Suggestion for UI Improvements to make transports practical for invasion

Discussion in 'Planetary Annihilation General Discussion' started by nuevotango, May 23, 2014.

  1. nuevotango

    nuevotango New Member

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    It's difficult to manage lots of transports right now because of some minor UI issues. I spent a lot of time in a AI game last night trying to invade his position with transport drops, and it was so close to being awesome, but because of these things took forever and required lots of attention to do:

    1. 100 transports that are empty, when grouped with 1 transport that has a unit loaded will only present the unload button. Please let me load if there are any transports in the group that have free spots, and unload if there are any that are carrying something.

    2. When I have 100 transports that are empty, and 1 that has loaded a unit, I can't easily figure out which ones have a unit loaded to exclude them from the group. Perhaps separate the transports in the bottom left selected unit section by unit type that is loaded? That would make this much easier. It would also allow me to see loaded unit composition, so if I've asked to group load a mass swarm that has anti-air and tanks, I can tell if I haven't picked up enough anti-air. Or separate the construction vehicles into a second wave.
    I know it's possible to see transports that have loaded units from the icon overlay, but that doesn't work if they have flown in from orbit, when they all stack on top of each other.

    3. Same 100 to 1 case, if I ask to unload it takes forever for them to actually unload, and sometimes they appear to never unload (same case as 5?).

    4. When I fly a big swarm of transports in from another planet they all appear at the same location, and then spend a lot of time arranging themselves into neat rows before they do the drop, meanwhile they are being torn apart by local defense. More importantly though, I'm spending precious time waiting for them to drop so I can direct the land army, and not spending time putting together another wave. I'd suggest making large groups of orbital appear in the grid pattern on arrival so they can drop from their initial arrival spot, with a cooldown to give local defenses a chance to chew into them a bit.

    5. Similar to 4, when I ask transports to drop at a location near where they already are on the same planet, it can take a long time to arrange themselves. Worse though (probably a bug?), sometimes they start moving, but get stuck partway through forming the grid. So you have to wait until the grid is formed, but it might never finish, so you have to tell them to try again, but you never know if they were about to finish or not. Really frustrating.

    Transports are so close to being an awesome planetary invasion technique. Even with the problems I still had a lot of fun, but it made something that should have been over in a few minutes of pitched battle take more than half an hour, at which point the server crashed :(

    Sorry if this is covered elsewhere, I did some searches and didn't find anything on this posted in the past few weeks.
  2. brianpurkiss

    brianpurkiss Post Master General

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    There definitely needs to be some UI improvements with the transports.

    I'd love to be able to select transports based on the unit they have loaded. I would love to be able to land all of my anti-air units first, then my fabricators a second or so later.

    The mass drop also needs to be improved. I agree, they don't need to move into formation to drop.

    Uber has talked about some of the shortcomings, so I believe they are aware of them.

    I'm just glad we finally get, what are essentially, drop pods. Originally Uber was opposed to the idea. I'm really glad we have them. They're tons of fun to use.
  3. UberMayer

    UberMayer New Member

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    Thanks for the post. I just played my first game, and am pretty frustrated with the transports. Hard to believe one unit per transport.

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