Suggestions for gameplay enhancement

[Pedro Falcão]

I've been brainstorming these ideas for the last few days. I thought to post this in the "Suggestions for 0 A.D." topic, but i thought it would be cleaner to create a new topic, since it is a long post and i'm attaching illustrations.

1 - Smart Passive Units

Priority: Can live without, but would be nice to have

Nature: Not so cool micro-managing

Short Description: Put passive units behind the aggressive ones.

Detailed Description: Have you seen what happens when you select that whole mass of units (including medics) and command them to attack something? The medics walk to the position of the target, and since they are always focused, they become an easy target, you have to manually hold them back or select them separately, wasting your precious time right in the heat of a battle.

Suggestion: Make the passive units (those that don't have any attacks / won't be used as warriors) stay behind everybody, no matter what formation they are (of course, with the exception of box formation).

2 - Smart Training Queue & Visible training queue

Priority: Needed!

Nature: To save time

Short Description: Make the training queues visible under the building portraits and distribute evenly the training orders between the selected buildings.

Detailed Description: I used to build a lot of Barracks/Archery Ranges/Stables/Castles, in AoK, to make unit training much faster. When i tried to select a bunch of them and order to fill all their queues with that unit, only one of the buildings would receive the orders, and i had to manually select each other one and make them train, wasting my precious time. Plus, to see if the queue was full in one of the building i had clicked, i used to need to click on each building and check it out manually.

Suggestion: It would be nice to have training queues visible like this:

Blue: Available units

Red: Buildings + visible training queues

Yellow: Barracks

Green: Attached facilities

I then spam clicks on the Mauraders' portrait, ordering the 4 barracks to train Mauraders, units that can only be built with an specific attached facility type. Note that only the two barracks with the needed facility answer to my command.

Now, i order the barracks to train 10 Marines, the basic units that any barracks can train. Note that i only ordered the 4 barracks to train 10 marines and the game took care of dividing my 10 marines in all of the available barracks.

3 - Flying Units' Ground Position

Priority: For mods, only.

Nature: For better accuracy

Short Description: A marker on the ground to show where exactly the unit is hovering above.

Detailed Description: For strategic purposes, i'd like to see where, on the ground, that flying unit is. Only with a marker i can see, with accuracy, if the unit is within range of an AA Battery or not.

Example Screenshots:

4 - Attack-move Command

Priority: I can live without, but would be nice to have!

Nature: Not so cool micro-managing

Short Description: A command to move to the target location, but attacking every enemy on their path

Detailed Description: Sometimes, even more against AI, i need the units to attack something as soon as they acquire range. I know the thing is there, but the fog-of-war doesn't let me see it, so i have to go there manually, make units stop when they're in range, select those that aren't in range, make them come closer.

Suggestion: This is an unnecessary and annoying thing we could prevent with the Attack-move command. You click the icon of this command, click where you want the units to go and they'll automatically go there, but attacking everything on sight, and then resuming the walk.

5 - Show/Select Weapon Types

Priority: Needs to be better thought of.

Nature: To save time

Short Description: A shortcut to select units by weapon type.

Detailed Description: Remember those situations when there are so many units on the screen that you can't even seem to find your archers to call them back before the enemies reach them? You know they are there, but you can't find them on such a mess (corpses on the ground, rubble everywhere, soldiers of different colors but with similar clothes... Or different clothes for the same kind of unit), wouldn't it be better to rapidly select them all and bring them to safety?

Solution: The player could be able to drag X unit's weapon to a button (similar to groups of control), so that you can easily drag your archers to safety without messing with your groups of control.

I apologize for the long post, i tried to make it both complete and pleasing to read. I'd also appreciate deeply other opinions/better ideas on these matters.

Edited December 20, 2012 by Pedro Falcão

[Lion.Kanzen]

i like that Pedro. all are good thinking. i remember the Avoid Stance, you can remember too?. i miss that Stance it was works fine.

[quantumstate]

Thanks for posting your ideas. They seem quite well thought out.

The problem with ideas like number 1 is that every time you make units smarter the less direct the players control of them becomes. Since units are never smart enough implementing these things must be done with great care to not be more annoying than the thing that is being solved. This is a particularly annoying issue though and should be implemented, it should be approached with care though.

2 - Smart Training Queue & Visible training queue

Priority: Needed!

Nature: To save time

Short Description: Make the training queues visible under the building portraits and distribute evenly the training orders between the selected buildings.

We already have an implementation of the multiple building training. We use the system of duplicating your orders between all buildings. So fi you select 5 barracks and click the spearman button you will train 1 spearman from each barracks. I see no reason to change the implementation and prefer the way we do it to starcraft.

Our GUI doesn't fit very well with showing the queues under the unit portraits. This is because we display multiple selected units as one portrait with number. This makes sense because the game is designed to have large numbers of units so we need a compact way of displayed large selections. Changing this for buildings is inconsistent which is not ideal. it does seem like a nice idea though, it would be good for garrisoning as well. Perhaps we can come up with another way of displaying the information.

4 - Attack-move Command

Priority: I can live without, but would be nice to have!

Nature: Not so cool micro-managing

Short Description: A command to move to the target location, but attacking every enemy on their path

Detailed Description: Sometimes, even more against AI, i need the units to attack something as soon as they acquire range. I know the thing is there, but the fog-of-war doesn't let me see it, so i have to go there manually, make units stop when they're in range, select those that aren't in range, make them come closer.

Suggestion: This is an unnecessary and annoying thing we could prevent with the Attack-move command. You click the icon of this command, click where you want the units to go and they'll automatically go there, but attacking everything on sight, and then resuming the walk.

This is a planned feature.

5 - Show/Select Weapon Types

Priority: Needs to be better thought of.

Nature: To save time

The current best method is to select everything, then control-click the unit icons to remove unwanted selection. Or set up better control groups before the battle.

I would find this feature helpful. The main concern with this one is that if we add too many buttons to the GUI it takes up more room and overloads the user with too many options. One possibility would be to relegate this to hotkey only, or if we think it is important enough buttons could be added. Perhaps we can have a toggle-able advanced UI panel for users who want masses of buttons.

A bit off topic and speculative is to add support for UI mods, I believe world of warcraft has may of these, so you could install addons to add these little GUI tweaks, this would let users decide for themselves what they want and allow people to distribute them separately from the main game distribution. This idea is exactly the kind of thing that this would be good for.