Multiple Bays per Factory

That's an awful lot of assuming there on your part, elexis. I'll leave it at that for now.

But no, just waiting for units to turn on the spot isn't remotely the biggest problem.

The argument that roll-off time is so crucial to the balance of assisting still doesn't chime with me. This quirk originates back to the very original Total Annihilation, which was made in an era when RTS balance wasn't seen as all that important and developers were doing things based on how cool they were. It wasn't until Blizzard's RTS games came along to change that preconception; which was also a correspondence to the shift towards understanding the importance of online play. At least this theory is more consistent.

And as an incentive to build more factories, it's a pretty weak one. All players did was construct one or two more for the sole purpose of mitigating the delay of run-off; after that they wouldn't build any more; there was no real economic or strategic incentive to it. Are we this desperate to justify gameplay that rewards factory building that we have to rely on this micro-inducing quirk? I stated this earlier.

Interesting points. Care to discuss any of my actual arguments from my post and not the one I explicitly left out?

I like the idea of a trapdoor opening to drop the unit below the factory, but I think it would have too many negative or undesirable side-effects to be worthwhile.

For example any ground-based engineers would have to aim their nanolathes up which would unavoidably cause graphical clipping. It would also mean that the aesthetic design of the factory was necessarily based around this one feature, rather than there being more artistic freedom (this would also affect any future mods in the same way).

I like the two-bay idea as it solves a problem that was never meant to be there and it would look nice.

I don't think that there should be upgrades, simultaneous parallel construction or any of the other over-complicating ideas that have been suggested.

It would also look really weird to drop a 100-tonnes battletank a few meters down. They can't generally take that kind of impact. Plus it's going to leave a pretty big crater after a few cycles which you have to close up. Not very efficient.

Very well then, if you can't see them.

Why would units move to intersect another bay instead of moving away from the factory before doing anything else?
What makes you think units turning is the 'biggest part' of the issue and not just the delays of unit roll-out in general?
How do you know how big the largest unit is going to be and if factories couldn't accommodate the largest unit blueprint space? (Although, the delays of unit run-off mostly affect cheap unit spam.)
Or if larger units won't be built from separate larger factories, or if the largest units are going to be built from factories at all, or if factories are upgradeable this time, or if all land units will be constructed from the same factory for all of these matters?
Why would modders take issue with the size of double bays when they got along fine with the size of the single bayed factories of Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander?
Why is modding being brought into this discussion at all for that matter, when modders can break games in a million ways and this should be about the base game?

No, it's not crucial. However, it is silly to have your army size determined by how units walk out of the factory. Things like this should be a non factor in gameplay, as managing them is neither a tactical decision nor a fun one.

^ This.

Basically what I wrote somewhere near the start of this topic.

If roll-off time was in any way part of balancing units in previous games it is pretty much irrelevant to PA since units will be balanced taking in to account factors relevant to this particular game. Since Uber will be building it from the ground up, if the factories are designed with a uniform roll-off time from the get go, then that just makes balancing easier and makes roll-off time a non-issue. Which, please correct me if I am wrong, was what the OP set out to demonstrate. Whatever kind of animation is used in order to provide this is really irrelevant too, as long as it achieves what the OP is talking about.

Do we even need the roll of time other then for balance?

TA just had the factory's build the units on the ground, letting units roll out as fast as they could walk, and leaving themselves open to raiding.

Because the AI is stupid, plus there is no guarantee that the unit won't be big enough to intersect both bays in the first place.
It's a part. A big part, the time to get out of the way depends on 3 things: how fast the unit can move, which direction it has been directed to go (and thus how much it has to turn on the spot) and if there is any other traffic to slow it down. As the third option is a base planning thing I am ignoring it. Basically I am saying you are correct here, everything is important. It's just that the turning is particularly important as it is done on the exact spot that the unit was built on. Also, in most cases speed is proportional to unit power meaning that delays based on this is almost self-balanced, however delay based on unit turning is another story, with walking robots tending to have a greater turning speed than tread units (hell, spider bots shouldn't even need to turn).
That's the problem, you don't know. Therefore any solution dependant on size, such as 2 construction locations on the factory model, will sooner or later run into this problem.
See above.
The modder won't take issue, but their AwesomeMegaOversizedGunBot9000 might.
Because an arbitrary size limit is an excellent way to break a game, modders or not.


Out of all the alternatives suggested, I like the piston approach the best. Pushing the unit out means that they will only come out one side of the factory but it also means the hold time between units will be perfectly consistent.

Perhaps I have to rephrase myself- you're making an awful assertion on how unit A.I. is going to behave in a new game. And why can't the game tell units to leave the factory through the exit before doing anything else?

Of course there is guarantee; the developers are making the entire unit pool; they have the full knowledge of everything to work with.

No, units turning in the factory was not the sole important part of the issue I have, or any more worthy of mention over the general quirks of factory disembarking. I'm telling you this mostly from the experience of many a Balanced Annhilation matches on Spring over the years. When you poured anything above around 50 metal into a factory, the delay caused by waiting for units to exit it choked the production. It didn't matter that the units were not turning and were in fact exiting in the quickest way possible, they still induced this waiting delay at factories that often turned into a production bottleneck. My issue is explicitly with all delay induced by waiting for units to vacate the factory; not with any particular one type of it.

Once again, I don't know why you're bringing modding into this discussion...or why we're supposed to care about someone's ridiculous implementation of a game-breaking unit.

I guess I have to rephrase this question as well- why is whatever space limitation of a theoretical double bay seen as an arbitrary restriction and not the space limitation of the factories of Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander?
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Really, you want me to respond to all of this, but what it all comes down to is you're building your argument on many wild assertions on either nonsensical issues or finer game details that might not even exist.

The assumption isn't an AI assumption, it an assumption that there isn't a predefined exit of the factory and that units can exit from multiple/all sides of the factory.

You are now saying that there is one exit from the factory, if this is the case (which it wasn't for TA or SupCom) then I don't see a need for your idea anymore.

The assumption that completed units would willingly move to block another factory bay is still a nonsensical one. I mean- the purpose of the idea is so construction of the next unit can begin instantly; a just completed unit doesn't have an instant to physically accelerate to move to block the next bay before the next construction has already started.

All the land based factories in Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander had either one or two exit directions, except for the naval yard. It was usually best to treat them all like they had one.

If you don't see where the need for the idea comes from then you just don't get it.

You could also solve this issue by having the same built in minimal build time for everything.

Sure, it's arbitrary, but it's simple, consistent and inherently balanced because it is the same for everything. Not to mention, that the actual animations in the game don't have to be suitable for insanely high production speeds, which also takes some weight off the art/animation guys.

While effective, the downside is that it links the build time of the smallest unit in the game to the movement speed of the biggest. IE; you either can't have really big units or you can't have really small units. It'd be a shame to not get enough scale going because of a fix like that.

(Well, you could, it'd just be a balance issue, but it's something to keep in mind)

Like SupCom2? No thanks. That was a very different game based around research. Units actually got cheaper as they got better in that game.

What we are talking about here is building into the game from the beginning a uniform way to eject units from the factories that allows for better balancing of the units build speed and a more consistent production rate from factories.

In SupCom, it doesn't even matter if I have two unassisted factories building the exact same unit. If I click one to go left and the other to go right, one factory will produce more units than the other. Even though the build time is exactly the same. This is just wrong and as far as I am concerned it's not even about balance in this case.

IMO, land factories could quite easily nanolathe a unit on a skid pan and then, as previously suggested, a large piston just pushed it out of the factory onto an open pad where the unit can walk away from in any direction. This clears the bay and allows construction while the unit moves away. This should remove all the issues around roll off time until the units are being produced at a faster rate than the piston animation.

As for air and naval, I'm sure there are other animation types that could be employed to give the same effect.

Did I say I want Supcom2 and the mechanics it had? No. Supcom2 and its mechanics are entirely irrelevant to my suggestion and you are simply making a strawman argument.

Going from the multiple bays = simultaneous production idea, you could have higher tier factories be able to produce multiple lower tier units at the same time.
This reduces the waiting per unit for small units without actually changing the delay.

Perhaps you should have been clearer then? It's fine saying that wasn't what you meant, but would you care to enlighten me as to what you actually meant?

His sentence has nothing to do with SupCom2, he suggested a minimal build time, not a fixed build time.
For example make that each units take always 0.5 sec to leave the factory. Only that part would be fixed, the building phase could be instantaneous.

I'm not sure I like that any better. If I'm honest I think it's worse. Much worse. Especially if nothing is done to address the issue the OP was talking about. You can't have a fixed, or instantaneous, build phase without prepaying for the unit. Again, like in SupCom2. It's easy to say that he didn't make reference to SupCom2, but his idea and your explanation of his idea both have parallels with the game. Sure people dislike it. For the record; I don't particularly hate it and I played it through the campaign. It's just not relevant to the game Uber have stated they want to make.

The whole point of the topic is fixing the roll off time so it is the same for all units, thus removing it as a variable in the unit manufacturing process all together so that he build time is dictated by resource and build power alone. Giving a true reference for unit balancing using the previously mentioned resource and build power constraints.

I'm sure he doesn't need you to answer for him, but since you did...

The way I interpreted what he said (rightly or wrongly) was that each unit should have a fixed build time. That's how SupCom2 worked. Units got better but they didn't get more expensive or have lengthier build times like in TA or SupCom. In fact they got cheaper if you did the right upgrades, but that's besides the point.

Looking back at his post, it seems he is more likely talking about introducing a minimum build time for all units, I assume at least equal to the roll off time (a point he neglected to mention). If I have presumed correctly, this would be to insure that you cannot build a unit in less than the amount of time it takes bay 1 to clear. This would ensure that when the unit in bay 2 is complete, bay 1 would be guaranteed clear to start production.

While this would solve the roll off problem, it seems some what complicated to solve a relatively simple issue. It doesn't really fit in with the resources/build power equation used to determine unit build times in previous games either. It makes it more like =(R/Bp)+K where K is the constant minimum build time. It's basically putting a fixed time at the start instead of the end. Therefore working around the problem instead of solving it. Additionally it means that to a degree, assisting would become ineffective after a certain point, which I disagree with.

The problem isn't with having a roll off time. The problem is having one that varies for no good reason. If the roll off for all units out of a land factory was fixed by a 2sec arbitrary animation then this is just fine. Because it is the same for everyone, regardless of where they set a waypoint or other player defined constraint. It also means that units build times can be defined entirely by how much resource they require and build power available. It's much fairer this way.

As far as I am concerned, there's little more to add to the topic. It was sewn up in the first couple of pages. I'd personally like to see a fixed roll off common for all units produced in a particular factory. Not just land, as has been mostly discussed here.

EDITED: Spelling mistake

Just for the record, all I really wanted to do with this thread was present a minor tweak that works with the current system and makes it flow that much more efficiently, which was based on my own experience and trouble mostly on pumping as much cheap(relative) spam out of factories and thinking it could be done better. I wasn't thinking so much about all these drastic measures posted here to enforce absolute standardised build times. But whatever. EDIT: I have nothing else to add at this point.