Constructing Units in Auto Roam Mode

considering the size and diversity of the planets we are dealing with, and our want to reduce micro and automate tedious back ground tasks. i think it would be a good idea to have automated construction features. i know this has been suggested before, but i want to concentrate on one specific point. at one point metal will be harder to get to with requirements needed to make extractors actually extract metal. the need to go searching for these metal spots will become necessary for advancing progress. in games that have multiple large planets this can become extremely tedious. as you conquer planets you will find your self with a lot of ground to cover and not a lot of free time between the rest of constructing that you will be doing. if we are going to have at least one automated build process please let it be for constructing units to hunt down metal automatically and build the extractors. i noticed that units already have a roam feature (whether or not it actually works at this time.) this could easily be a sub option specifically for construction type units under that same tab.

Yes, factories should be able to set the stance of constructed units. And one of those stances should be roam.

i know roaming is in. im talking about commanding fabricators to automatically build extractors on metal spots in large scale games.

I don't see why this wouldn't be possible. There have been some "area" and "mouse gesture" based UI suggestions from some of the Zero-K guys in the backers forum.

I think that should be easy to do with a UI mod even if it's not in the game by default. I saw something similar in SupCom. Zero-K also has a feature exactly like what you describe.

I would certainly support an "auto-econ" script being available for engineers, where if metal was low, they would journey to the nearest metal point and construct a mex. If energy was low, they would look for somewhere safe near the nearest base, and begin throwing up power-gens.

I don't think that the unit movement stances is the right place for this kind of behaviour though. The roam, manoeuvre and stand ground stances should relate purely to movement, and should probably have the suggested auto-kiting-and-dodging from Zero-K settings folded into them here. Likewise, fire at will, return fire and hold fire settings would be a place to put the automatic firing settings (if implimented). These could include things such as the settings for auto-focus fire, overkill limiting, and preferred targeting (should these be implemented).

Auto-build, Auto-Scout, Auto-Assist and similar potential features have combinations of both movement, and action. This I would suggest they are grouped in their own small separate (but hideable) UI window, perhaps somewhere between the aforementioned settings, and the Chronocam button..

that sounds like civilization's auto-improve city command. in that game workers could be set to make buildings that will maximize the out put resources in the surrounding area. but that would be a lot easier for a tile based, turn based strategy game like civilization to pull off. not so much for an RTS like PA

i'm guessing for power you would want to set it up some where otherwise remote and tell it to just start building and either give it a parameter or just come back later to tell it to stop. and metal like i was saying before would be easy enough it just roams till it finds an unused metal patch and starts building.

i also thought about the interest of doing the same thing for surveillance. like in the case you took over a planet and now you want to evenly place out radars. maybe there could be a quick go to command for that.