Feature suggestion : Automatic split of large fabber groups

At some point in the game, especially in multi planet games, we have a large number of idle fabbers. When we assign them to do build buildings requiring not too much metal, a part of the fabber will not have the time to assist it effectively.
Then, we have to manually set groups of fabbers to build at different points.

It would be very useful if we could automatically split the group of 20 or 30 fabbers into groups of 4 or 5 and build, for example, on all the metal spots of a planet a lot faster. It's mostly useful for build queues on a large area.

What do you think?

I'd like this to happen for when you have a moon covered in mass points, and the fabbers split evenly in all directions to construct. mass points.

Not sure how the coding would go for it, but some arbitrary number of fabbers would be nice if any number is needed to figure out split values.

Maybe have an option on the side part of the UI (energy on // turn off energy) (continuous build// linear build)
(Split//don't split construction. )

It would probably be easy to implement as part of the area command, perhaps a hotkey combination while making an area command?

The way I envisage it is like this:

• Select X fabbers, lets say 20
• Press a hotkey to turn on 'split mode' or whatever you want to call it
• Lay down Y blueprints and/or assist orders and/or whatever fabricators can do, say building 5 laser towers
• Press the hotkey again
• The fabbers split evenly among the work, so you get 5 sets of 4 fabbers building simultaneously

Would work the same for offensive units. Select 100 and give them 4 targets via the hotkey, they'll split into groups of 25. Bonus points for splitting the unit types as evenly as possible too.

I like this. I kinda feel like we need it too. When I have so many fabbers in a completely mine moon, for example, I tend to select many of them to do the same task, which is innefficient. Automatic smaller groups would do it sooo better!!

Oh absolutely, 100% behind this. It should all be adjustable to user's preference. For example send fabbers through teleport and immediately give mex build command of whole planet and split the group into 2 engineers (my preference, but perhaps one is more efficient?). Perhaps for umbrella builds around planet you want a minimum of 3 but ideally 4 per group.

This is possibly even moddable right now using a variation on spaced out sphere build commands for defences like AA and umbrella. Any modders can perhaps verify that?

I do of course think this should be a default vanilla functionality of PA.

I kinda took a look at the modability of this a while ago for my advanced selection mod. The problem is you can (de-) select units by type/subtype, not by quantity or single unit id.
The only work-around currently possible would be to track unit creation and auto-push every newly created fabber into a control group, then stumble through piles of rather "expensive" sub-selects until you end up with half/the desired amount of whatever you had selected.
You can probably guess that this becomes quite laggy once you get a large number of producing factories and fabbers, possibly to the point of messing up unit selection alltogether.

It would be super-awesome if uber added a quantity-based selection filter (ie. split selection in half/Math.ceil() would probably be enough) at some point in time- but currently there are no engine hooks like that :-(

This is a pet peeve of mine to add at some point so I'll be keeping an eye out for this.

(I hope some of the uber devs played AI War -
That game, while being singleplayer- did a lot of things right in terms of macro-rts unit-selection...)

If I'm not mistaken currently an engie set to assist won't go to an almost done extractor but instead go to the next closest one.

But of course this idea is an absolute must and needs to be fully implemented

Parallel mode: while shift queueing hold addiotional modifier down. When modifier is released instead of giving the same queue to all units the order of the those orders is altered so for each unit the queue is a copy of the latest unit orders so the first order goes last. That is all units receive the same orders but start at a different point in the chain.When used with consturction orders would cause an even split, assisting others when done with own project .

Would using include 'KO deferred' help with the fast separate selections, or does it only help for the single large selections, or am I off-base entirely?

https://forums.uberent.com/threads/rel-ko-deferred-or-lightspeed-ui-ahead.58294/

I want to have a feature to ease the control of a large number of fabbers. Basically it's like players can assign fabbers to take care of an area or a planet, let's call it "area construct command". When player want to build they can either select idle fabbers and issue the building queue or do not select any fabber and place the building blueprints in the range of the area construct command. The fabbers assign to this area will build(if it's able to) or assist building.

I like the idea, but it sounds too specific. I'd just like a "half of selection" hotkey to make it easier to divide up forces, workloads, etc.

ko deferred is just a way to "watch" an array (in the above case the selection list) actively for potential changes. What we need are more powerful functions regarding unit selection in the mod/engine interface.
I am pretty sure uber will get around to them eventually, but for now it is a waiting game.