Hi hi, After the announcement of PA (and the successful Kickstarter), I somehow have found myself drawn back into Forged Alliance. After my break, I think I have drawn some conclusions. Stategic Zoom is revolutionary, I can't really imagine playing an RTS without it now. Engine Scalability is almost everything. FA is plagued with lobby connection issues and the games get quite laggy as the units increase. All this for a game made years ago. I am very glad the PA team is building this game for scalability from the ground up. Modability: Forged Alliance has been brought back to life by the FAF community. If the game wasn't somewhat mod friendly, it would be dead by now. GUI: I think FA has one of the most power GUI available to the RTS genre. Even more so with the mods. I think numbers 1-3 have been addressed very strongly by the PA team and I am very glad for it. I think the GUI question may be a bit early for us to hope for. I am going to make a general assumption that that PA will have at least equal to FA in terms of GUI smartness (assists, ferry, patrol)... I would like to hear your thoughts on what other powerful GUI features can be adopted from other games and how they work. I really think that this is one of the best things that this game can bring to revolutionize the genre. cheers all! :mrgreen:
some hotbar stuff that lets you keep track of your economy and consumption (that can be toggled) much in the same way the engineer, commander, factories and SCUs had hotbars something like this: https://sites.google.com/site/supecono/ conditional automation for things like MEX upgrades and what have you doesn't need to be in the game from the start but should be enabled for UI mods, automatically turning off things like metal fabricators is a must lastly some sort of priority system for construction not unlike what zero-k uses: http://zero-k.info/Wiki/EconomyGuide (bottom of the page)
Like they could with any camera I suppose. I'm always frustrated watching games that don't have it. I want a broader view of the action. Of course the scale of most games is so small I suppose the minimap suffices for that.
I always liked the idea of how a game goes from early game being like SC2 cam to late game being more like Victoria 2, slowly and cleaning shifting from tactical relevance, to grand strategy relevance. Hell if there is (not saying there is) multiplayer galactic war types things it could go even bigger with clan matches spanning days or weeks as teams of 20 slowly battle for control of a galaxy.
if you ever have a chance you should give some of the Forged Alliance casts a watch. they make EXCELLENT use of the strategic zoom and different camera features. if necessary the community could be asked what they would need/want to better observe and commentate on the action (i'm sure some of these casters could be asked to comment for example terrain clipping and multi-split screening would be very useful): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXqlVwjM ... w&index=12 (skipping the first few minutes will put you right into the action)
I brought this subject up just to highlight how the powerful GUI is probably the greatest defining feature of SupCom. It puts the control of the entire army at the player and gives him a true General's perspective on the battlefield. It makes it a strategical game instead of tactical unit positioning like Starcraft. On the top of cameras and casters. SupCom has a lot of stuff going on at once. And quite often in the casts I watch the casters zoom in to give us a pretty view of a critical battle, but another 2 drops are happening elsewhere. I don't believe in limiting the casters or the tools. It's more about caster ability and skill. I am assuming split-screen is a given (or at least will be patched in later). Even the multi-monitor support in SupCom is amazing. Let's me zoom into 1 section of the battle while giving me a massive mini-map. And if I ever need to baby sit my Commander and the front line separately, I can drill down and micro both. I really feel the advanced and powerful GUI gives me that feeling of control and power as a decision maker. I find that kind of enabling in an RTS extremely fun. It is what has drawn me back into SupCom over all else. Fingers crossed that PA will take that level of GUI and push it 2 steps further and revolutionize the RTS genre again like it's predecessors!
Watching that game was pretty boring. No fault to the caster who did very well, but icons vs. icons wasn't just very inspiring, coupled with the fact that the few times the camera was close enough to see the actual units, they still vanished behind their icons (and were blurry enough to be unreconizable anyway). I really hope the art design of PA will lead to much better readability because what I just watched was pretty bad. :/
