This was just another idea that came to mind that might be interesting and/or useful. One of the problems I've often run into with strategy games is that after a serious battle near or in your base (of a forward), a number of structures will be destroyed. Sometimes wrecked, sometimes entirely gone. However, I never have a good idea of exactly what has been destroyed and even less interest in restoring all of it manually. So I would be very interested in seeing a 'Restore' command that tells an engineer to restore the structures in an area to operational quality automatically. It would simply remove all the wrecks (if any) and start building the same structures that were once in this location again, in the same order they were originally built in. Ideally, with their internal orders still intact (so factories would resume production, deactivated buildings would stay deactivated, etc) Effectively a shortcut to prevent you from realising after 5 minutes that the tank factory you built to produce a line of artillery is actually a wreck and you forgot because you were in the middle of another battle. It always bothered me that one of the reasons interesting battles ended was because both sides grew tired and bored of having to repair and rebuild everything by hand and just kinda stopped doing it until they slowly wittled each other down.
You should be punished for your lack of overview and focus. If you're way ahead of your opponent resource-wise, and he decides to make lots of small assaults to stress you, and your engineers just automatically rebuild everything, that would be unfair. You each have one mouse and one keyboard, so you are on equal terms. The game shouldn't help you because you were outplayed by someone.
This was also pretty extensively discussed previously. In fact, I thought you were involved in the discussion, but I guess not. There have been some suggestions as to how to implement this, from base templates, to memorized bases, etc etc. The idea I liked best was that if commands were implemented as first-class entities, then the build command could be bound to a structure, so that if it were destroyed, the build command would remain and allow the player to activate it for the base to automatically be rebuilt. (And since it's a command, it can be moved around as needed, like queued commands in Supcom.) svovlmunk, it's not about the game helping you, it's about the game providing the tools to get the job done with minimum busywork on your part.
I did get involved in some stuff about this, but I don't remember this one, nor seeing anyone talk about it before. Granted, I'm not super involved with the forum (even if it might seem like it sometimes) so I could've missed it. Should a mod think this belongs somewhere else, please move it That said, I agree what sylvester says, not having time to or interest in laying out your base again isn't lack of focus. It's the game forcing you to do busywork, while the whole game should be built to help you not do busywork, but focus on leading an entire army. The more powerful the UI, the bigger the battles can be. And the more you measure a player's ability to lead and strategy, and not his ability to quickly complete mental checklists over and over. That's not what this game should be about.
It's not the game forcing you to do busywork, it's your opponent. This is how it should be, in my opinion. The big strategy on your part would be: should i spend time trying to manage this base, or should i focus another place, where i can do more damage to my opponent.
Even if it was the opponent forcing busywork on you, that's still a problem. You should never be forced into doing busywork. If I want busywork, I'll go wash the dishes. And the problem is that, usually, if your base is partially crippled and needs to be rebuilt, the correct answer will be "manage this base to get it operational again", which is the boring answer between "rebuild base" and "focus on something else" and whenever the correct answer to a problem is the boring one, that's a game design flaw. My opponent should be forcing me to think about my global strategy, not forcing me to remember which structures I had built that he just destroyed and that need to be reactivated.
Well, maybe the restore command could be something as easy as a command to "rebuild structure wrecks" instead of having it remember your build order and subsequent status of the building, as i think this would be very hard to implement (no technical knowledge to base this on, so i don't know) - this could be pretty cool, because if all the factions are identical, you could kill an enemy base and issue the command to restore it to working order, if you so wanted.
Technically it should be a piece of cake, you already have all the required information. All it takes is for that information to not be removed when the structure is destroyed, but to keep it around until someone rebuilds the structure. (Remembering your build order is as simple as storing the game-second in which the order to build it was given) But I like the idea of other players restoring a base to their own side. That could be really helpful, especially when capturing forward bases, guarded mexes, etc. Saves time, too. Although templating could also do a lot of the work here, if you have your own layout for doing so.
For me rebuild command should be in game, its not an advantage between players, because damage was done by one player and rebuilding it takes time and resource. Rebuilding it manually is more micro than macro, so this command would be useful.
Is rebuilding going to be somehow different from building the same unit from scratch? In all similar titles, any wreckage can be reclaimed for metal, and then transformed back into units. In TotalA, the Necro could turn wreckage into a living unit, giving it the power of resurrection. This process took a long time, but literally made metal from nothing, as even rubble could be revived. In Supcom 1+2, dead structures could be transformed into a half completed unit, reducing the cost of replacing the structure. Strangely enough, this wasn't always more efficient than reclaiming the wreckage and building anew.
It's pretty much the same, except that not all buildings leave a wreck (nukes for example often don't leave wreckage) and the necro-command usually accepts a single target instead of an area. But it comes pretty close to have that kind of restore available to engineers.
On the Spring engine you can make area commands with Resurrect commands. "Resurrect all units inside this circle".
It would be identical. Same cost, same time, etc. However, it takes unnecessary effort on the player's part to rebuild, and even remember what buildings they had that were destroyed. Sure you could use the fancy new replay system to take a look back, but it would be cumbersome and slow to do this comparison to rebuild a base. Instead, providing a way to identify what buildings were destroyed and where they were placed removes that extra burden from the player. And if those buildings could be rebuilt in a more optimal position (especially if the terrain has changed) then the player has that chance to move those build commands around. After that, all it takes is one or two button clicks to assign some constructors, maybe an extra click to remove orders for buildings you DON'T want rebuilt, and away you go. It's a much more elegant solution than sitting there and manually clicking each and every building you lost back into the order queue, and it's a lot more flexible than an all-encompassing "Restore" button.
