Sandbox mode

I know this was talked about in the past but, its been a while. I was really expecting a sandbox mode sooner than this, since the game is "released". What I mean by sandbox mode is complete control over units and being able to spawn and control them, as well as manipulating the map at the same time. Also, when you do play with sandbox, you could be able to save and load the game to an actual game with AI or real people but I know that would come only after saved games are implemented. If there is a mod for this, please don't answer with that, sandbox should be available to all users who play it without modding or doing some kind of special enable. A lot of good RTS games have this type of thing and not even PA has it yet, come on.

You can do this with the cheat mods.

The only RTS I can personally think of that has it is Supcom?

Supcom has sandbox mode?

Sort of, I think it just makes the ai do nothing at all.

(which you can do by giving the enemy 0 resources and yourself *5)

Just use cheat mods on PAMM

Seriously, he asked specifically to no say anything related to mods. And i have seen this kind of editor in many many rts such us entente, american conquest.. It is not a thin list by any means.
I think uhe is spot on, we need this. And not the shitty cheats mods that Uber created to fullfill this role. The already have the basics but need to work on it. And cheat mods are for testing not a real sandbox, for example it doesn't even have a complete unit rooster to use or buldings without summoning the avatars.. So yeah. Pretty much a needed feature

PA needs alot of things, THIS should not be a priority

The shitty mods that do the job just fine while Uber works on parts of the game that actually need work?

Wait.. why do we need this? I don't really understand the application. I guess units in the editor could be useful for making single player scenarios but that's not what the op wants.

Supreme Commander required you to enable Cheats when creating a regular game, then using cheat commands to spawn in units.
PA requires you to enable the (official) Cheat mod when creating a regular game, then use cheat commands to spawn in units.

It's really not that different, and ultimately works just as well as a lobby option. I agree that eventually it should probably be moved into the lobby, but it really isn't a high-priority thing (since the functionality already exists), but rather polish.

In that case I would recommend the sandbox unit organiser...mod

I haven't checked recently, but from memory that is actually just an unlocker for code that is already available when the game itself is run in --devmode.

Pretty sure it organises the sandbox panel too, so categories like bots are grouped together.

Sandbox Unit Toolbox just flips the UI flag, so you have access to all commanders and unbuildable units. Sandbox Unit Organizer filters and reorders units according the build bar info.