Something that struck me when I went back to play FA is how glacially clunky and slow building anything felt. I'd snooze out for a good couple of minutes while my first build order executed, it took >1 minute to upgrade even with engineer help, a factory cranking out units also took a long time to build an army, etc. Part of this is how smooth the construction process is (i.e. how much time you do or don't spend watching engineers play bumper cars), but is it possible to get a higher speed of construction? I'd like to see the game take a long time beause of multiple large planets not because it takes 10 minutes to build anything other than tiny raiding parties.
If you know what you are doing in FA you can quickly build so much stuff that it gets hard to manage it 100% efficiently.
Turn scouts into fast, mobile units that scour maps for reclaimable resources. Any spare rocks and wreckage on the map: A) Becomes an instant point of battle between opposing scouts (and later, dedicated kill bots) B) Will provide all the early game resources needed to build factories and pump out those first armies.
Wasn't this to some extent the driving force behind the commander 'egg' idea? If it's customisable then you can have the early game as fast paced or sluggish as you want. Personally I think having super-quick build times detracts from the strategy - it makes scouting less reliable and doesn't allow you to build counters to enemy forces as succesfully. But hey, you want to play a short rush game then crank that egg resource bar up to maximum.
ITT: people who don't know how to play efficiently completely misrepresenting FA. It's about as fast-paced as Quake 3, except you have several hundred units to command, so it's effectively several hundred times faster than Quake 3 already. I think that no matter how the game is presented there will be ways to make things happen so fast that an inexperienced player will be unable to understand how it happened (e.g. getting swarmed by 30 tanks when they've made six engineers and a light raider). There will always be people so poor that you can destroy them without trying, and there will always be people so good that they can destroy you without trying. To paraphrase Marilyn Manson's 'Irresponsible Hate Anthem', "Everybody's someone else's noober, I know you are so am I, I wasn't born with enough clicking fingers, WHY ARE ALL MY TANKS DEAD OMG HAX".
Yes, I agree. When I hear this about faster speed... I think those people should better play a FPS game or play Dawn of War2 with a squad they have to handle... In FA and in SC2 you are pretty much busy from the get go and timing can/is very important... after all this is a strategy game and not a jump and run... just my 5 cents.
It is unfortunate that at the end of the day a game cannot be designed for everyone. While for casual players things could potter along pretty slowly but for hardcore players they are constantly overloaded with tasks because of their increased efficiency. So if you don't want to alienate the hardcore players by overloading them that then determines part of the speed for casual players. There are a couple of things that can be done to mitigate this (some of which happened in sup com 2 like no assisting) but the relationship between casual and hardcore speeds will always exist.
