Morwynd

Join Date 02/2008

It's a pity you can't really queue up stuff much in advance

Immediate expenditure forces you to micromanage spending

First let me say I absolutely love this game, it's like someone took three of my all-time favourite games, Master of Orion, Homeworld, and Supreme Commander, and somehow married them into something that not only works, but is greater than the sum of its parts. Just brilliant.

That being said, it's a shame that in a game of such strategic depth, you can't really (ie, feasibly) lay things out much in advance... that is, you can't really setup a build order for your base, a manufacturing queue, and a research list, because you have to spend the resources for all that queued stuff immediately.

Even if you CAN afford to queue up a bunch of things, obviously it is highly disadvantageous to have your resources tied up in something that won't happen for a while, when it could be spent on something else that will yield immediate benefits.

Thus, extensive queuing is actually at ODDS with playing efficiently, which as I said, is a bit of a shame. The game basically forces you to micromanage your spending (especially early game), rushing around to start the next upgrade or ship building when the previous one finishes.

I hadn't seen any threads on this subject so I though I'd make one. Has this been discussed before? Would it be possible to have things only incur costs when they actually start (it could simply fail with a warning if the resources are unavailable)? Or is this type of thing set in stone and off-limits to future patches?

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I don't mind it. A lot of players here come from RTS relms, starcraft and the like, and are used to having something to do constantly. So.

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you can queue production based on research that's pending, and research on research stations under construction, I'd say that's a fair amount better than most games, but yes, taking the resources when it is built might be nice.

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But could also mess it up. I don't always have the resources on hand when I need em, due to a possible emergency.

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Yeah, this really bugs me too. I really dislike traditional RTSes--the only I've really liked was SupCom because of its focus on queueing things, automating things, etc along with its scale.

It'd be nice if you could queue things up without having the money and it would wait until you have the resources to build it.

A system like in Supcom where you can split your income up among multiple projects would be cool, but that would require too major a change to the existing game mechanics, I'm sure.

Anything that makes the game more thoughtful and slow-paced is a good thing, IMO. I like this game exactly because it doesn't really require micromanagement and twitchy reflexes.

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Frogboy

Join Date 03/2001

+2419

The problem with that (using the TA or Supreme Commander model) is that then you have to prioritize what gets resources as they come in. And TA/SC solves that with construction units "helping" produce things which would create a much MUCH different style of game play in Sins than what we had in mind.

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Right, I get that we don't want to make a critical gameplay change like that... that's why I was trying to think of a "minimalist" solution, one that would literally just be like the software clicking the right button when the time comes, as a convenience to the player.

Completely canceling the queue if there are insufficient resources to build the next item when it comes up would avoid any complexities about prioritizing, etc.

You could try to have the queues pause instead of cancel, but as you say this kind've opens a can of worms with respect to prioritizing incomplete queues.

Just doing something brutally simple like canceling the queue if insufficient funds are available (with an appropriate warning to notify the player) would avoid any such problems, and should still be an improvement (in terms of laying things out in advance) over the "pay everything upfront" system we have now.

It's like, I know I can build these 8 light frigates at the start of the game. I know I will have enough on hand to build the next one as each one finishes. I know this because I do this every game. But instead of just being able to queue up 8 of them and forgetting about it (which would be a Good Thing in a game of this scope), I have to keep coming back over and over again and adding more to the queue, piecemeal fashion. It would just be nice to have a way to tell the program, "hey, as long as the cash holds out, would you kindly produce 8 of these things?"

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It would just be nice to have a way to tell the program, "hey, as long as the cash holds out, would you kindly produce 8 of these things?"

Well, I think it would be possible to add that much.. but once you allow that style of future production order things get complicated if the player places more than one order.

We could have a control-click on ship production mean "produce this once resources are available" and that would be fine, but if the player control-clicked on more than one thing it would become hard to know what should be produced. Add this mechanic to structures as well as ships and then to research as well as structures and things really become hard. When I scrape up 150 metal should the game do my military research, my civil research, build my frigate, or one of the 10 trade centres in different systems... The game can of course pick something - but explaining which it has chosen and why to the players, that's a real UI challenge.

That said, I don't think there'd be any harm in allowing one "when resources allow" order per player. The button could be given a different colour highlight to show that rule was in effect. I would suggest that all the regular orders ought to take priority, so that we could say "build 5 siege frigates as resources allow" and then not have to cancel it to get some research done first.

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Instead of control-click, we could use one the game's cooler interface innovations, right-clicking buttons for "automatic" functionality... it would make sense too, since you'd be telling the game to "automatically" spend money if available.

Edit: Someone brought up Starcraft before as a point of comparison. Starcraft works exactly as I've suggested here; queued items do not incur costs until they start building, and if there's not enough resources you get a "Not enough minerals" or "Insufficient vespene gas" message, and it doesn't build.

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Right-click is already in use for reducing the number of ships ordered or cancelling research. Shift-click is already in use for queueing larger quantities. That's why I suggested control-click.

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I would like to see that kind of feature too. Queueing items is really useful...

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