I like how some games (RTS and Civ-style) have an "explore" mode for units, where you can spawn a couple scouts and send them on their merry way to wander the planet and map it out, find enemy bases, etc. Will this be a function soon? Also, something that I've never seen before, but I think would be super cool would be an "auto-patrol" where you could spawn an air unit and click a patrol mode that would have it automatically start flying a large circle patrol around your base. It could center either on the air factory, or if the programmers were feeling adventurous, calculate the approximate center of your base by the furthest edges of your construction (not counting extractors) and patrol around that. It's kind of a hassle creating a patrolling flight path, especially when you have to re-do it every time you spawn a new unit to add to it.
If something like this needs implementing, there is an inherent problem with the scouting mechanic that needs changing in the first place. I really hope that they just change the way that scouting works rather than just implementing something like this. One fix, like i have said for a long long time, would be to show all potential opponent spawn locations to the player, maybe throw in a few extra dud locations if needed. This allows you to scout in the directions the opponent could have started in, rather than scouting randomly over the whole planet.
Really? I have never had a problem finding anyone. Pick a group of about 10 scouts or fighters and send them all the way around the planet and they will fan out and scout a giant swath of area. Repeat a couple times and you've scouted the planet. Piece of cake.
Generally, you want to be able to scout with your first couple of units, not many different ones that you get 7+ minutes in. I know i certainly would not be waiting in my base until i have 10 units to scout with, and if your saying you need ~10 units to find the enemy, then the system IS wrong.
... Why is this needed? You can see the terrain as is without having to "map" it, as for finding enemies: Just tell the scouts to check all "mass point concentrations" and your bound to find a enemy, and from there its not hard to find his base in the vicininty.
Currently 'check all mass point concentrations' is not viable due to the fact that metal is pretty much uniformaly distrubuted, but yes, depending on how clumped the metal will become, this might fix it. I have my doubts though.
It's really not a big deal to just build some scouts and go looking.... I did love the other idea though someone mentioned in another thread and that was to instruct unit to start fanning out from their location in a ever increasing spiral.
Really? I dont think metal is distributed evenly at all, there's lots of clumps. I'm finding it quite obvious roughly where people may have started, it more annoys me that its quite hard to see when I HAVE spotted them... Though I do agree scouting is a bit of a testicular itch right now. Definately could be made more uh...click-efficient.
Isn't this what the "roam" order is supposed to do? Make your units roam around the battlefield? Or is it just to make it walk around when engaging an enemy, so it is not just standing still? I played another RTS, cant remember the name, it had a unit order called "Search and Destroy" - a unit order with a name like that is pretty hard to misinterpret.
I think a good minimap would work better than this command. But I also hope that a client side script to implement this command is within the scope of the UI scripting.
GoogleFrog, how would this client side script work? What would you consider "cheating" in this game? At what point is too much automation?
All scripts need to be able to do is read unit positions and give out commands. Then it could store some sort of 'recently scouted' heatmap as well as turret locations and units set to scout would just move around trying to keep the heatmap as even as possible. Cheating is doing something which someone with unbounded attention and micromanagement would not be able to do. Currently I don't think there can be too much automation because AIs are much stupider than people. I will have to come up with a better definition if AIs surpass people but that can be done later. I think my definition without reference to current AI power is that we need to identify the point of the game and not automate that. To me the point is in making high level decisions about economy and unit placement. If you can break a game with automation then it was just a micromanagement-based task all along. It is the game's job to be interesting enough at a high level such that automating low level micromanagement does not destroy it.
