fabricator behaviors

this may have been talked before but this might be a good time to bring it up again


so i played command and conquer again and i was reminded of something that i found a bit lacking in PA
so in command and conquer once you build a refinary it immidiatly spawns a harvester which then goes and starts to gather resources the closest to it, so i thought since fabricators can both gather resources and build
maybe add fabricatorbehaviors for production:

for example set behavior to assist and the fabricator automatically assists factories or other fabricators with production unless issued a specific order which it finishes and then continues its set behavior

or set it to reclaim so it goes and reclaims on its own preferably only when the metalstorage ain´t filled unless again gets an order to assist on one building or one unit in a queue, or gets a specific reclaim- or areareclaimorder ..

or set to idle .. only reacts to orders


thoughts? would you like to see this in game or rather not?

already present in the game or can be client modded. patrol command, and world reclaim is what you are looking for, and the storage is related to a very ambiguous mod made by Cola_Colin i think? there never was a consensus if that mod is fair as it game new players an advantage (mostly useless for Ubers)

https://forums.planetaryannihilation.com/threads/wip-free-energy.69359/

no, i am not

so as far as i understand it this mod sorta automates production in a more general way ... however without your input sometimes even ignoring your settings .. that is not what i am asking for

What you are asking for is unnecessarily complicated when the same or similar functions can be achieved by already existing mechanisms. Fabs will assist constructions and buildings when set on a patrol command. The game doesn't owe you automated behavior like "return to what i was doing before" that's a part of the skill curve in making sure everything is working. If you want a fab to do something and switch upon completion, use shift like any othe rplayer would. The entire point of economy management is for you to do it: not stalling and not floating should be determined by player input and not by AI in the fabs. Tree econ used to be a big part of PA meta, and whoever was better at using it without wasting could carry games.

Not to mention the things that are in the game but nobody uses: Firing and move orders. If you dont want your units to fire, you set them to hold fire. If you dont want them to move, you set them to hold position. Again, literally no use in wasting dev time with UI and mechanics changes like that when they have already provided a mostly sufficient framework. Ironically the only units where you'd want the hold fire (mines) dont have it :')

Any further automation from here on is just creating AIs that play the game for you, and if you are in to that you should probably talk to Quitch

it´s neither too complicated nor would offer too much automation unlike the mod that ironically was linked to me ..

indeed firingmodes and movement modes are wierd, the same way with TA were the movementmodes do nothing realy ..
attackmodes should have been attack on sight and hunt down, hold position, hold fire and attack ground (for the units that can ..

fabs on a patrolpath if they assist a factory producing units they tend to keep standing there ..
fabs or combatfabs issued with a reclaimorder at the moment ignore your storage and just keep reclaiming even with a full storage ..

economy management is about balancing your production with your resource intake but that´s not what the game primarily is about, it is about building large armies you sent over to your opponent and with this game´s multiplanetbattles things can get difficult to oversee ..

"Any further automation from here on is just creating AIs that play the game for you,"
no you are the one issuing the behavior of the fabber still thus giving the order and managing it ...
a AI playing the game for you would be one that knows buildorders, knows what units to focus on, knows how and when to expand, knows how to use intel etc. .. setting a behavior does not set a fabber to produce a whole base by itself .. you are merely setting a behavior for minor tasks .. do i realy have to say every fabber when to reclaim any single piece of tankscrap lieing around close to one of my turrets that shot it down? especialy patrol can work well with a behaviorsetting .. shall it reclaim, shall it help finish the current object in a productionqueue next to it and move on, shall it just repair damaged structures and turrets .. hell maybe even rebuilt a destroyed turret on its own ..

what i´m asking is a wee bit more inteligent productionassistence but ultimately the one to choose what to produce were to place it and when to sent it to a designation is still me ..

Declaring the game is primarily about building armies instead of balancing your economy is an argument that you need to support. Sure, it might be sold on the basis that you get cool big armies, but the game’s primary challenge is currently in the macro. Even if it’s a bad thing, the game is currently primarily about balancing income and expenditure.

tell me when ecoballance is not ever neccesary or a challange in this kind of RTS game ..
it's neccesary as much in command and conquer as it is in starcraft .. macro in any of these style of rts is neccesary
that doesn't change what PA, TA or supcom are about compared to other rts games ..

and no one says that having a ecosystem is a bad thing .. the stuff i'm asking for IS for eco- and productionballance

Nik, move and fire orders are used, I use them all the time, they have their place. Ill also agree automation of economy is a no go. Part of the skill of the game is managing your economy properly, taking that away makes PA even more of a just spam factories and have the stronger force, tr2 rush took enough of that away for me as pre tr2 eco management to the scale of having a single extra mex to a single unit being produced quicker made all the difference. The stitch and Mend I would deffo dabble in changing up, as is they have their uses though, one strictly for repairs one able to enforce a push and build walls etc. I think in the realm of that the players need to play more with effective uses before we try to balance them anymore.

you guys are sooo overreacting on this ..

automation is a no-go? balancing eco and production through minor tasks like reclaim is a skill? ok so lets take away build- and repeating productionqueues then .. let´s take away waypoints from factories, let´s take away areapatrols and patrols in general as well as all area orders .. let´s micro every little thing, screw having QoL functions .. why have A-move in this at all ... .. ... all of these have a certain ammount of automation to them ...

there is a thin line here that you ignore called decision-making. if the mod replaces explicit decision-making, than its bad. it is your decision as a player when to build a storage and when to stop factory production to fill that storage up. It is also you who should suffer from the consequences of not paying attention to your storage and having it over-float because of tree econ or whatever. Dont try to strawman the argument, at the very least its rude. As tetc said, i suggest you watch some high tier games or practice 1v1s until you have a good grasp of all these units and mechanics, that would validate your opinions more than just throwing ideas about total changes to the game

dude i don´t care about high tier .. i am not intrested in becoming high tier, i am intrested in having fun playing the game .. and when a game like Command and Conquer was able to do something like automated harvesting for 2 decades then surely PA can, difference being in C&C it´s integral were as in PA it´s your secondary way of getting resources .. and i doubt it would break the ammount of effort to ballance eco as much as you are afraid of ..

reclaiming is not realy decisionmaking, you do it or you fall behind vs someone who does it .. plain and simple
decision making is weither and how much you expand your resource gathering and expanding production .. you need a certain ammount of territorycontrol to stay competitive at any time but it comes down to how much territory you are capable to effectively control as that ties into your ecoballance aswell .. the biggest challange of this game however is not its eco as that is simplier than its spiritual predeccesors .. the challange is being aware in this game not just about what color your resourcebar is ...

sigh...

almost half of PA is managing and balancing econ and production. "the color of your resources" is almost always more important than every other individual thing you do, and if you dont agree with that you are on a different page. Every change that automates that takes away from the core experience which makes PA fun.

If thats not what you want, make a server mod and play whatever game you like to play, but thats no longer PA. If you are into huge armies clashing id recommend sandbox mods by wondible, or the build mex everywhere by stuart. If you cant use the control scheme to its fullest, its not the game's fault

seriously now ? were did i EVER say ecomanagement is not important?

"than every other individual thing you do"
and exacly reclaiming is A individual thing to do, it´s not a general thing to do like building or areabuilding mexxes which is of greater importance and has more impact on your eco
single fabbers assisting a single building or a unit in a queue IS a individual thing to do .. not like building 5 to 10 factories that pump out units for tens of minutes or have a bunch of fabbers constandly assist a t2 factory to pump out advanced units faster, THAT is a more general thing to do that matters more ..

also what a copoutanswer with "uuh play a mod on server" .. why don´t you go and play a tycoongame then if ecoballancing is what is fun to you? ..

what i want is better and easier control of my fabbers to do what i want (that´s what the thread is about) .. i want one to focus on reclaim without going overboard, i want one to focus on keeping my structures at full health, i want one to maybe rebuilt defensive structures were they may have been destroyed (something that was possible in supcom iirc) ..
just issuing a patrolpath is not accurate enough it may be even limiting ..


i DON`T want the mod that was linked

also harrassing and weakening THE OPPONENTS eco and production or issuing significant strikes against the opponents army is VERY important .. it´s not JUST all about spamming one huge army and going for the kill ..
it matters what weapons you invest into to harm your opponent, were and how you harm him ..

The current level of automation doesn't really take anything away from decision making, autonomous fabbers wouldn't take so much away either but it does take a big part of hands on economy management away and that's basically what PA is all about beyond macro. I don't like the idea of removing this aspect, it reduces the skill level. Managing your eco is a key part of the process. Doing it well wins games.

how though?

the task of issuing a reclaimorder f.e. does not strike me as anything particularly intresting or fun especiely having to tell my fabbers when to stop reclaiming if i´m lacking in storage or productionoutput .. .. rather the skill of keeping a reclaimfield within your territory so you can actualy take advantage of it ...

and as i said (sorry for repeating myself) the issue for me is when patrolorders on fabbers do not exactly do what i want and worse have to limit the patrolroute so it doesn´t like colide with a factory to constantly assist it ...

this is like needless EXTRA babysitting to me were i rather want to focus on my army to direct it ..
sure areaorders ease up the neccesity for microing your macro but they too are imprecise deppending on what unit you use .. patrols or areapatrols with aircraft, scouts and ships for example are not a problem as they only have a specific role, in fact issuing a globalwide areamove on a scout is the same as telling it to simply scout on its own, it having a propper working roambehavior/order would be no different to that (in rise of nations a roam order does indeed that, it sends a unit all over the map to scout) .. so that kind of automation is already there ... fabbers however can be used in multiple ways as mentioned before, same with combatfabbers were players critized not being propperly able when to have them with their army to repair units and when to have them by themselves reclaiming or building minefields etc. ..

adding fabricator behaviors would not add more automation rather it would make it more precise imo .. if done right

I agree that combat fabs interacting with armies are a problem, but am not yet convinced by any proposed solution.

As for the far meatier topic of fabricator behaviour, are you saying that you want your fabricators that have been given a non-specific factory assist through the area patrol command to reassign themselves if they find an incomplete building? I get the concept, but I don't think it'd be as intuitive as you suggest. It's a difficult behaviour to explain to a new player, and patrol commands are already bad at that. I could buy into the idea that an area patrol only assists construction perhaps if it still showed up as an idle fab, but what I think you are suggesting breaks established rules about assisting, and makes the unwritten rule book a lot messier. Until someone comes up with a consistent way to piece that all together (which might involve a total rework), I'm going to continue to be against it.

To the same end, combat fabs suffer a similar issue - lots of functions that are hard to explain succinctly, that all inhibit eachother. Generally PA needs to be working on making it easier to explain the game to new players, and the above is something to add after the wider problem has been solved.

explaining these things is generaly a tutorial matter and that needs a propper overhowl ..
and/or a couple tutorialmissions ..


"are you saying that you want your fabricators that have been given a non-specific factory assist through the area patrol command to reassign themselves if they find an incomplete building?"

that would be one example .. that or cycling between unitproducing factories instead of assisting just one .. another would be to set a fabber with a behavior to focus on repair or (if it can be programmed) to rebuilt say destroyed defenses on the same place they were originaly build on ..

the cycling between unitproducinging factorys patrol/assist might be a intresting option for when you want your commander to not stay stationary f.e. ...

as for what i primarily want for fabbers as i mentioned in the OP i would want them to focus on reclaim and do it intelligently ..
if you played and remember any classic command and conquer game once your silo was full they stopped gathering resources but like with mexxes you still could waste resources from oilderricks as they gave resources per tick too ... in PA however you are more prone to waste resources on both reclaim and mexxes and that with PA´s awarnessdifficulty ..
current patrol doesn´t work well with that and areareclaim is inaccurate ..
it however makes sense to add more behaviors as fabbers are not just havesters but universal workers ..


i get that some of these functions may end up taking more work to programm than realy proving usefull in gameplay ..
but to me these would be definitive QoL functions without taking away from the core ammount of neccesary eco- and armymanagement

ALREADY POSSIBLE WITH FABBER PATROL COMMAND!!!
just set your fabbers on patrol ROUTE (not area) and they will assist factories while walking by them and back!!

It's not different in any way from the act of area building mex or clicking on a specific unit and giving it an order. As TETC said, managing your economy creates DEPTH and having fabs auto rebuild turrets is plain lazy. Reclaim can give you 25-30 m/s, if thats not significant enough than i and my 2k+ hours in this game have no idea what is. All the alterations you offer.

Reclaiming is as much of an individual thing as ordering your armies to attack or ordering another fabber to area repair, or building mex and turrets. it's just as important as any of these things, and that goes for all fabber behaviors. You can NEVER run those extra 4-10 factories without telling your 2-5 combat fabbers to reclaim areas where thy will be safe from snipes. During commander reclaim years the survivabillity of that one fabber was the difference between winning and loosing. And while at it, why not also automate fabbers to build sorages when you are about to float so you dont waste metal? or straight out construct walls and factories so your production can always match your income... It's all the same: taking away attention demand from a player who in the status quo has to priorities between econ management macro and army micro. This is one of the most important time trade offs that seriously declines the more you automate ****, and that is a huge part of the core idea of PA: not just spamming huge armies and watching them clash, but producing those armies in the first place. Every intelligent behavior that is 1) not intuitive and 2) takes away major decision making from the player is bad game design, and AI fabbers are guilty of both.


PA is not Sup Comm, and is most definitely not Command and Conquer, and one of the major things that sets these games is the economic model. Sure, for total newcomers it might be a bit of a challenge, but thats what a learning curve is for.


On another note, I do feel like combat fabbers could use their own selection group which means that players can mod their controls and put them wherever they personally like. I keep mine in the combat selection and whenever I want to select everything BUT them I exclude them with a hotkey. But i still see no reason why that would be a problem since armies are most often into easily selectable blobs anyway.

the fabber patrol is inefficient-ish, unless they stop to assist as they walk by a factory (last I checked they did not)

If they have to walk non-stop, they'll barely walk by a factory and barely contribute before walking past.

At least with area patrol, they stop walking to engage. Problem there is area patrol is often too big to convey "hey, just assist these 2 things".