Factory Management

This is such a fantastic idea. It perfectly provides what we all already do - send many factory outputs to a few key areas and manage the counts/ratios of what is being produced. But it does it in far, far, far fewer clicks. I would love to never task a factory directly again - just select what I want where and it arrives when a factory can produce it.

I hope this is asked about in one of the upcoming livestreams, I'd love to hear what the devs think of it, especially how likely they are to build it.

I kinda like moving certain functions into the gameworld. TA had the targeting facility which theoretically is something you'd want units to just do on their own, but having a structure creates an interesting opportunity for the enemy.

I see your point and there are probably times where limiting user control can be interesting. I can see cases where, for example, environmental effects limit your direct control over units unless you have a control relay tower nearby. However, the targetting facility always annoyed me. I knew the game could do auto-targetting, but it just wouldn't let me. It meant that you had to micro your artillery for most of the game.

+shootall

Too many clicks when compared to setting rally points and build queues individually for each factory now? If I can take the clicks needed to create a build queue for one factory and have that build queue multiplied across several factories, that is an exponential reduction of clicks.

Seems to be pretty much a case of 'commands as first order entities' fleshed out - well done and yes please!

Did you mean @shootall ?

@ledarsi two words : Factory. Assist.

Yes but no.



Because there is only 1 rally point, and there are multiple bases, multiple bases finish the order quicker than 1 base alone.

Same situation as before, but now there are multiple rally points.

A and B are 10 seconds from rally point 1, 500 seconds from rally point 2. C is 10 seconds from rally point 2. 1 and 2 are both requesting 90 units.

A and B finish their order in 595 seconds. At this time, C has finished unit 45. C will not finish its order until 1180. It takes 500 to walk from A/B to 2.

A and B can both produce 6 units towards the total, and they would arrive at the same time as C would finish alone. I.e. A and B can both produce 1 unit, and save 26 seconds off the total for C.

It's good if they aren't on infinite.


If you want all your left bases to supply left rally point, and all right bases to supply right rally point, I don't really see the value in this system over factory assist.

for those who don't know what factory assist is:

For those who don't understand....


You take a factory, you give it a queue and a rally point.

If you assist that factory with another factory, the second factory works off the first factories queue and sends units to the first factories rally point.

If you give that factory its own queue, it will work through its queue first, and then go back to factory assisting.


Begs the question - what happens if you kill the master factory?



Ledarsi's system goes one step higher again - you don't have to tell the second factory to assist the first, the system just gets on and does it.

queue lost.

the great thing about this mechanic is that it works as batch command or in a chain, whatever you want.

Bugger. That sucks.

well why not upgrade all that in PA?

that's why I came up with the future queue idea. :
https://forums.uberent.com/threads/gamma-livestream-question-thread.56918/page-2#post-881346
https://forums.uberent.com/threads/furture-queuing-reorganizing-orders.53140/page-4#post-827011

and others came up with the Order as persistent first class entities idea

http://totalannihilation.wikia.com/wiki/Cheat_codes check out "+shootall" I assume that's what Neutrino was getting at?

Ahhhhh!!!

Yes got it.

Factory assist in supcom had a problem though. It wouldn't properly preserve the ratios of things you are building. So for example you had a 2:1 fighter/bomber ratio going on it would come out the other end closer to 4:1 if you used factory assists. I'm not sure of the actual mechanics of why. I think it's because the current build order would get distributed more than the others, and if one unit took longer to build then that would affect the ratio.
Because of that I mostly just built factories in neat, easy to manage rows and gave them the same orders as a group.

It was very useful to that you were able to give factories build orders while they were assisting though. So if you need some more engineers while building an army you can build them at the assisting factories, and the engineers will be inserted as the next thing, and then the factories go back to assisting when they are done with their own orders. Very flexible.

that said, I never said we have to copy everything.

just the good parts

Factory assist is a decent feature, but it has shortcomings that an independent order system solves. For example, if you build a new factory, you have to give it the order to assist the "main" factory before it will start working. This saves some actions compared to queueing its own production and move orders, but the biggest cost is in needing the player's attention at all.

In addition, the "main" factory is unnecessarily important. In order to change your production you have to navigate to the main factory that is being mass-assisted and modify its orders. And if that factory is destroyed, you have to reconfigure the system again. It's rather like the problem with SupCom's ferry system- an independently placed system would have been much better than "assisting" a single transport's route, because if that transport is destroyed the route disappears.

With independently placed rally points, you don't need to navigate back to your base at all. You can configure production with the camera and player attention focused on where those units should go, rather than back home where they are produced. The system can easily adapt automatically if any factory is created or destroyed, and you don't need to give assist orders to a new factory, or reconfigure the system except by adding, removing, or moving rally points.

Factory assist isn't a bad feature, but it is a bit of a hack with some strange and inconvenient downsides. A more robust and elegant system would be much better.

It would also be possible to place the rally point and then assign factories to assist the rally. The build list available to the rally point could then be based on what factories are assisting it. Toss in a button to quick select all idle factories on the planet and you're in good shape pretty quickly.

This might be more reliable than allowing the system to try and auto choose factories, as a purely automated system might send units built in a proxy base directly through the enemy. The end result is similar to the factory assist mentioned above, but you never have to worry about your core factory being destroyed.