Construction Streamlining.

Ok, I think I'm getting it (and I'm sure having played SupCom would have helped). I'm sure it'd be much more intuitive in-game too.

However the method I proposed earlier does the same thing with less user-input. It's more of a 'fire-and-forget' method that could help when waging war across multiple bases and multiple planets. Although it does sacrifice 'direct' user control, and require more AI to be implemented... It basically adds a layer of abstraction between the user and their base.

Your system is certainly good as well, but a lot of low-level users may not get/use it. Whether or not we care about that, well it's not really up to us. But in teaching people RTS games I've found it takes them awhile to get mechanics, much less hotkeys and higher-level orders. Or maybe it's just the people I've roped into it, haha.

yea it's just I kinda dissagre with you, there's a point where you have to give credit to a player for being a good macro manager, I'm not to sure about this 'fire-and-forget method', feels to me as if we'd be letting the game play itself too much and fall back on Starcraft II MICROMICROMICRO gameplay, because essentially that's what it is, because eco in SC is only adding engies to the 'eco place' it takes nanoseconds of time, and the real gameplay ends up being moving unis around the right way.
PA is more about "look hey, you squandered around so now I have a 2K army to your 80odd units."

Eco needs to be important. I don't entirely dissagree with box-selecting mass points and the engie lives his life but I find taking it to the extreme like you guys are is just letting the eco part of the game play itself.

I voted 1a, seeing as you can assign engineers to assist or simply give the initial order to a group.

Would like a 'paint tool' for placing extractors so I can fire and forget a large metal field to be developed and get back to the all important early game scouting and decision making for my overall strategy.

Currently It can take a good 30-40 seconds to micro even a field or two, and that's kinda bad. (for me)

Tatsujb, that is a good point. I'd thought a fire-and-forget base method would make it easier to manage more bases and units in a macro sense. However it makes sense that that would give players more time to micro, and hence create a need for micromanagement in a macro-game.

I cede my point, well argued.

why thank you ^^

I would love to see some of these features implemented. This thread talks about macro-management rather than micromanagement. I believe the future of RTS games should be an overall tactical game, not a twitch game to get your actions per minute up.

A great example of this is globulation2. Here, you place your buildings down and your workers automatically task themselves to build. They work on whatever has the highest priority. The micromanagement option should still be there just because it's what we're used to. The macro-management would allow us to focus more of our attention to economy and big battles, where the strategy is.

You wouldn't need to restart the whole queue if you added two icons (up and down arrow) to an selected building. By pressing down the building would move towards the front of the queue (changing place with the building before it), by pressing up the building would move towards the end of the queue. Or perhaps drag and drop (Select building, it then gets highlighted and you can move it where you want in the queue). The rest of the queue would stay the same.