Confirmed features and suggestions

agreed, also its your first post, don't try to design everything for the devs, its their game. Sure you may help, but what you did there, was just deciding for them. Please focus your ideas on small things you really like/find important.

Try making a mod yourself and you will see how much work it is, then you will really respect the work they are doing.

That sounds like high-level interesting play, I'm curious how that will work out.

Added more stuff here. Mostly small UI things, may be some overlap.

What does "great support for water in the engine" mean? As in water itself is usually a plane at a certain level and I don't see much more that can be done. Does great water support imply pools of water at different levels?

It seems in the original design of SupCom, nuke hit water would change water level of an area temporally, water would rush to land and cause some gameplay related effect, I guess the developers of PA want to bring this feature back.

OK I have a slightly off the wall suggestion, but hear me out.

I feel it would be interesting to restrict players to pick a certain number units they want to play with in their game from the general pool. The example would be to a TCG (like Magic the Gathering) or a League of Legends/DOTA style of game (where there is a rotating roster of heroes).

For example: There are 100 units available to choose from and 50 of them are required to be used by all players. Each player is allowed to pick 20 of the remaining 50 to customize their army. This would allow players to customize their army to their requirements. Do you want to focus all on air units, or do you want a balanced army with some units from each theater?

This feature, along with procedural planets and the idea that players can pick their starting planet (an idea, not a confirmed feature yet, I know) would help create a meta-game that continually changes. This would keep the game from becoming a rote set of commands that people repeat every game. Your strategy would have to change depending on the opponent you are playing. There would never be a 'perfect' path to victory.

The one downside that I can see is that I would guess most players would want this feature turned off so they could play with all of the units and not be restricted. I don't know how viable this type of feature would be, or if anyone would want it. But I am just throwing it out there so we can have a dialogue about it.

No. Let people choose their strategy on the battlefield, not in the game lobby.

There is nothing like the feeling of having lost the game even before you start playing just because either you choose poor units or the opponents happen to count/be better than yours.

Mike

Not sure if it is added yet, but what about an exclusion list like in Supreme commander (2)? It is very useful to disable certain of techs sometimes if you don't like to play with them for a game, or try some stuff if ya know what i mean.

I agree, and to be honest there is much difference between choosing the units before the game and during. I can definitely see people having a bad experience from choosing poorly and not being able to change startegies mid game.

One advantage I could see is that this type of system allows players to create a connection to their army. We see this in other RTS's with multiple races, like SupCom, with players gravitating toward a certain race that complement their play style.

The whole point of a suggestion forum is to post ideas, big and small. The producers of the game have the final say. To suggest that no one post ideas, or narrow the suggestions arbitrarily, as if the producers of the game cannot decide what ideas they like, is completely ridiculous.

I had a question that struck me when I saw the new Project Update #4, if I may:

Will there be any sort of plans for a map editor of any kind? Even if it means editing just a planet or the entire solar system it is a part of? I would certainly love it, personally, and I find that when you add community support to things like this (Within reason) it extends longevity. I can understand if not even from the get-go and adding this support later, if at all, but it would be neat. Perhaps one could extend it so that a player can edit an aspect of the solar system (Main planets, moonbases, asteroid belts, etc.) and then combine them from a community pile into a solar system? Or even make a solar system editor accessible to both individual players and groups of people at once, to create large-scale maps. And, as a springboard for this, are maps already planning on being random generated?

Sorry if that got, as has been said earlier, a bit too much telling/asking Uber how to run your game, but I just got excited when I thought of possibilities.

-EDIT- It appears as though I somehow missed that mapmaking support has been confirmed when I skimmed the front page of this thread. Apologies! >_<

I agree with you for the most part, just don't dump all your ideas in one go, that way most people are not going to read them anyways, especially when it is someone's first post. It is great that everyone tries to help, but helping in some ways simply work better.

edit: btw your post was perfectly readable, no issues there, just divide them up in the future please.

Didn't search through to see if this was suggested yet and it is also obviously not a huge priority, just something I thought would be a nice feature.

If the art style in the visualization is to be close to what the final product looks like, I think it would be fairly easy to allow some customization. How about having more customizable unit colors, instead of just being solid "red" or "yellow." I feel as if this would add a nice layer of individuality for each player.

For example:

Primary Color (your main team color, appears on tactical display / mini-map as well)

Secondary Color

Patterns / Decals for display on units

Pattern / Decal Color

And if you want to push it even further, perhaps a full color editor (brightness, saturation, hue, RGB), instead of just pre-determined colors. That is assuming that it couldn't be exploited as some kind of cheap camo.

Anyway, you could have multiple preset color "themes" attached to your account / profile. Players would have to switch to a different theme if their primary color was the same as another player's. Or perhaps the game could auto adjust the colors to a similar variant of the player's selection to differentiate the armies. For example, turning black to gray.

Or if you wanted to dumb it down a bit, just decals with or without custom secondary or decal color options would be nice. I'd just like to see something that sets my army apart from other people in the long-term, instead of just what color I am for that match.

Someone else posted a link to an indie RTS with a TA theme. I really liked the feature of having an engineer assigned to an area and the AI would build the mass extractors in the most efficient path possible and rebuild them if they were destroyed.

In TA/SC the first few minutes of every game was the same initial build and then sending out engies to claim metal/mass deposits. It wasn't "fun" and required too much micro to make sure things were done in the right order. Automation of mundane tasks is a good things if it leaves more time for planning a grand strategy.

There are two design philosophies in this regard. One says the start is always slow and boring and should be sped up as fast as possible, the other school say that to much skipping of the earlygame would destroy novel strategies like airfac first, fast tech or something like zergling rush.

I'd love to be able to drag a line of point defense and then use the mouse wheel to adjust the spacing before releasing the button to give the build command. The ability to add a curve to the line would also be extremely handy.

Would love to see shared command of units as well. I play with friends while communicating over Skype. We all work as a team, it would be great to only have a single army with shared control between three or four people and just deciding between us how to share the management. We could decide: one on economy, one on air and intel, one on production and one on tactical for example. For a team who know each other with good communication, that could work very well.

On another note, I read in an interview with Jon that the planets would really be distorted rectangles wrapped around a sphere, in order to not make it too complicated. How about using the geodesic dome method (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geodesic_dome) of 20 pentagons and a variable number of hexagons to construct a distortion free spherical battle ground.

Also, while I'm here, how about the ability to rotate factories before you place them, so I can pick where my units come out.

Sorry, I know it's my first post, and I have just basically posted exactly this on the kickstarter page. Any of these worthy of making the list??

Cheers for reading...

realtimeshepherd I'll repost this. The "Building Buildings" section is what you're looking for.

Doesn't supcomm have this?

The solution is to skip only the boring parts of the start.

googlefrog, Yes! that SpringRTS Wiki was just what I had in mind, that spring stuff looks amazing, I will have to check it out Can this be included in the list of features/suggestion? Not entirely sure how to summarise it in a one line title...

Sadly no, SupCom (I still play Forged Alliance regularly) does not have the ability to rotate buildings

Cheers!

Hope you can add this to the suggestions list:
being able to see and select units on the back side of the planets.
viewtopic.php?f=61&t=34863&start=30

What about unit restrictions? Will this option be implemented? It was really good option in TA... I have played with friends using that... without BIG berthas and nukes.

How about naming your commander? I mean changing its ingame name to match your username, like it's literally your avatar in the game. Gives a more personal edge to beating your friends. Would also make the campaign more personal. I miss those 'put yourself in the game' gimmicks from the 90s.