Hi, this is my first post to the forums so hi everyone! I recently noticed that you can right-click on a unit with an Astraeus selected to have it loaded, which is great as clicking the load-unit button every time was cumbersome. Even better, I found that you can draw a circular range with a set of Astraeus selected and have them pick up all the units (or at least as many as possible) within that range. Not sure if these improvements were made in a recent patch or I just didn't notice them originally. In any case, I wondered if it would be possible to improve this functionality a step further by including a 'load collection' icon which would load up the next set of selected units, regardless of selection method (dragging, assigned group hot-key, double clicking on a unit, etc) to make it easy to transport spread-out battle-groups or lots of units of the same type. It would also be nice if you could send a unit to an Astraeus for it to be loaded like you can with transports in, e.g. Starcraft. Apologies of this has been suggested before but a quick search of the forums didn't turn up any similar suggestions in recent posts. - Lofty
just to add to the thread factory assisttransportation as well as ferrysystems were you asign both a loading and a landingzone would be very desireable ... ... and multiunittransports ....
I think mods for pretty much anything are possible in PA but there's always the danger of ending up with a thousand mods and everyone effectively playing a slightly different game depending on their mod selection, which has some clear drawbacks. In terms of simple playability improvements without adding units or changing any of the gameplay dynamics, I feel these should be part of the core game however - for example if the devs are committed to restricting themselves to single-unit transports then it would be nice if they could make them as easy to use as possible and it's often only minor code changes that are required if the game is internally well-designed, which I'm guessing it is due to a fairly active modding scene. The main problem with PA as it stands (although it's rapidly getting better) is that due to having an orbital layer and multiple planets, a player's attention span is really stretched to the limit and micromanagement is still a problem. I bought PA as it seemed the closest thing to a sequel to Total Annihilation, probably my favourite RTS of all time, in which they did an excellent job of reducing micromanagement to a minimum.
