Suggestion: Prioritise Button

Discussion in 'Backers Lounge (Read-only)' started by Schulti, June 21, 2013.

  1. darac

    darac Active Member

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    • Select the thing you want to priorities/remain building.
    • Click the "Prioritise"(pause everything else) button.
      • Everything assigned to construct the building/unit keeps building.
      • All other fabricators/factories get paused.
      • A "Resume normal construction" button appears on the HUD.
    • When the prioritised building/unit finishes or the "Resume normal construction" button is pressed then all construction returns to normal.
    You could go a step further and take the button micro out as well by resuming construction on everything when your resource storage is full/full enough to finish your prioritised construction and then re-pausing everything automatically when your storage empties.
  2. Culverin

    Culverin Post Master General

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    Wow, that actually makes a lot of sense.
    In the grand scheme of econ meta, the pause button the factory does very little since it only pauses the factory.
    If all the units assigned to assist also get paused, that would actually remove a LOT of micro compared to SupCom.

    I fully support this idea in theory, but I have no coding experience.
    Is this somewhat feasible? Or are we asking for the moon here?
  3. godde

    godde Well-Known Member

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    Lol this is getting funny. In some games I've played it's just Ctrl+A(selects all units) and then press "Wait" then select the units that you want to build and start building. Then select all units again and press "wait" again to continue all construction.
    Of course this setup you are talking about would remove a few steps but it is really simple to do manually and should be simple to implement in the game.
  4. lilbthebasedlord

    lilbthebasedlord Active Member

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    I think priority-on-demand is a really good idea, especially with the new energy mechanic.

    In FA you wanted to have lots of decentralized and cheap build capacity (read:masses of T1 engies). With bunches of engineers all over the map you could decide where to spend the output of your economy.


    Playing lots of FAF, I found my self in this situation:
    I was building a large project that needed to be done ASAP. This project (its engineers I should say) is competing for resources (only mass) with other smaller projects(expansion mexes and pgens, PDs in the front, unit spam, new factories) and my eco has no surplus mass(no mass in storage and +0 net income/s).

    Suddenly I decide that this main project is more important and need to make sure it builds faster. Instead of having to decide what to pause and how to do it, I take a bunch of spare engineers around my base and stick them on the project.
    This puts me into negative income and in a way, prioritizes the project. Because now each engineer is requesting its entire rate of mass/s from the eco, but only getting a fraction of that.

    Now in PA, I can't afford to do that because regardless of an engineers mass output, it costs me a fixed cost of energy to run that fabber every second.
    With this prioritization suggestion, all I have to do is press a button and make sure that the project gets 100% of the resources requested (subtracted from the eco) and the rest is distributed evenly among the rest of the engineers/factories. Plus, like this I can easily estimate how long it will take to finish.


    As a side note:
    Now we can easily convert energy in terms of mass and effectively have only one resource. If you need five T1 pgens to support 6 T1 fabbers, and assuming that your engineers never stop building, then each engineer has an effective cost of 555 mass. I hope you see where I'm going with this.

    Also, if each mass point inputs 7mass/s and each engineer outputs 10mass/s, then it's very easy to see how many engineers you should aim for based on the number of mass points worth defending.

    I'm not sure if I like this new system or not. It seems simplified, but as a result of that, more easily predictable, which I guess is a good thing.

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