Ideas from Zero-K

It should be toggleable ofc. In zero k (and TA had that too i think) you can say at how many %hp aircraft should find a repair pad.

That is like arguing against firestates because hold fire is often not the best tactical decision.

As long the player decides if the units are allowed to retreat and if so, to where. Then large armies are easier to manage, but it is still skill based, see it as micro up front, but less.

Total war games had this option. you could set all ranged units (cept artillery) to skirmish mode, which made them run away from melee units automatically. As you might know, total war games do not have a very micro intensive playstyle, but it is extremely gratifying if you see your tactics work.

Wow googlefrog that was an impressive post, I'm behind these 100%...speechless..

Absolutely 100% agreed. One thing I'd like to add is the ability to change artillery engagement angles. Did you mention this?

This was a feature of Spring and was useful for when terrain was in the way. You could change your artillery units to direct-fire (faster to hit them, wasn't always supported by all units, but could be compromised by terrain) and a high-angle bombardment. The high angle would take much longer for your shells to arrive there and would endure reduced accuracy because of it, but would avoid terrain.

This was always helpful for when you build your Bertha only to find out that it can't hit a goddamn thing because of some terrain problems that aren't completely obvious.


On the topic of artillery, it would also be nice to be able to band-box an area for bombardment. Sometimes you *want* inaccuracy.




The one thing that does greatly concern me is aircraft handling. Aircraft handling has always been a pretty flimsy point, because they're so easily shredded by defenses and require lots of attention.

Nothing was more maddening than telling your bombers to attack a target in TA, and they would fly all over the goddamn place *NOT* dropping bombs. Or they would drop the bombs and continue on their path instead of immediately turning around, and fly right into AA units.

In zero k aircraft do pretty well. You dont have the horrible unkillable blobs like in SC2. They are quite fast but die fast too. They are often used to strike at undefended targets (they can cover the entire map with their speed), kill a high value target or to provide fast support when needed which is a pretty nice role. Area commands are also really usefull for them. You can tell them to bomb a area and they will be divided evenly.

Downside is that they need constant attention but this is still way better than the SC2 blobs of death.

Seconded, I think Zero K has an excellent air-ground relationship. The air-air war works well too, although I personally just don't like dedicated aa fighters from a pure gameplay perspective, I think the ground aa vs air fight is more interesting and less likely to lead to massive single unit spam.

I suppose you could have it as a mode, equivalent to fire states, but for each one of these features it has to be worth adding in the first place lest it clutter up the UI. If you have auto-retreat when you reach a certain amount of hitpoints, where will the units retreat to? If you could come up with a heuristic that would work in most cases, then this might be viable.

Okay I just tried out the auto-retreat feature in Zero-K and it's incredible. You can set the degree to which a unit has to be injured until it retreats, at which patrolling construction vehicles will repair the unit and it will continue the orders it was given. Retreat zones are also completely independent of units, so you just plant one down and the injured unit will go to the nearest retreat zone. This certainly could be used for re-arming planes if their ammo is restricted.

Bombers in zero k have ammo and reload automatically if there is a free landing pad then they continue bombing. All automatic so you are busy with deciding what to bomb instead of microing them to landing pads and ****. There is also a option to let them repair at low hp (with multiple levels).

Thanks for this awesome and very well-documented post GoogleFrog. Truth is, while all the Spring RTS engine games like Zero-K are a bit clumsy in many aspects, they hide many genius ideas behind their rough shell. Stuff like the very intuitive area commands should already be in every rts .

Overall I like 90% of your suggestions, providing the UI can be made more intuitive. For instance inserting units at the front of the building queue is pretty essential, but AFAIR in Zero-k there's no visual indicator that the unit inserted in queue won't be repeated if building is set to auto-repeat. The interface should also be "discoverable" just by looking at tooltips, so there should probably be a button to insert a unit at front of queue, and its tooltip would tell you that alt-click does the same thing. Bam! The player now learned the shortcut naturally without going through a brain-busting tutorial.

Simple and Advanced GUIs which you can customize might also be a good idea to minimize the sense of being completely lost newbies will get.

Heh, I'm trying to play Zero-K right now, and the only thing that really, really bothers me is the terrible UI. It's almost unusably small at 2560x1600, and all the unit / building icons have the same color scheme and look exactly alike.

I have no problems at all but i play at 1440x900.

2560x1600 is a extremely high resolution btw. Wouldnt be the first game that doesnt work very well with it.

A nice idea. I really believe that PA will need a smart AI and commands like this to minimize micro. You should be able to make a command like this and then move somewhere else in your empire and expect that the group does what its supposed to do.

Maybe post a bit on the ZK site for help? With screenshots. The UI can be moved about and resized in tweak mode which is reached with the little green plus on the menu (hotkey Ctrl+F11).

And you can increase unit icon distance in Springsettings if you have a really big monitor and don't need icons to see units clearly.

"Damnit Jim, I'm an engineer, not an artist'

- open source "Zero-K artist"

Dayum I didn't even realise you could get screens at that resolution.

Tell me no more it will hurt my wallet.

For the record ZK looks fine at 1900x1200.

The standout from that for me was the formations thing... But most of all idea that Constructors have a set maximum metal and energy output. This could be fantastic for making the economy easier to manage.

Zero-K and spring got some of the very best UI features I have ever seen in an RTS and I would be delighted to see the same in PA. Feel free to hit me up in Zero-K if you would like to play