Unit 'clumping' is an eye sore

Don't get upset at my title. I just wanted to get you in here to read this.

I am liking the games development and direction, but I have one pet peeve...

The units are 'clumped' like every other RTS when moving/attacking.

For me, it is an eye sore and would be nice if the units were more spaced out when in combat like in the Kickstarter video.

Of course it is not a game breaker for me but what attracted me to support UBER is that in the kickstarter video, the units look more spaced than riding on top of each other in a big clump.

Remember, most of that video was first pass stuff (or close to first pass). They may fix these issues in the future, maybe by expanding the "physical" space of a unit to prevent clipping or things like that.

Yeah i agree with you but it is early alpha and these guys seem to have their heads screwed on properly.

to add on your opinion, its also a bit game breaking in a way, if you were able to tell when units clump up you would be able to kill entire armies with a few select attack commands from bombers, or artillery.. aka Micro.. something they have said they dont want to be a focus in this game.

but hey I am sure they will get to it at some stage and its not a big deal.. personally i had to clean up the big puddle of drool that was caused from the last livestream.. my gawd that game is pretty i couldnt help but watch the video several times, and link it to everyone i know it was that pretty. *excited*

I believe Uber haven't get the auto-formation working yet.

This post is correct with as far as we have been told. /thread
(On official terms and in the non-backer forums, I don't know what the backers know, but I imagine that Auto-formations is one of those things that they mentioned they were working on, but weren't ready to roll out to show to the public yet)

On the other hand clumping has a bit of charm to it I think.

Well, I definitely don't want the kind of spaced outness that Supreme Commander 1 had. Do you know how horrible it was to command, say, 200 Gunships?

Clumping is the price of flow fields. You can move thousands of units around the map, but they do it as a blob.

If your steering algorithm is good, though, you can make units distance themselves from each other while following the flow field. You could also add a tiny cost to the map where a lot of units are clustered so that units try to flow around a traffic jam.

It's a thing to do a little bit later though. Not much later, mind you, but considering this is the first real gameplay we've seen besides last steam (which didn't have combat or any significant amount of land units), they're on the right track.

I've talked with Elijah in regards to how the movement can be improved from what was seen in SupCom2, and from that we know that Neutrino and Elijah are really trying to make sure that units act like they do in SupCom/FA as opposed to sliding and floating around as seen in SupCom2, so all we can do now is wait and see how it turns out, we know thier end goal and it's aligned already with what we want, so we should just sit back and wait.

Mike

I'm not an expert on flow fields, but isn't it the other way around? Flow fields made clumping possible in the first place, since with the old one-path-per-unit calculations clumping was impossible by definition. (Units inside a clump wouldn't be able to path out since they were surrounded.)

It seems like clumping up is the optimal solution to unit movement in any situation. (optimal is in terms of cost) But you should be able to modify the unit steering (or the behaviour they have around other units) to get different results I think.

I'm curious how it will look like in 2 months. (Why does the chrono cam not work in the future. Grmbl...)

I would really like to see line drawing custom formation of spring being copied into this game, unless Uber have a better idea for spreading out units manually.

formations are an area that has a lot of room for improvement, flying v, inverted v, etc

Wouldnt unit clumping also cause AOE to be tons more effective?

Watch the live stream again, he specifically says formations are still WIP. Any complaints right now are counter productive. Any speculation is just that, speculation.

It almost appears as though the units are just not colliding properly. I have chalked this up to the game being pre-alpha and hopefully they will make the collision boundaries on units bigger in the publicly released builds so this sort of behavior is fixed and units keep fair distance from each other.

Collision seemed good to me but the selection boxes had a lot of overlap obviously.

agree with the OP, but understand its still early. Definitely needs more spacing between the units i think, it'll help with the cluttered look during battles too.

The explosions looked sweet, if the units were more spaced out it would have been perfect.

Yay for flack 200 units in 4 shots.