GUI ~ Build Grid

Eh. The farthest I would go with a 'snap to' grid is showing the collision boxes of buildings, so you don't end up getting your fabbers stuck in an energy farm. It's simply much easier on the developers, players, and processors to not have a grid.

One thing I'm curious about though are Metal Points. In both TA and SupCom, those were reliant on a grid system. So are they going to be snap-to points in PA, or 'Metal Areas' where you can build extractors in a general vicinity to occupy a deposit of mass? The latter sounds cooler.

Mass-Deposit overlay which has something akin to a "water-table" map of resources. The darker the colour, the more mass there is to extract!

Something like a heat map? Green for where you can build red for where not?

@Gruenerapfel you cant build a generic homogenouse grid on a sphere. Especially if the sphere itself is scaleable but the grid should be equal.
There are only 5 homogenouse platonic polyhedra, and 13 non homogenouse.
All are not suited for big spheres with little grids.
If you want that you should look at blender they have a nice solution with nearly homogenouse triangles, and ordering them to mostly hexagons and some pentagons.

I'd like to see a hybrid grid-freeplace system, wherein you can hold a modifier key or something to snap to a grid that is formed relative to any nearby structures, but by default structures are placed freely.

Which people would be pissed off, Cola_Colin?

Mike, have any examples? I don't know where Uber Entertainment stated anything remotely related to not being able to block passageways with buildings.

In my Balanced Annihilation 1 vs 1 games, building placement and blocking is a critical determiner in base raids.

Placing buildings to block pathways like in SC2 is an extreme kind of micro. And many people here seem to dislike micro.

Again this confusion between high apm and micro.
Many people here like micro. Most people don't like high apm micro.

A lot of people like base building, including Neutrino

Wait, we're calling walls an extreme form of micro now? That is more than slightly sad.

Who said anything about walls?

Walls are not the same thing as factories you know.
Mavor has already confirmed that there will be walls and that they will block movement.

You wont "Wall off" with a Factory and a Power Gen... you'll use a wall.

Crazy Idea I know... but there it is.
Mavor is nuts if you ask me.

As torrasque and rec0n412 posted, that's not 'micro' in the same context.
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I don't care if there already exists wall pieces. I'd like walling up or funneling a passageway with regular buildings to be a viable tactic, like in Total Annihilation, or every classic RTS. Dragon's Teeth were still useful for having ridiculous health on the cheap- so they were naturally balanced.

So Dragons teeth are not "walls" now?

Oy vey...

@rec0n412: nobody talked about walls. This was about the type of "wall" people use in sc2 to block ramps. They are made with warpgates and pylons for example. Those relate to things like factories in PA. Who would use a factory to wall of ramps?

The implications from ramps and the need to wall of with random buildings (not real walls) are huge and tend towards lots of micro. So my main point is more about ramps than about wall-ins.
Real walls (cheap per element, high health, small elements) that block huge pathways have nothing to do with it.

Also neutrino wrote that he does not like adjacency bonuses because it forces you to place your stuff in a very specific way. The SC2-type of wall-in forces the player to build every single of his first buildings in a very specific location. So SC2-type wall-ins are probably not to neutrino's liking.

I don't dislike SC2, but the idea to use factories to wall off is a bit weird for game like PA imho. Real wall-elements should be used to build walls. Not factories.

+1

Walls might be cheaper being a dedicated wall-building but if you are gonna build a bunch of solar collectors why not use them as walls or to shield a weaker target?
Using structures to for-fill secondary purposes can increase the depth of the game as the player can make preemptive choices to make his base harder to harass for example.
If there is a building that cause a large explosion when it blows up you can use it as a land mine for example like players do with energy storages in FA.

I agree that it might be helpful as a secondary small optimization. But it should not be as dominant as it is in SC2.

if I remember correctly, energy storages are very expensive. So I doubt anybody would do this.

How placing a building is so much micro that is should not be used to block units, but placing wall magically involve no micro, so it's okay ?


Btw, I really don't like ramp blocking in Starcraft.
And solar wall in TA was never used in that way. It was more used to have some indirect way to control the flux of enemy units.

Have you ever seen what walling off in SC2 means? build your whole first structures all at some ramp, let a small space free and place a single unit there. Now manage that single unit like a door. I would call that micro and I am pretty surprised to see that anti-micro people don't share this view.

Real walls are not used like that. They just block off whole passages that you don't want enemies go through. Usually those passages are so wide open that there is no way to block them with factories. I.e. in SupCom:FA this is the case. You cant block passages with factories because they neither tightly fit together nor are they cheap enough.

The only case of production-buildings that are used as walls I know is SC2. SC2 is pretty micro heavy, so my general idea of walling off with production-buildings is influenced by it. Your idea of making walls with production buildings is probably vastly different then mine.

Yes that's what I was talking about when I said many people would dislike it.

Just to clarify, every RTS has some sort of "build/no build" variable built on a grid system.
Maps are made of tiles, as are buildings.
You can't build on ramps, slopes and water.

To the best of my understanding, no mainstream RTS to date has an "infinite" grid.
So even if the buildings have a "select, then spin, then drop" function with the GUI, they are always going to take up some sort of footprint.
This means there IS some sort of innate game grid mapping.


I was just asking for a build/no build grid to help clarify things when you select the building to be constructed.
Instead of SupCom's just green/red yes or no system.


Any sort of further mapping is beyond what I intended to bring up.

I've seen it happen in pro replays.
They placed it among well spaced T1 PDs so that it would be harder to overrun them without bunching up the spam next to the energy storages.

Huh? That's not a conclusion, that's a non-sequitur.
Just because something has a footprint doesn't mean it's on a grid.