentatively call an action area. You would hold down a keyboard button, Alt for instance, and then right click and hold a spot on the map. While holding down the mouse button you would drag the cursor away from the spot you initially clicked. A red shaded circle would be displayed with a radius equal to the distance you dragged. When you released the mouse button the order would be issued. What the units did with this order would differ depending on the unit type. Combat Units Combat units would move toward the center of the circle engaging and destroying anything they came within range of. They would spread out into a loose group, with different unit types with one another evenly so long as they were all order to do so as a group. They would not all move to the center of the action area immediately, but would progress to it as all enemy units and structures between them and the center were eliminated. They would continue to engage and destroy any enemy units within the action area until it was devoid of detected targets. Units would not stay together but instead spread out, each potentially choosing different targets. If you want your units to stay close to one another you should keep your action areas small. Units would also prioritize what they attack, shooting at things that can shoot back at them first. Second they would shoot at things that could potentially harm other units in the group; like a tank shooting at anti-air units once all the anti-ground units were dealt with. Finally all other structures would be targeted. This would allow things like carpet bombing runs with bumblebees and hornets, with hummingbirds and peregrines mixed in providing air support. The action area would also work slightly differently for air an orbital units. Once the action are was devoid of valid targets, or if it never had any to begin with, air and orbital units would set up a sort of pseudo-patrol. They would orbit the center of the action area 2/3rds of the way out (remember each action area has a radius). If any valid targets enter the action area they would automatically be attacked by the circling units. While not engaging targets air and orbital units would attempt to form a circle as evenly as possible, spreading out rather than staying together. This would be superior to the current patrol system for some purposes. First, it would all patrolling units to engage a threats. Rather than putting 30 humming birds in patrol around your base and hoping 3 or 4 of them will be there when an enemy bomber(s) approaches the perimeter, you can instead put 10 hummingbirds in an action area centered at your base and know that when a threat approaches they will all respond. It would be easier to manage as well. The units would automatically spread out, rather than stay in one group. Setting it up would also take less time.
Fabricators Fabbers could also be given an action area. Fabbers in an action area would attempt to assist any actions taking place in that area automatically. If a building is being constructed they would assist in it's construction as there first priority. Second they would repair any damaged units or structures. Third they would assist factories in the construction of units. Fabbers doing any of these actions would consult the economy and alter their behavior accordingly. If assisting in constructing a building would cause your economy to dip into the red then it will cease and idle until more resources are available. If you had multiple fabbers using an action area(s) then they would not all cease activity, just enough so that your metal and energy production stayed in the green. They would prioritize assisting in the building of energy plants if you were pressed for energy, and prioritize in metal extractors if you were pressed for metal. It wouldn't do any fancy math to decide if you were pressed for energy or metal. It would simply decide you needed energy if some of your fabbers were idling because doing anything would cause your energy to go into the red. Same for metal. I'm often left with lots of fabricators lying about and tediously searching for one when I need one takes more time and effort that it shouldn't. Setting the majority of your fabbers to an action area centered around base would make managing the construction of your base and units much easier. It would prevent fabbers from being forgotten and going to waste. But most of all, it would help with resources going to waste. When I reach tech 2 or advanced as it's called, I often end up with more metal than I can manage to use. The problem isn't that I can't think of ways to use it, it's that I can't work fast enough to keep all my fabricators and factories building things when I have so many. Even if I spent all my time managing my fabbers and factories it becomes impossible, and then whose managing the more important part of the game, the fighting. I'm not saying the amount of mass needs to be tuned. I'm saying that my idea above would help alleviate the problem by making it easier to use all of your metal. And once you have used all of your metal you have have to expand and take more territory. This increase in demand for territory and metal extract spots means more fights over territory and larger battles. All of this equates to better gameplay in ways I hope are obvious in a game called Planetary Annihilation. Buildings Defensive structures could also be given an action area. This would mostly be useful for artillery like the Holkins and the Catapult. Normally when an defesive structure like a Holkins isn't ordered to shoot at anything in particular it shoots randomly at whatever happens to be within range. If given an action area however, it will shoot only at targets within the action area. Like other combat units it will prioritize other units which could potentially fire back. Unlike other units once those were dealt with it would begin firing on other thing within the action area such as energy plants. Once ally valid targets within the action area are depleted it will resume firing at anything within range. The action area order will persist however in case anything enters that area. Factories given an action area order equate to any unit built at that factory being created with that order in a similar way to how patrol orders given to factories work. And... I have more ideas but I am going to stop here for the time being. Oh, I almost forgot. Your reward. PUDDING!
I agree with your aim if not the exact specifics of your idea. The units would have to be rather smart and I would like more control over construction ratios than a simple area would provide.
radar's range should be equivalent to the scale of the planet it is on and i think the observer orbital should give clear vision over a small ish area under it
Something that i really want to see is when i drag a box over units on the left hand side there is a number of unit icons that pop up with a number on it saying how many of each unit are in the box i just dragged i would like to beable to click on a box and select all of that type of unit, it would be faster then 2clicking which doesn't always work for me. the main reason i want this is it is annoying when i'm having a ground battle near my base and I need to quickly give orders to certain types of units I don't want all my units to go towards the bombers coming in at the back of my base i need only the fighters to go there. and the bombers need to stay away from the aa ground units but my ground units would make short work of them so i want to send my fast bots there to mop them up then flank the main army I am aware of the control group mechanic and its great but its harder to add new units to it and it certainly can not be made in the heat of the moment.
@wrathos: Area Commands have been in the works almost since the beginning of the project. I'm pretty sure that all of the things that you mentioned will be covered. Sorian is on that task, and he's quite excited about it, which means he will probably do a great job with it. @Murcanic: It was introduced with the Beta build that when you select a group of units, you get unit composition icons on the bottom left of the screen indicating how many of each unit type has been selected. If each unit type is not currently select-able from those icons, then I'm sure that that feature will be implemented soon as well.
I have a some faith in the design team but I believe that my ideas may still be useful. I am convinced that all the ideas I posted above would be great additions to the game. My post is quite verbose in explaining how and why I think these features should be implemented, but if anyone has any questions as to my reasoning for suggesting any of them I would be happy to explain in more detail. For example, you might ask, "Why do you think stationary turrets need area commands?" And I would answer, "Because sometimes you have a particular inside the areas base that you know needs to shelled more than rest and you don't just want to wait for the random AI selection to get around to it."
I think that your post, while verbose, is pretty straight forward. That is why I think that all of the points that you mentioned will be covered in the finished product. The problem is that Sorian has only recently had the chance to start digging into the code to begin working on some of this stuff concerning the AI and unit control, because the code just wasn't ready for it until a bunch of other things were added first. That fact could make it seem like an afterthought from the players' perspective, but it is definitely a top priority for the dev team!
This sounds like something PA could sorely use. Lucky for us, @neutrino mentioned that he would consider implementing area commands so this could be a thing in the coming weeks. Excellent news for me, since I have trouble managing all my factories, economy, and armies across even a single planet, and this would help make my units far less retarded.
I do. It's way easier to use. The fighters would spread out better and DIRECTLY move to the spotted enemy planes instead of flying on their route until they are close enough to be 'aggrod' by being close enough to the enemy planes. You know what I would love? A "build mexes everywhere" command. Perhaps call it "colonize" or something. So after you took control over a planet you can select a bunch of idle fabbers, tell them to colonize the planet and they will go around and build basic (and advanced if they got adv. fabbers between them) metal extractors on every spot they can reach. I would also want checkboxes for those action areas, at least for fabbers. So I can give them an action area in which they just reclaim and nothing else. Just reclaim and repair perhaps, so they don't end up assisting the factories the whole time while I actually want that they just repair the base in case it get damaged or reclaim wrecks.
Yeah, area commands for fabbers and defenses would be great. Also, I agree about area commands for attacking units not being like patrol/attack move. Hans.. addressed the patrol difference already. However, with area command attack, your units would not keep moving along the predefined path until all enemy objects were destroyed, as they would with attack move. Subtle difference maybe, but would be important for smaller attack groups especially.
I think some of the ideas I posted are fairly unique; I haven't seen anything exactly like what I described in any game that I know of. So while they may have been planning something similar, I doubt the features I mentioned had been thought of exactly. I trust in the developers judgement but I think they should take my ideas into consideration. I have more ideas, which I will be detailing in my next post/thread. Probably a new thread since it's going to be another looooooong post full of ideas. I don't want it to get buried at the bottom of this thread and not get read. Speaking of which, did anybody read the whole thing? Please let me know if you had any difficulty reading it. Also, let me know if my writing style needs work.
I won't rehash everything over for you here, but before you go putting all of that work into an additional post on the topic, be sure to check out the links to previous posts below. There are more, if you research the topic, but those will give you some idea that these things have already been considered/discussed for this game. Trust me, they are important to me too! : ) There are a lot of smart people on these forums, with a lot of experience, who have been involved with this thing for a long time. The awesome fan base for this game is one of the things that will make it great! Link1 Link2
