View Issue Details
| ID | Project | Category | Date Submitted | Last Update | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0006797 | AI War 1 / Classic | Suggestion - Interface Ideas - Unit Selection, Management, and Orders | Mar 24, 2012 7:26 am | Aug 7, 2014 6:01 am | |
| Reporter | beyond.wudge | Assigned To | Chris_McElligottPark | ||
| Status | closed | Resolution | reopened | ||
| Product Version | 7.055 | ||||
| Summary | 0006797: Retain unit selections and give orders whilst viewing other planets | ||||
| Description | One UI issue I'm running into is creating and giving orders to hotkeyed fleets on multiple planets. Based on unit behaviour when offscreen the game must still render/store the units and their orders in the other planets rather than truly abstract them out so I presume it's possible for the game to be changed where a player can skip around several planets, shift+bandbox various groups of ships and then hotkey them all without a significant change in how things work under the hood. Presumably then, this would eliminate _a lot_ of the issues with ctrl+right clicking wormholes as most rts players would go to the enemy planet and issue the move/attack commands directly before their forces would even arrive like they would in most games. Being a Starcraft 2 player this level of control, tactical power and intuitive gameplay would be incredibly useful. In addition, it would allow me to set up complicated attack patterns before my forces enter the system and I could even clone (tap L, issue new command, tap L, issue new command) groups of units off to hit different targets quickly and efficiently, something a lot of Supreme Commander style player's would also find incredibly useful. NOTE: This feature does /not/ require having ships selected from multiple planets simultaneously. | ||||
| Tags | No tags attached. | ||||
| Internal Weight | New | ||||
| duplicate of | 0006338 | closed | Chris_McElligottPark | Ships in multiple systems |
| related to | 0015641 | new | Retain unit selections and give orders whilst viewing other planets | |
| related to | 0015640 | new | show selected ships in galaxy view |
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See my comments on the issue this is a dupe of. However, a few added notes: Having ships selected across multiple systems would be incredibly, horrendously, confusing most of the time. When you are on a planet, you can see what you have selected by the sidebar and the list at the bottom of the screen. Left-clicking anywhere deselects those units and/or selects more units. When you click into a new planet, you're left clicking, right? Ergo, based on the convention GUI rules of every RTS ever (well, except the older style of C&C games), you've just deselected your units. To change that, we'd then be showing you a list of ships that you had selected on some number of planets, but it wouldn't be super clear which ones. Imagine: you go to some planet, and you forget you've accidentally left some ships selected. Now you start right-clicking to give orders. Some ships on some other planet you can't even see at the moment suddenly start moving and coming to your planet, possibly through hostile terrain, possibly opening a key weakness in your defenses and/or just plain getting slaughtered. Generally speaking, it's a good GUI rule that you can only interact with stuff you can actually _see_ at the time. The galaxy map is one exception because it acts sort of like an overlay on your regular game screen. At any rate, after almost 3 years on the market we suddenly have two people ask for this in the span of a couple of weeks, but there's just no way that this is something I'd want to change -- it's riddled with logical errors and gotchas. The current system has flaws of its own, but they are minor in magnitude and something that doesn't affect players who learn how it works. The system you're describing is something that would shoot both novices and experienced players in the foot all the time, just because they forget an extra left-click when they go into a new system and don't want to keep giving orders to whatever they had selected before. |
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Having read the other thread, I'm curious as to what are the coding issues with this? If ships are tracked across the galaxy normally why would updating their orders be an issue? Is it purely a structural issue (the game engine cannot handle information from multiple planets)? Edit: Just saw post. Give me a sec. |
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There are no coding issues, but to design it with cross-planet selection would be an egregious design flaw. I don't have time to discuss it further at the moment, I'm working nights and weekends as it is, sorry. |
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I'll break my response into 2-3 parts. "At any rate, after almost 3 years on the market we suddenly have two people ask for this in the span of a couple of weeks, but there's just no way that this is something I'd want to change -- it's riddled with logical errors and gotchas. The current system has flaws of its own, but they are minor in magnitude and something that doesn't affect players who learn how it works." Hmmmm, as a thought it could be Starcraft 2's influence. Player's naturally following a flow from one game to another as community/scene develops. In anycase to the issue at hand. I started playing AI War with v1.0. I wanted this feature back then but I didn't expect a fledgling indy game to be polished like a triple AAA title. There are actually a host of things when I play AI War I find counter-intuitive compared with years of RTS/4x playing. Not to say I'm not willing to learn how AI War does things nor understand why the game has turned out that way given the market. Indeed, there are many things I like about AI War's interface (FRD for instance is phenomenal). Given I'm an early adopter it's entirely likely that other players who found the interface clunky are the kind who don't persist with issues like that, nor would pursue you for a fix. Personality-wise a large portion may have just moved on without realizing the game's depth. |
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"Having ships selected across multiple systems would be incredibly, horrendously, confusing most of the time. When you are on a planet, you can see what you have selected by the sidebar and the list at the bottom of the screen. Left-clicking anywhere deselects those units and/or selects more units." As for the issue of player confusion & interface conventions. I had similar discussions with the designer of the Battletech Heavy Metal program years back about his desire to stick with the Windows input style over customizing his program for maximum utility. Without rehashing ideological arguments (you know, about whether broadest base/accessibility outweighs hardcore utility) the main development I see in player interface systems, especially amongst the hardcore market, has been SC2 and eSports. This has pushed and changed the expectations of player regarding interfaces quite enormously as Starcraft 1's competitive success very much relied upon the difficulty of it's interface. It created the skill divisions people needed to have a 'sport' around. Whilst the SC2 interface has become _far_ more casual friendly it still yet requires great speed and precision for optimal play. As a result more than ever in history RTS players as a whole are becoming far better at playing these games, especially large scale games. Their capacities are increasing enormously and the culture of being good at RTS games rather than forcing RTS designers to make their games less and less physically demanding is growing. Having been (vocally) apart of both movements I understand the reasonings behind them (the same with the wide-spread FPS realism movement that thoroughly died upon its own realization, once people played realistic first persons for a while they went back to more 'gamey' ones that 'felt' realistic, rather than were realistic). My point is that players are now becoming more and more used to managing multiple groups of units, some of them offscreen. They are flicking across their minimaps constantly, bandboxing groups and groups of units whilst mentally keeping track of all previous selections. I am only a Diamond player currently, apart of the top 20% of SC2 players, yet even at that level of play I must keep track of many groups of units across many parts of a map, constantly update my hotkeyed groups and know how they'll pathfind and behave despite their distance. In fact, its mandatory for me if I want to keep up with what the game throws at me in terms of tasks I must to do. I am not extraordinary, I am simply a new player type to hit the mainstream scene which will only grow with time (much like experienced first person players have). AI War's galaxy to me is my minimap. If you actually put a small galaxy map down in the bottom left I'd use it without hesitation for most moving around the map. I'd only tab to the full map for information. For me a SC2 map has far more complicated and significant topographical features than AI war often does. For me to keep track of how units in multiple systems will interact with my orders is very easy. I also know my friend who I just introduced the game can say the same, especially given the game's pacing, and he is only at Gold level (next 20% band of players from the 'top' [real pros don't play ladder much]). I don't want AI war to be SC2. Far from it. But, I think you're underestimating what many players are becoming capable of nor the things they'd do if you enabled this functionality. |
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"To change that, we'd then be showing you a list of ships that you had selected on some number of planets, but it wouldn't be super clear which ones. Imagine: you go to some planet, and you forget you've accidentally left some ships selected. Now you start right-clicking to give orders. Some ships on some other planet you can't even see at the moment suddenly start moving and coming to your planet, possibly through hostile terrain, possibly opening a key weakness in your defenses and/or just plain getting slaughtered. Generally speaking, it's a good GUI rule that you can only interact with stuff you can actually _see_ at the time. The galaxy map is one exception because it acts sort of like an overlay on your regular game screen." I appreciate that showing what ships are in-system and not is an issue. But I'd gladly accept such a UI flaw to gain the ability to carry out more complicated tactical plays without enormous time pressure/unnecessary battle with the interface. The fact I and my friends are constantly making use of offscreen hotkeyed forces in RTS games now and using the minimap for giving orders (even in older titles I replay now, like Generals) without serious issue does mean that the player base is changing. Hell, I'm actually starting fight entire battles on the minimap (including more intense micro). The actual translatable skills between AI war and Starcraft 2 is much greater than I expected. I actually am getting better at SC2 because of AI war (I can read my minimap far quicker, I plan better, I take time to actually get a handle on the game situation and am more in-depth with my battle plans). |
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Let me break this down for you how I look at it: 1. Right now, we have a couple of hours a week, max to do AI War features. There are a whole lot of things that people want, way more than this. We go with what more people want. 2. Next time we do an expansion, in a few months, we'll have more like 60 hours a week to devote to the game for a while. But the demands on our time (from players wanting other features, etc) will be even more. You're approaching this from a very academic-sounding viewpoint, and that's fine, but my sole viewpoint is pragmatic. Does it make the game more fun and playable for a large number of players? Does it improve the game in a way that would broaden the audience? How difficult is it to do, and will it alienate many of our existing 130k+ customers? We make improvements to the game all the time, but this one doesn't fit the bill for me. Starcraft is still different because it's all one contiguous space. These planets are individual areas that you cannot get to any way except by clicking through wormholes or on the galaxy map. There's no amount of scrolling your view you can do to get from one planet to another. |
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"There are no coding issues, but to design it with cross-planet selection would be an egregious design flaw. I don't have time to discuss it further at the moment, I'm working nights and weekends as it is, sorry." Oh that's fine. You read this if you have time. If not then I take no offense! |
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"But I'd gladly accept such a UI flaw to gain the ability to carry out more complicated tactical plays without enormous time pressure/unnecessary battle with the interface." If you need to select lots of ships and move them all around the galaxy, then you're already Doing It Wrong, for the most part, I'll also add. AI War is a game about positioning and long-form thinking, and if you're having to constantly gather forces from many planets then your logistics are already pretty messed up. I don't mean this in a rude way, but generally speaking you should be allocating certain amounts of defenders and attackers, and grouping them strategically where you want, and then only moving whole hosts of them from time to time as the situation changes. If you've got one big overlarge fleet moving all around the galaxy trying to do all things at once, that's a problem: the biggest barrier to balance in AI War is if the player is ever allowed to mass their forces too much all in one place. If that is possible then you can just roll the AI, or alternatively that becomes the ONLY way to play because if the AI could counter your entire fleet at once then logically anything less than your whole fleet would be insufficient. So in general the game makes you split your forces, makes you keep them apart, and makes it difficult to move your ships between one part of the galaxy an another in a timely manner: not by interface means, particularly, but by making ship movement speeds relatively slow and the distances relatively large. Starcraft II is about as far from AI War as you could possibly get, in terms of game flow and goals. It's all about reaction and quickness. AI War has a lot more in common with turn-based games like Civilization IV or similar. The fact that it controls kind of like Starcraft is what is a bit misleading. There are occasionally needs to muster a quick force, or do something fast in response to the AI, I'll grant you that. But that's not a central goal of the gameplay, and in general if you're having to do that then what you are _really_ doing is recovering from a past mistake you may not have realized you already made. |
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Hmmmm, no I accept that. If this is a large amount of work then your approach is smart. I do enjoy the new content patches and they are I imagine a great way to getting players back into the game. The game does work. I guess as someone who likes to see games sing when they can I really place significance on this stuff. I also am a very high end player so the upper edges of what I can do really matter to someone like me. Just FRDing entire systems to death with a massive economic machine might work for some, but it isn't necessarily what I'd find fun. All I can think of is "think of the ships I could have saved had I spent the time!" In the New Vegas mod I'm working on at the moment I'm encountering many similar questions when I'm faced with "man, I'd love this but the game engine/development tools just don't allow for it." I'm being a lot more pragmatic and saying "whats fun, do I need some complicated system for say companion healing when just spending a high value healing item each time will do the job, be fun and easily understood by everyone? Yeah, scrap the complicated system, even if it 'sounds' better." Edit: Give me a sec again. :P |
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By the time I'd won my first game, I no longer needed or even wanted to have ships selected across planets. I find it particularly useful for control-group splitting. If I have a group of ships in a single control group and I split them across two planets, I can go to either planet and select that control group and get only the ships in that system that are part of the control group. I literally use this constantly for teleporting ships. I put them all in Group 2 and so even when I spread them out, in any system I can just hit 2 and get the local teleporters. Give it some time and I'm guessing you'll find it isn't really necessary and certainly isn't worth the added complexity and potential confusion. |
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Actually, I totally accept that 'Grand Strategy' requires a different mindset. I do try to create lines of production in FRD to catch stray enemies, split ships between systems for defense, allocate resources to each strongpoint and then reallocate as the environment changes and so forth. I guess the reflexive elements in my play are coming somewhat from a lack of game knowledge (i.e. just discovering what XYZ type of wave actually does or what hidden surprises the AI has as the difficulty rises). However, I guess I also have a playstyle that tries to push the game to the limit (in terms of knock out my opponent as quickly as possible) so grouping forces, defeating in detail and minimizing wasted time rebuilding is important to me. If I hit a system I want to be able to wipe out the guard posts in half the time with two fleets then reallocate them to defense as needed (again, the L button is a godsend in this regard). I do admit I've got a lot of learning to do but this game does have a lot of untapped potential as well for playstyles that involve reflex and control without cramping slower paced players. In fact, despite my reflexive inclinations I have been playing around a lot with offensive turrets and beachheads. Currently I really enjoy taking planets and then killing fortresses with missile turrets rather than spending my fleet on them (again, saves me time rebuilding dead ships). I'm right now working through situations where a slow turret push is more efficient (in time/attention/freeing up my mobile force to hit other planets) than using my main fleet to dissect and carve the planet apart. Obvious advantages include pre-built bulwarks and strongholds against waves into that planet so if I can merge the two I save enormous time/resources/ship use in not only attacking the planet but also then fortifying it. |
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Heart Eater: Having been a SC1 player I do completely accept there are subtleties and quirky advantages to the current system. I am very interested in learning how to max out all I can get from AI War's interface, whatever it is like. I guess I just find it incongruous in a 'Grand Strategy' game that I have to lay out battleplans once I get to a system, under time pressure, rather than simply just do them while my ships on the way. In SP I'd pause and that's fine but in multiplayer that can ruin people's flow if it's very very regular. Also, when reacting to a wave or surprise attack (I don't know yet how to detect where cross-planet waves are going to hit, right now I just get my ships somewhere central and scoot to where they flow in when there is a min or two left on the clock) if my ships are split across systems and I can't FRD them due to lots of random little guys punctuating my other planets (the ships would go on wild goose chases after some raptor hitting a mineral patch) then I have to give literally five FRD/move orders's to the different speed ships once they arrived in system even if I have a rally post there (for some reason it doesn't always cause ships entering to enter FRD, it may just be a quirk in the system I haven't isolated yet). It just becomes a bit tedious is all. :) |
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"Starcraft II is about as far from AI War as you could possibly get, in terms of game flow and goals. It's all about reaction and quickness. AI War has a lot more in common with turn-based games like Civilization IV or similar. The fact that it controls kind of like Starcraft is what is a bit misleading." Actually, on that point SC2 is developing a lot deeper strategy. Up to a point speed is the decider but unlike SC1, build order and unit composition wins are becoming far more prevalent in pro play as players are hitting certain degrees of proficiency at the game's basic tasks. All the big GSL (star league in korea) winners are stable, unemotional types who have a _lot_ of builds at their command and tailor their strategies correctly. Player's who use weird timings and play the meta-game get stopped cold when they invite a base trade with their more mobile army but discover the GSL winner had predicted this and shored his defenses the moment their armies passed each other without a proper fight, something most players had failed to do the entire tournament. Even the lower levels enjoy some trickle down as better players are being beaten with the right build and in-game strategy, rather than faster hand reactions. Don't get me wrong speed matters, but only to a point. |
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"If you've got one big overlarge fleet moving all around the galaxy trying to do all things at once, that's a problem: the biggest barrier to balance in AI War is if the player is ever allowed to mass their forces too much all in one place. If that is possible then you can just roll the AI, or alternatively that becomes the ONLY way to play because if the AI could counter your entire fleet at once then logically anything less than your whole fleet would be insufficient. So in general the game makes you split your forces, makes you keep them apart, and makes it difficult to move your ships between one part of the galaxy an another in a timely manner: not by interface means, particularly, but by making ship movement speeds relatively slow and the distances relatively large." Actually, one of the first things I did was unlock the Zenith Time Manipulator's and drop them in key planets. :P I wanted to get around faster... so I made it happen :) |
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Yes, but at an opportunity cost of other things you could have done. |
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No you're right. Beating the AI quickly requires accurate judgement of what you need to get the job done. If I can save that energy (I think that's the big downside yeah?, that and the knowledge lost) for more economy (less power plants) or more turrets/ships then I should do that. If in a multiplayer game where people hate saving/reloading or a Iron-man SP playthrough then the forgiving margin-for-error time manipulators give you could be really worth it when you make sub-par choices/AI sends _another_ wave unexpectedly. :) I've become more of an Iron-man player recently. Realized that saving and reloading ruins the difficulty and depth of a lot of games, including even single player first person shooters funnily enough (RPGs like New Vegas are big examples where this happens but Halflife, FEAR, even Call of Duty to name a few suffer this issue as keenly as other games do). |
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I'm going to reopen this. There's no need to have ships selected across multiple systems to implement this feature. I think almost everyone would be fine if you could only select ships in one system. In fact, I prefer that (as do you). But that's a separate issue from whether you can "retain unit selections and give orders whilst viewing other planets", which would be useful. For example, I would very much like to be able to queue up a deep strike on a tough system by selecting the fleet, going to the planet, shift-right-clicking all the targets (see also 0015636 and 0015637), and shift-right-clicking the planet I want them to retreat to in the galaxy view. That way, I could give them orders for the entire raid without having to babysit them and then get on with the next thing I want to do. Currently I have to give my ships the order to move, wait for them to arrive, try to quickly assign their targets before they get blown up, wait for them to finish, and try to quickly give them the retreat orders back to my own planet. Also, I would like to be able to see the selected ships in the galaxy view. I often like to remain in the galaxy view to get an overview of everything that's happening, especially if I'm fighting on one planet while a CPA (or whatever) is working its way to my systems. Keeping the selected ships visible would let me monitor their health and instantly retreat them by right-clicking on a planet. As for how to distinguish when you have ships selected on another planet, you can simply have the box say "Selected: 512 (on PlanetName)" if they're on a planet besides the current one (and use the usual "Selected: 512" if they're on the same planet). |
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Well it seems I'm not actually allowed to reopen the item, so I'll post a new one (0015641). |
| Date Modified | Username | Field | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mar 24, 2012 7:26 am | beyond.wudge | New Issue | |
| Mar 24, 2012 7:35 am | beyond.wudge | Description Updated | |
| Mar 24, 2012 7:36 am | beyond.wudge | Description Updated | |
| Mar 24, 2012 9:26 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Relationship added | duplicate of 0006338 |
| Mar 24, 2012 9:33 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Internal Weight | => New |
| Mar 24, 2012 9:33 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0021209 | |
| Mar 24, 2012 9:33 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Status | new => closed |
| Mar 24, 2012 9:33 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Assigned To | => Chris_McElligottPark |
| Mar 24, 2012 9:33 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Resolution | open => won't fix |
| Mar 24, 2012 9:34 am | beyond.wudge | Note Added: 0021210 | |
| Mar 24, 2012 9:35 am | beyond.wudge | Note Edited: 0021210 | |
| Mar 24, 2012 9:36 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0021211 | |
| Mar 24, 2012 9:37 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Edited: 0021211 | |
| Mar 24, 2012 10:26 am | beyond.wudge | Note Added: 0021212 | |
| Mar 24, 2012 10:26 am | beyond.wudge | Note Added: 0021213 | |
| Mar 24, 2012 10:34 am | beyond.wudge | Note Added: 0021214 | |
| Mar 24, 2012 10:35 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0021215 | |
| Mar 24, 2012 10:35 am | beyond.wudge | Note Added: 0021216 | |
| Mar 24, 2012 10:42 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0021217 | |
| Mar 24, 2012 10:44 am | beyond.wudge | Note Added: 0021218 | |
| Mar 24, 2012 10:45 am | beyond.wudge | Note Edited: 0021218 | |
| Mar 24, 2012 10:53 am | Hearteater | Note Added: 0021219 | |
| Mar 24, 2012 10:56 am | beyond.wudge | Note Added: 0021220 | |
| Mar 24, 2012 11:04 am | beyond.wudge | Note Added: 0021221 | |
| Mar 24, 2012 11:05 am | beyond.wudge | Note Edited: 0021221 | |
| Mar 24, 2012 11:07 am | beyond.wudge | Note Edited: 0021220 | |
| Mar 24, 2012 11:07 am | beyond.wudge | Note Edited: 0021220 | |
| Mar 24, 2012 11:10 am | beyond.wudge | Note Added: 0021222 | |
| Mar 24, 2012 11:11 am | beyond.wudge | Note Edited: 0021222 | |
| Mar 24, 2012 11:16 am | beyond.wudge | Note Edited: 0021222 | |
| Mar 24, 2012 11:17 am | beyond.wudge | Note Edited: 0021222 | |
| Mar 24, 2012 11:20 am | beyond.wudge | Note Added: 0021223 | |
| Mar 24, 2012 11:24 am | Chris_McElligottPark | Note Added: 0021224 | |
| Mar 24, 2012 11:30 am | beyond.wudge | Note Added: 0021225 | |
| Mar 24, 2012 11:33 am | beyond.wudge | Note Edited: 0021225 | |
| Mar 24, 2012 11:34 am | beyond.wudge | Note Edited: 0021225 | |
| Mar 24, 2012 11:34 am | beyond.wudge | Note Edited: 0021225 | |
| Aug 7, 2014 5:54 am | AdamMil | Note Added: 0038896 | |
| Aug 7, 2014 5:54 am | AdamMil | Resolution | won't fix => reopened |
| Aug 7, 2014 5:54 am | AdamMil | Product Version | 5.000 => 7.055 |
| Aug 7, 2014 5:54 am | AdamMil | Category | Suggestion - New Features => Suggestion - Interface Ideas - Unit Selection, Management, and Orders |
| Aug 7, 2014 5:56 am | AdamMil | Description Updated | |
| Aug 7, 2014 5:57 am | AdamMil | Relationship added | related to 0015640 |
| Aug 7, 2014 5:58 am | AdamMil | Note Added: 0038898 | |
| Aug 7, 2014 6:01 am | AdamMil | Relationship added | related to 0015641 |
| Aug 7, 2014 6:10 am | AdamMil | Note Edited: 0038898 |
