Ideas from Zero-K

Wow, if even half of these make it into PA, then I will be incredibly happy.

Make it happen!

I'll just put down my opinions on the suggestions made by OP.

These were implemented by mods in SupCom/FA. Having them integrated from the start would be good.

These sound good.
The Economy Breakdown is the suggestion I agree most with. This might also be because it impacts gameplay the least.

If this were a separate command to supplement the normal attack ground, it'd be fine by me.

Probably pretty easy to do and would benefit ease of use. Nukes had this in SupCom.

These were already in SupCom/TA/FA to an extent.

The ETA was flawed though.
The Initial States partially in SupCom/TA where the firestate/movement state was transferred from the factory onto the units.
There were no armor classes in SupCom when units were fighting eachother. Only buildings and commanders had armor classes which resulted in various degrees of resistance to overcharge. (iirc)

I am opposed to these:

1 - I believe this to be too great an advantage if these rings are drawn on opposing structures as well.
2 - We've already had a discussion about this and why I feel they're bad.
3 - Shooting more > Shooting less . I am also opposed to radar wobble.
4 - I saw a different "insert into queue" suggestion before, that one looked better to me. (Not sure which it was)
5 - I believe this would not benefit the eventual game. In SupCom/TA you would instantly say crap when you saw the opponent reached higher tech/advanced units before you did. I also think this would take away some of the feeling of progression.
6 - I believe this would add too much automation to combat, if you want your units to kite, you'll have to tell them to do so yourself. In my opinion, this is necessary micro.
7 - While this would be clearer to understand for new players, it would also allow you to build anything right away, it would just take longer. In SupCom you simply could not start an experimental the instant you reached tech 3 because it used too much mass/sec.

There are people who love much automation, thare are people who love the lack of automation, hope the developers won't choose a compromised design for the UI, sometimes it is better to not try to cater everyone's taste.

Its not supposed to be a RTT it will be a true RTS so automation is needed else it just turns into a starcraft game with extremely high apm

As if TA or SupCom were RTTs.

TA has a lot more automation than almost all other rts games at that time, some innovative UI features and AI behaviors in it have big impacts on gameplay, hope PA would be like this too.

They had some automation and now we bring it to a new level so you can put more attention to the strategical aspect and blowing **** up .

Automation is a must.

Even in competitive Supreme Commander you can see people sending units and letting them do their thing because their attention is needed elsewhere. Micro wasn't even that important except in some rare cases.

The game we're talking about now is on an unprecedented scale and expecting people to micro their battles is insanity. Zero-K's smart unit AI is refreshing - if a bit crude - and leads to better gameplay.

I guess it depends what you want to get out of an RTS game. I consider automation to be 'pressing R to reload' in an FPS game, whereas micro would be engaging in some ridiculous task that involves me clicking and dragging a magazine out of my pocket, pressing the 'magazine release button', carefully slotting it in, but if you don't do it fast enough you risk a jam, etc.

I get the joy of RTS out of seeing my plans unfold and watching units battle it out and explode, not in celebrating the tedium of click-click-click-click-click-click-click.

Me too. But that, sadly enough, is impossible to my knowledge (excempting Supreme Commander and such I guess).

Which is why I love this game.

not from Zero-K but on a similar note: I'd like to be able to mark No-Fly/No-Go zones for your units so they won't follow enemy units into areas you know are dangerous.

There is a separate command for normal attack too.

This is for rare commands and greater customisation. The inheritable attributes such as fire and move state have a setting called inherit along with the other 3 presets. A factory doesn't really need a cloak state if it only builds one cloaking unit.

1 - This is just a scouting information aid. Otherwise people will just hover blueprints over opponent bases to figure out where to place their armies or nukes.

3 - I don't think radar wobble is necessary.

4 - Maybe it can be done better. The best solution would be to let people write UI widgets and find which is the best way for them.

5 - This was just to say that it is possible. Anyway the devs seem to be set on 2 tech levels by now.

6 - Why would you have to tell them to do this yourself if you clearly know what you want them to do? There is still battle 'micro' because players will have to make decisions quickly in battles. For example units set to kite would not dive a commander in a suicide attack unless told to. Anyway there are already a few discussions of this point going on.

7 - I think this comment is wrong. If you increase any of the three resource costs of a unit then it is worse than it being cheaper. Do not be confused by the flow resource system. Here is an example.

I have unit A which costs 100 M, 100 E and 50 BT (build time). It takes my factory with 5 BP (build power) 10s to build it and drains 10M and 10E throughout.

Another unit, unit B, costs 100 M, 100 E and 100 BT. It takes the 5 BP factory 20s to construct this unit and drains 5M, 5M.

You seem to claim that I could start production of unit B when I could not construct unit A because B drains less. Unit B is my proposed system which "allows you to build anything right away". But if you periodically pause/unpause the construction of unit A it has overall equal drain and production time as unit B. A good UI would do the pause toggling for you and would do it rapidly.

So I think the premise for objection 7 is false.

Edit: Just discovered that there is an entire thread for this exact idea. viewtopic.php?f=61&t=35752

Sorry I started from one and had to work backwards.

-1. One thing that googlefrog didn't mention that I think is worth mentioning is adding unit ques into command groups so that when they are built they start taking orders from the command group immediately. In a game where units are continuously being hammered out you need a simple way to add units on auto build into your command group, especially from brand new factories. Also, allowing players to give units commands such as get-in, jump or teleport (if they have it) from the factory would also be great. SupCom1 had ferrying, but it seemed like ferrying was partially broken in SupCom2 and I was a lil disappointed that it wasn't more useful.

0. I LOVE good UI with the heat of a thousand burning stars. With that said Zero K has the best UI around. I fully endorse taking ideas from Zero K.

1. Auto micro to repair was in TA. The air units would go to the repair platforms on aircraft carriers (or built in your base) when they were low enough on health. I see no reason why adding this for vehicles cannot or should not be implemented. They could even use the same platforms if there was a ramp to get on up. I want to stress that auto micro rarely saves a unit in a fire fight especially one you are losing. In between fights, it is magically delicious.

2. Automated fire and retreat is very dependent on the unit designs. One of the mistakes GPG made was not balancing for kiting. However, on the reverse side the mongol horse archers in Age of Kings played by medium difficulty AI made me cry. To close on automated retreat I have to quote superfrog:

2. [cont'd] I got to be really skeptical of this. I mean, I am a mad genius of strategy, but ask me to apm the crap out of something and you will watch 15 year olds whom I am good friends with rape me like a defenseless child. Honestly, I like the fact that I can take some Zeese and walk up to some units someone isn't managing and eat them. Auto kite sounds like it would benefit fast long ranged units exponentially when lets be honest, they are already really good. So yeah, it is really going to have to come down to implementation and its affect on game play. I have no problem with losing to someone who can force me into an apm situation, especially if I have the tools you are proposing. Something has to decide the match between two very good strategies. At some point APM may decide some of our games. I am ok with that.

While I am discussing this I should point out that APM can be even more of a factor in TA style games than Starcraft. It's not because someone is managing zerglings, but it's because someone is managing multiple battlefronts.

I can defeat Iron Commander in Star Craft 2 relatively easily. I think I won our first game we played together. However, I cannot beat him in Supreme Commander 2 without the devil's own luck and some of the best cheese in the game. Why? Because radar makes everything I do some level of transparent. In Star Craft you can use the element of surprise strategically to roll a high apm player with better predetermined decisions. In TA style games you are at the mercy of the radar system and surprise is at a high premium. I know this last bit is a total aside, but it eats at me every now and then when I play a TA style game and I have an unshakeable enemy.

So, tread lightly with the automated kiting. I am only on board if it isn't that good. I know that sounds terrible, but I think you can see where I am coming from.

Honestly, I need to try the feature this weekend. What's the best mix of range and speed in ZK?

Fast low ranged units in Zero-K are benefited by auto-dodging, they are very good at closing in long ranged units without getting hitted, so it is still quite balanced.

And hell, you're the general, not the squad leader. Giving unit AI the tools to actually work to its full effect makes sense. We demand that our units close in automatically when an enemy is just outside of range instead of standing there and waiting for an order from above, makes sense that they'd go the opposite direction too, no? It probably won't match human intelligence anyway so if you really want a micro advantage you can pay attention to details like making sure they don't move towards a cliff or enemy fortification in their kiting attempts (even without them somehow falling off the cliff or running into fort range they'd still be out of space to retreat into and thus get caught). Also it'll look better to see the individual units engage in more dynamic combat than a freaking civil war rifle line.

I'm going to cry 'just balance it' because you can definitely make units balanced when they kite intelligently. It should not make a difference to balance with small scale engagements in which everyone can micro their units. It just makes lets skirmishers scale up and they can still be balanced there as well.

Sure APM is always important. If you remove the things which the game is not meant to be about (moving units back and forth on a small scale) then the APM barrier is lowered for everyone and they can get to the real strategy.

What do you mean by the best mix of range and speed? For mixing units together? For individual unit stats?

I hadn't heard of or played zero-k til this thread. Now I have. Kudos to those involved, it is extremely awesome.
I hope PA features the auto-kiting AI, that is especially cool, reduces unnecessary micro and makes the units feel a bit more real, and not like lemmings with machine guns.

One thing has to be said though, for new people trying out Zero-K now:
There's other similar, TA-like games made by the same engine (Spring) too. If you dislike the simplified economy or tech tree, or the automation, of Zero-K, be sure to give them a go too. Zero-K to me feels like a TA-lite, when a lot of the strategic elements contained there have been dumbed down.

I'm late to the party and was just about to suggest this on these forums, only to see googlefrog has already done it about a month ago... tip o' the hat to the guy!

Spring RTS' and especially Zero-K's controls and features are outstanding. They're immensely facilitating being in command of large armies.

Even my friends whom I got to play Zero-K instantly loved area commands, custom formations and all the visualizations (like the radar and AoE on ballistic weapons), as total beginners. Those just seem to be immediately accessible features to almost anyone. They're just great enhancements like TA's more clever "builder patrol" and shift-queueing, back then.

For individual unit stats. I believe the Fido would be a good example of an excellent kiting unit from TA.

I agree you have to balance the units regardless, because you don't want to give someone with good apm kiting skills too much of an advantage.

The bottom line is this shouldn't feel like auto-pilot. Who wants to play an auto-pilot version of a flight simulator?

Skirmishers in Zero-K are balanced in regard that they might have moderate speed, low HP, innaccurate weapons or easy to dogde projectiles. Since that they automatically skirmish they are reliable counters to units with lower range and speed without requiring heavy micro while they are weak enough to be napalm bombed and slow enough to be catched by raiders.

I don't understand the analogy to a flight simulator. You are playing the general. Telling your units to skirmish on their own rather than having to do it manually seems more like a commander to me.