PTE build 78071 now up

Couple of things I noticed. Combat fabbers in transport can also spot mines, not sure if intentional. If your combat fabber scouts a mine and then moves on the mines go off the radar. They are visible as blue square when you press cntrl alt f11. Should be either you see them or they not on cntrl alt f11. Huge trick I also noticed about cntrl alt f11. Enemy commander is clearly recognisable if you have radar on him. This Should be changed.

The metal spent repairing units is ALWAYS less than building new ones. The only overhead is the combat fabbers themselves. They were expensive for so long, its just habit not including them in blobs.

Just don't try including them with dox... I've seen that way too much.

I disagree with this, I would rather repair a unit in ther base than have 2 in mine half the map away. Combat fabbers are super squishy and an easy target. Now you will be able to stop a whole army with a mine field and a pelter. Just scout and snipe the combat fabber and the army is useless. This is just my first impression or trick to turtle up, i'm sure there are other ways too.

No error messages in live_game or live_game_control_group_bar debugger. Here's something juicy looking from the console though:

-1 02:19:51.003159 W | Argument conversion failed: Wrong type - expected Integer, got Null while converting argument 0 for handler select.unitsOnScreenWithTypeFilter

I get this every time I press one of the "select all" buttons. Perhaps that will lead to a related issue for the idle boxes.

I am going to pee on everything you love.

I mean this change is weird and I don't like it.

This should also fix team colored beams if anyone wants to try.

It's a starting point

Right. Argument zero is the planet id. If I reselect the planet things start working. I think it's less of an OS X issue and more a slow computer issue - I get to the planet before some panel is ready to catch the change event.

does this mean we can have none random landing zones?

[BUG]
Selecting an idle air factory and giving it a planet-wide patrol command will stop the factory from being shown as idle even though I haven't actually started building anything.

Ok, some of this has been said but it's easier for me just to go down the list.

New selection UI is far too intrusive, there's no need for the box to be that large with only one or two different units selected, scale it to how many different units you have selected. Having all that empty space in the box looks silly anyway, regardless of screen space taken up.

Some translucency would be nice on all of the new UI, as mentioned above.

I find the yellow of the idle alerts far too bright: the glare of bright yellow was actually distracting me.

Fabbers should not be included in the 'select all [unit type]'. I can think of no situations in which I want to select all of my combat bots and all my bot fabbers. Adding an extra tab of 'select all basic/advanced/orbital fabbers on screen' would be useful, but while fabbers are included with combat units I will continue to use ctrl-z for everything.

That's all the UI related stuff. Haven't really played enough to comment on balance properly, but I have to agree with clopse and jaguar on the combat fabber/mine mechanic. Much as I love the idea, after only one game I agree that it would be an extremely micro-intensive, annoying addition. If mines are going to behave in that way they need to be a lot more expensive and/or a lot slower to build. Alternatively you could have them visible on radar but untargetable without a combat fabber, or perhaps have them always visible but untargetable except for reclaim. Also area-reclaim needs to work on enemy structures so we can clear mine fields with combat fabs easily (this would be a nice addition anyway, I often find myself queueing reclaim of enemy mex fields).

Final comment: the new SXX lightning beam effect is the coolest thing ever to be added to PA.

Implement this for UI improvements?
https://forums.uberent.com/threads/toggle-the-orbital-layer.67626/#post-1063526
^Toggle Orbital Layer

"- Normal AI and Hard AI are now easier"
but why?

Yeah I liked the change at first since I always thought combat fabbers and mines were a bit useless, especially on small maps where radar sees everything, but then some loser named Mered4 pointed out that it would just force everyone to build bot factories as soon as the match starts and send combat fabbers everywhere because mines would be totally OP if your enemy doesn't have CFabs and totally UP if they did, since they'd get spotted and instantly shot at by all the units in the area

A possible fix for this (I haven't even been able to try if this is as big a deal as mered said to need a fix, but hey what I'm about to say encourages diversity anyway and that's always fun) would be to allow combat fabbers and scouts to see mines (all the factories except bots have scouts, and bots have CFabbers) and then make mines invincible to enemy fire but have all fabbers and scouts either instantly start reclaiming mines when they get nearby or have the ability to reclaim mines added.

I also am mystified. Both of those AIs already felt like they were on suicide watch for low self esteem. Why have we driven them to the edge?

Because nubs.

... Or just give mines more HP?

The massive radar nerf in this PTE means you almost certainly won't have radar coverage of an area, so giving scouts radar the same range as their vision so they can see mines would be nice.

@sorian I just did a 2v2 against AI, with 2 planets. Both AIs rushed (~7 minutes) their commanders to the leetle moon, then sent them back once we destroyed their bases on the starting planet. One of them walked into triple laser defence towers and Levelers, the other one into Ants+Shellers. Replay ID: 12557404920151438314

Edit: More stuffs

Radar range is smaaaall. I think the nerf may have gone a bit far:


Also new this update for me, instead of 1/2/3 I have black squares for picking spawns. It's just me so far so might be mods or something:


Edit again: Someone should make a .gif of the new SXX effect if it's really so fancy?

I knew it. Their low self esteem is getting to 'em.

hard should have been kept the same, as with normal, and there should have been an easy AI class introduced for the really new newbs