Suggestions for more fluid gameplay

[HenryC]

I find 0 A.D. to be an interesting game, and it seems to be moving in a good direction, but playing this game feels unneccessarily clunky compared to most other succesful RTS games. I think implementing some basic hotkey functionality for training units and constructing buildings would streamline economy management a fair bit, and should be relatively easily implemented. In addition, I feel adding some basic commands for army movement would significantly improve the feel of combat in this game.

For the army commands I find that the minimum would be a stop command, a move command and an attack move command. Out of those, only the move command seems to be currently in the game. Adding a command to stop the selected units, so they can immediately attack nearby hostile units or simply stop movement should be an easy addition, that would make responding to attacks significantly less cumbersome. Imagine a scenario where you have a fair amount of military units, but they are all doing economy related tasks, such as chopping down trees or farming. Now, if you get attacked, you could simply select all military units, order them to stop gathering resources, and the AI would now attack nearby hostile targets immediately.

Attack move would make attacking and using your military offensively significantly more effective. Attack move is essentially a normal move command, but if your units come into proximity of hostile units, they would stop to attack the hostile targets before continuing towards the target of the move command. Now, when attacking a hostile army, you could order an attack move past the enemy army, and your units would automatically attack the nearest enemy when they are in range. Currently, you either order your army to move near the enemy army, in which case your units often get attacked before stopping movement and fighting back, or you would order your units to attack a single target, causing your army to only start attacking once in range of that unit, or in case of a melee attack, stand around that single unit watching as only a few units can get close enough to attack the target.

Edit: In addition to the basic commands, a patrol command could also be helpful.

Edited August 2, 2012 by HenryC