It was mentioned once in the Advanced Micro Commands TM megathread which then derailed into game theory / AI debate, for the amount I could bother to read it. Apropos of which I chose this section for the greater number of people who have already played the game and might have thoughts to share. In any case, I fail to see the value of massive megathreads with broad topics such as "GUI". Information is difficult to extract and a thousand discussions intertwine. The new patch brought us unnecessarily large planets and I played a game with some newer players. Even without having to focus microing combat on two fronts just the eco alone was getting very heavy to manage with so much ground to grab. Here, "plan" refers to a build order queued for any unit you control. I think it'd be definitely worth a shot seeing how being able to order forehand what the units you are about to do should build. This would be particularly powerful with nesting, eg. ordering a factory construction, ordering the factory plan to build some builders, selecting a builder in said queue, and ordering it to start constructing further. A way to toggle or at least differentiate between plans of the selected and unselected units would be nice ("plan layers"). Perhaps highlight the unit whose plan is moused over. Hell, a visualizer for the plan tree could be interesting, but perhaps that's mod material. Of course, "blueprints" as plan/order macros would be of obvious utility.
I second this, in OTA you couldn't do anything with a unit until it is finished (beyond setting a factory way point or patrol path). Spring improves on this and you can actually queue up orders for a construction unit as soon as production starts on it, it will trundle off and execute said orders upon completion (something I use allot although I've noted allot of players don't know about it). The other thing Spring does well is allow you to set certain default behaviors for units (e.g. all cons without explicit orders automatically assist the lab until told otherwise) which I think should be included. Taking it a stage further and allowing the assignment of orders to queued units is even better (although i could see this being hard to implement with very large or repeating queues?). Another thing that could be helpful would be to assign cons to standard tasks with simple AI to complete them, for example- this con will go and build metal extractors, this con is set to build t1 energy plants and so on. Including a priority system would help as well so these auto-cons would pause if you needed to plow your resources into something else (rather than just stalling your whole economy)....
