A Possible Macromanagement Tool - Creating Armies

Hey people,

It's nice to see PA back in development after such a long time away from the community.

I'm wondering if it would be possible for P.A. inc. to implement a unit manager into the game to help with macro. So what this would be is an army/fleet/air force manager, similar to the way Stardock implemented theirs in Ashes of the Singularity.

So let's say you are building up your airforce. You want fighters in control group 1 and bombers in control group 2, and all your reinforcements to stream into those control groups, so that when you select all your fighters with control group 1 in 30 seconds time, it selects all the fighters which have been produced in the meantime. You also want a couple of scouts with your fighters, and you want your air factories to automatically maintain those unit compositions in those armies, so that all reinforcements keep going to your army, air force, navy etc..

I also suggest assigning specific factories to the army, air force, navy etc. so as to maintain different factories supplying different fronts. So you build a proxy base and attack from that front, then the units produced by those factories don't stream through the enemy base to reinforce army 1 when they should be reinforcing army 2.

How do people feel about this?

Just in case you missed it, Uber is no longer associated with PA.
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I can see selecting a group of factories and command everything produced by those factories becomes part of control group 1.

I have more difficulty imagining selecting a group of factories and commanding, say, all tanks and spinners produced by any of those factories going to group 1 and all infernos and drifters produced by those same factories going to group 2.

How would you see keeping track of what's toggled on & off? And track all of the assignment decisions? I'm thinking 30 minutes into a heated game.

Reading your description, are you just looking at role assignment? Or do you envision the new units automatically rallying to the main force based on role assignment?

Yeah thanks, old habits die hard and it doesn't help that this website has the same colour scheme as the old one lol.

There are two parts to the suggestion, the factory assignment to the platoon, and the platoon creation, and I suggest looking at the way it was done in Ashes if you can, because that is my idea is inspired by.

Let's say you have 2 or more dox selected. You tell them to form a platoon, and they form a platoon. This is done on the UI. And also a hotkey. You tell them to disband, and they disband their platoon. You reform the platoon.

Now you select your platoon, by either clicking on any unit or selecting the platoon unit icon, which looks like a P. I think the P unit icon should be in the centre of the platoon. Or maybe weighted to be closest to all units.

You order your platoon to be reinforced with 1 grenadier, and 1 grenadier is queued up at an idle factory (or at the front of the queue of the nearest factory to the centre of the platoon, if all factories are full). You do this by selecting the platoon, opening the bot production tab and ordering 1 grenadier.

Now one grenadier is added to the queue of one factory, with an order to rally to this platoon. Maybe in the back-end the developers have created an array of units in the platoon, so the grenadier is added to those units in that array?

Then you assign this platoon to control group 1, so every unit in the platoon is in control group 1. you order more units, they are added to the platoon, and therefore also added to control group 1. Maybe the units that don't exist yet are 'ghost' units, added to the production queue with specific orders?

So far, all of this is exactly as it works in Ashes: Escalation. The key is that it starts with the units, rather than with the factories, so that you can divide the spinners produced by factory A between each platoon you have, while still producing skitters which aren't assigned to a platoon.

I would therefore like to see an improved implementation - I would also like the ability for you to assist a given platoon with factories, so when you queue up reinforcements, reinforcements are produced from those factories specifically and exclusively. It would work just like assist currently works, and therefore the assignment would look just like assist currently does, except that because they are joining the platoon, they inherit the orders of the platoon when the parent unit dies. (Currently if you set a factory to assist a unit and that unit dies, then that's the end of the order queue).

I thought this was dumb when I read it a while ago, but the technology has interesting implications. mostly interesting to me because you can more easily have different unit compositions in different places built by the same base.

how might the platoon system interact with teleporters?

I like the idea of being able to just order some units to show up at a location and you factories handling it. hotkey+click ground, menu appears, you select 5 skitters and the nearest factory (or 5 factories?) moves them to the top of the build order and deletes them and resets the rally point when the order is completed.

or right click and context menu appears...

btw. i dont like your footer.