Hello, I would like to suggest consideration of adding new type of units grouping, rather than being always assigned to key I would suggest adding squad mechanics, every unit group could be formed as squad (by assigning it to key or group without key shortcut if you had too many of them). Squad would try to stay together (faster units staying with slower ones) and will share one (nice and clean) squad icon over them instead individual markers and selecting (by selection box, not by mouse, as you could select with CTRL few units and give any order to made them leave squad and execute new order) any of units would cause selection of entire group. This solution always had appeal to me in games like company of heroes or men of war (especially second one as their grouping aren't permanent), where infantry units aren't working separately, but as one collective unit. I think that it would be great addition to game with such massive scale as planetary annihilation to had squad grouping (only for managing groups, not permanent) added would be extremely beneficial . I'm curious how other user think about this idea and if it would be feasible for planetary annihilation.
I think stuff like this just runs into the same issue that a lot of other things taken from other RTS games suffer, PA's scale. "auto"-squad stuff like you describe works well in smaller games because there is simply fewer of everything. Also a lot of what you want is really just part of Formations, things like grouping units together and keeping them aligned is all part of that. For doing things like Squad Icons, it's tricky, the System for that in SupCom2 drove me simply Bonkers because while it make "high-level" control very easy, any kind of fine control was forced to happen in very specific ways that just wasted more time than the system saved to begin with. I'm glad GPG listened to reason and tweaked/make it not default during the Beta. Mike
I think its ok if a locked group was a toggle. Toggle on, shared icon and select, toggled off, back to the single units again.
I dunno. I don't think small squads really fit in the scale of PA when we have hundreds and (soon) thousands of units.
"Squads" are just a form of upgrade to regular 1-0 unit groups (witch should stay as they are as they only provide selection), with additional formations mechanics, You could easily use keyboard shortcuts for "form squad" to group selected units/squads together and "disband" for removing a group entirely. All units of squad are staying together (anyone saw how large blobs of units tend to disperse everywhere during marching ?) in selected formation (spread, normal, thigh and stuff like that) and adjust speed to not leave any units behind... they would share one squad Icon and move as one collective unit. This could be useful to group armies into squads, making moving larger formations easier and cleaner (like few groups of 20+ fabricators, fighter/bomber squadrons, artillery, scouts, patrol forces... etc). Also like Brian mentioned, we had to deal with hundreds or thousands of units, so having ways of making formations to manage large quantities of units are ever more important for keeping the order in your army without micromanaging every unit separately. EDIT_1: I agree that "squads" in game with thousands of units fighting may be a wrong term as we would often more talk about groups in size of company or battalions but it's just terminology. EDIT_2: Also it would be great to be able to use Ping on formations in shared team battles to highlight entire squads (300 bots for example) to your teammates so he can take them quickly without taking other forces (you cannot select squad by boxing individual units).
I think squads is a "small" sounding term, sure. Either way, aint nobody care bout names. Whatever it is called, it still cuts down on micro if you could select a group of units one, group them, and they stay grouped if you ever click it again. And no, that isn't the shift+1 thing, those are limited to numbers. You have so many armies in this game, you might want more than 10 things to select-bound-together. You painstakingly have 4-5 groups of fabbers to do 4-5 simultaneous seperate projects, 3-4 armies of variety (spinners ants levelers dox and gil-e), and 2-3 groups of structures you want to address together (nukes, factories). You don't want to rapid-doubleclick and select all those fabbers instead of just the chunk, it would be nice if a toggle made single-click a pleasant experience of being a single click all the time. Always being able to single click for you desired results. That would be a mod I would subscribe to if not a game feature, somebody has got to make it. I would buy some cheap cryptocurrency coin to give someone for it.
Yeah, as I said groups under number keys are purely for selection most used groups like factories, nukes and other installations or all units/squads from one army. Squads are intended to bond group of selected units together, and force them to move keep formation (they wont spread randomly or wander away from rest of the group) together and it's select-able as one unit. Also, unlike number groups You could form any amount of squads as you like. I see this very useful for both small groups of specialized units like fabricators teams, squadron of Astreus (picking by area command and making drops as easy as using one unit) patrols (groups wont split so they patrol together on one path) and medium to large squads like team of shellers/snipers staying behind heavier units, so you can had couple of organized squads (with different formations and move/fire orders) formed by player or one big blob of (same) units that is covering 1/3 of the planet, it depends from taste. EDIT_1: other idea, if we had many squads on field we could possibly use larger squad "shield" real estate to add custom name to it (limited to 3 charters for simplicity) like "FB3" for third squad of fabricators... what do you guys think how squad common icon should look like ?
This could sort of work like the fleet system from Sins of a Solar Empire, where you would designate a unit/group of units to start a fleet that would be controlled as one. Maybe a "reinforcements" type thing where the game would remember the initial amount of each unit in the battalion and automatically take nearby idle units to replenish losses.
Replentishing lost units in a collective you made, sounds like another really time-sparing feature to add. Make an army once, it makes itself back anytime it is spent. So, you make a variety of units, throw it at the enemy base, in a few minutes without ever clicking once, there they are again.
+1 I would love to be able to make platoons of units! Like in SOASE it helps a lot against micro and PA is all about macro
