Hello! I've just bought the game and I have to say I'm really enjoying it so far. It feels like it's got some things that Supreme Commander was missing without the across-the-map-can't-do-anything-about-it-until-you-die artillery barrages. Yay! But I have a few questions and concerns! 1) Is there a pause button(That isn't the chrono-thing, since that keeps going in the background?)? I thought I paused the game to go to the bathroom and when I came back the AI had overrun my base and I was dead. =( I even went to the options menu(which usually pauses the game). Is there a key I'm missing? I didn't see a 'pause' key in the options, and pressing it doesn't seem to do anything. 2) I am apparently really awful at this game! Several matches against the AI and I've lost every one, though admittedly I've lasted a bit longer each time it still ends with me being overrun by lots more units than I can produce. The only time I even came close to beating one of the AI is when I had him cornered on a peninsula for a while, but I guess he managed to escape it and hit me from behind! Does anyone have any tips that really helped them out when they started? 3) Is there a way to see idle commanders/Engineer|Fabricator units with the UI like there is in SupCom? Or a way to see idle factories? Eventually you have so many it's hard to keep them all working without manually adding like 1000 units to the queue. As a sub-question, is there a way to queue multiples of a unit? Clicking that much takes forever! Again, I am -loving- this game, I just hope someone can help me out. =)
1. Nope, not yet. 3. I believe you are missing the build panel too? As in a global "where are my engineers"? "F" = Select all fabbers on screen. Unfortunately, it doesn't take you directly to the fabbers, nor cycle through them. It's only selects what you see on the screen at that moment. And only for what the camera can see. In order to use "F" right now... Planetary Annihilation 1 action to "zoom out" 1 action to hit "F" 1 action to "track" 1 action to "zoom in" 1 action to "select" a single fabber. vs Forged Alliance 1 action to "move mouse to idle engineers panel" 1 action to "right click" for select and zoom-to idle fabber. As for multiple units. If you hold down "shift" key while you click, it will add 5 units instead of 1 unit. Repeat/Loop button isn't in yet. It's clearly not macro yet. But let's hope we get there
1) No pause function yet. I am sad about it, too 2) Expand, expand, expand. Take every metal spot you can take. Early in the game make a bot factory that builds non stop workers. Try to keep the workers busy by sending them to build mex/energy. Then try to use all the resources you'll get through this. 3) Not yet, you can press F to select ALL idle engineers though. Also see this mod to queue up 100 instead of 5 with shift: https://forums.uberent.com/threads/rel-modbatch-54357.50897/
Culverin & cola_colin already answered your questions. In the meantime, I'd recommend you check out a tutorial I made. http://pamatches.com/2013/planetary-annihilation-tutorial-basic-gameplay-and-techniques/ It goes over some of the basics of gameplay and provides a lot of techniques for becoming a better player. Also, if you check out http://pamatches.com/ there are a bunch of videos from some of the best PA players out there. You can learn a lot from watching them.
Thank you for the responses! They have been very helpful. =) Speaking of pausing, what about saving? I haven't seen an option for that yet either. And if I were going to mod the game how would I do that? Like is there a modding folder in the steam directory like for Skyrim or is it more complex?
Savegames are not possible yet either. You can only mod the UI right now. To check out how that works have a look at the modding section of the forums. Basically the UI is a webbrowser, so mods are done in html and javascript. And yes there is a mods folder in the ui subdirectory of PA.
Oooh, that's very interesting. =) As an update I managed to win a game but when I went back to review it in chronocam even though my infrastructure was almost three times as big as his and I was spending all my resources constantly he was still giving me trouble to the point I was almost killed. The AI seems able to advance through the tech extremely quickly.
