So I just watched the Livestream that was aired a few days ago, and it left me with a question I'd love to have answered, it's about a feature I've always wanted in RTS Games but have never really seen it used that much. That's the formation of units, some of you people out there who much like me just love to turtle down and build as big an army as possible with a specific kind of units in the frontline backed up with say artilleries in the rear and such. I guess the best example I have to offer would be Age of Empires II which had a few different formation orders you could give to the currently selected group - such as to form a line or a square, and then keep this formation while moving around. This made for some really interesting gameplay, and I'd love to see this in Planetary Annihilation! Also, will we be able to change the angle of say tanks while they're standing still? I've always hated how in RTS Games, tanks always have to go either forwards or backwards in order to turn around, even if they're tracked tanks - tanks which are supposed to be able to turn around while standing still. It would make it possible to place some nice lines of defense using units instead of structures. Any answer/information regarding this would be much appreciated!
I too would love to see persistent unit formations. Particularly for groups which are assigned to a hotkey. I'm not sure how well flowfields work to this. It would seem to me like flowfields would lend itself to blobs, but I'm sure there would be a workaround to allow for formations (right?). I loved making units move in formation in SupCom because it kept the blobs from turning into spaghetti if they were told to move too far away from their initial starting position (where the blob of units turned into a giant line if they were told to move too far away, every RTS seems to have this problem but no one has really tried to fix it except for maybe AoE).
Formations are still possible with FF. The FF is only concerned with how a unit gets to its goal, not where the goal is. If your goals are set so that units end up in a neat box formation then you'll have a neat box formation. Units may be a bit blobby while getting into position, but that's about it.
Customizable formations would be great. You can sort of do it already by simply moving multiple groups of units separately but having them respect this order when moved in formation would be great. In fact it could be as simple as "when units of mixed types are ordered to move in formation, respect the current placement"
I'll be following this thread with great interest, as it is quite important in my opinion. I dread to bring this up, but I feel an example is most practical here: SupCom2- where a large mixed group of units would, by default, form a square formation, but the units would take up random positions, rather than, say, tanks on the front, artillery on the back. The same system with one default formation would only work well (better) if units would in fact choose logical positions. The slightly less simple way, and by all means the much preferred way by most of us I'm assuming, would be the choice of several different, persistent formations, where the units again choose logical spots themselves. I also wholeheartedly agree with the ability to choose the direction of said formation. Rightclick- move. Hold rightclick+drag=direction of formation, showing a green overlay of the entire formation. Can think of several working systems like that, all very pleasant to work with.
And user definable spacing would be great too btw... not only in formations. And I don't think of spacing that only holds for units in formation that don't move, but rather moving units in formation.
