More feedback after a few plays

from AshesoftheSingularity Forums

Now that I have played it a few times, I have formed a play style and can give better feedback based on how I use the user interface.

I find myself spending a lot of time trying to keep my armies and control groups in sync.  I need them to be in a control group so I can see where they are at a glance.  I need them to be in an army so I can manage the whole group while only having to select one unit, and so that they will act together.   I am also having a hard time adding units to a group, having to select the target group, shift-select the add-on group, reassign the control group, then re-merge the army.  It just seems so needlessly tedious.  The army and control group concepts just need to be combined.  Also, while I kind of get why you only allow one dreadnought per army, in practice I find it horribly confusing and irritating.

When I select three engineers and queue up three buildings, each engineer should build a different building.  Right now one engineer builds 3 buildings, while the other two just idly wander.

I switched the map terrain to “exposed” rather than “hidden” because micromanaging my scouts became too tedious.

It needs to be easier to add units to an army.  I issue an order, then add units to an army, then the order is cancelled and the armies try to merge.  This is wrong, the newcomers should have to catch up to the army.  Orders should not be cancelled unless I cancel them.  New members of an army should inherit old orders.

I love the infinite upgrade.  It would be nice to see the level of upgrade for each so I can decide at a glance where to allocate my next points.

I would like to be able to tell from the map where I can build extractors.  In fact, given that I don’t get to choose placement for extractors, it is not really interesting to manage at all.  I would rather be able to set an engineer to auto build extractors and forget about it.  Or have extractors and amplifiers be buildable directly from control points without using an engineer at all.  Or better yet have three buttons to build each of metal/radioactive/amplifier, each button could show for example, 3 out of 5 metal extractors built.

I want to know what my rate of quanta generation is

An idle army button, in addition to idle engineer, would be very helpful for the early game when I am aggressively expanding.

Not sure that there is ever a reason to increase metal/radioactive storage.  Perhaps I just don’t understand the strategy.

Add a button to select all units not in an army.

I love the new icons for region types, very much improved.

The more granular snap-to-grid behavior is very helpful, before it was really frustrating because I kept accidentally queuing up buildings too close to each other.

Unlimited zoom out like total annihilation would be nice

 

15,465 views 9 replies
Reply #1 from AshesoftheSingularity Forums Top

The main times I wish I had more metal storage is when I build PHC AA defences. They cost 500 metal over about 40 seconds. That results in about -20 metal hit during its production. If you have to build early game it totally stalls everything. Even in late game I would never have +20 metal to soak it up as obviously you should be using it and not letting it go to waste. But metal storage never gets upgraded as its far too expensive for what you get. I think buildings for storage work better.

 When I select three engineers and queue up three buildings, each engineer should build a different building.

I don't want that behaviour. If I select three engineers and queue three buildings I want them to work together one building at a time. I can see your way being useful at times too though so a way for both would be good. For my way I guess you could tell two to follow the leader, though that would take more selecting and clicking so I wouldn't want that to be the only way. Better to have Shift + click as one way and Ctrl + click as another for example.

As mentioned by someone before, it would be great if you could tell an engineer to start work on the blue/green outline of a pre-planned building which is in the queue of another engineer. Otherwise you have to cancel the original engineers whole queue when you want to reprioritise things.

 

One thing your thoughts prompted me on. It would be nice if there was a number somewhere like 17/19 which represented how many resources you have and how many you have capped. On the big maps or in combat it can be easy to lose sight of where you have or haven't built on the resources or where you've lost some. If you could then cycle to them by pressing the number or hitting F3 or something then that would be useful too.

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Reply #2 from AshesoftheSingularity Forums Top

Agreed on most points,  the resource info and army/control group are big ones.  I would like to see incoming/outgoing for everything. (metal, radioactives, quanta, etc)  Right now I just cancel random stuff until I find out what the biggest drain is on my econ.  Being able to see exactly how much is being produced/consumed by each factory/engineer/extractor/amplifier/node/relay would be wonderful.

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Reply #3 from AshesoftheSingularity Forums Top

I'd totally forgotten about that in Supcom/TA, where selecting an engineer or factory told you what resources it was using, extremely useful.

Reply #4 from AshesoftheSingularity Forums Top

Quoting Ticktoc, reply 2

 When I select three engineers and queue up three buildings, each engineer should build a different building.



I don't want that behaviour. If I select three engineers and queue three buildings I want them to work together one building at a time.

 

That works for me as well, the point is that they are not standing idly by when there are orders to be carried out, especially if they were selected when I issued those orders.

Reply #5 from AshesoftheSingularity Forums Top

I agree with all this stuff.

I love the pace of the slow armies and it gives this real strategy feel, rather than a click fest like Star craft.

However, does anyone else feel the game needs more endgame stuff? I get the sense there's supposed to be one more level above dreadnoughts, or at least some alternative strategies besides adjusting the stream of armies. At the moment a bombing run is about the only other card people can play. Maybe orbitals are the plan to fix this.

Supreme Commander had the massive artillery and nukes and shields and gunships but that's all missing here. We don't need that much options but a little more variety besides the land unit blobs might make things more interesting.

I'd be curious to see what adding flying transports did. Might be nice to have the option of opening up a different front when there's a bit of a stalemate. SupCom had a great system for setting up "bridges" and then units used transports automatically, making it super easy to click them over to the other side of the map and know they'll get on and off without you having to micro.

Reply #6 from AshesoftheSingularity Forums Top

Quoting CDM1500, reply 7

Maybe orbitals are the plan to fix this.

The problem with orbitals, and there is a nuke like one, is that when it comes to base defence they are very easy to block with the existing game mechanics.

I agree a T4 line would be great. For the smaller matches what we have now is nice but yeah there is definitely room for T4 in the game.