Thinking about blobbing

[TechSY730]

A lot of this gets into the territory I'd like to cover by making "control groups" into "fleets" each with their own tab (conceptually) on the CTRLS window with auto-replenish thresholds, possibly targeting preferences (we already have separate target-sorting functions called by various special cases, so there's some room for that), fleet-specific auto-kiting distances (instead of the one experimental auto-kite setting), etc.

Reminds me of that over ambitious, but still a neat idea when you isolate the core of the idea "FLEET command" suggestion I saw a while back. Yes, this would be cool, but would radically change up how combat plays out in practice, not to mention turning fleet construction dangerously close to a programming game.
Not to mention the UI challenge.
Plus a scope of that change alone would almost be enough to bump up to a new major version number, if not renaming the product line (like AI War II) because unit construction and management would be so different. I would agree that it would be really nice though, if unconventional and a little hard to wrap your mind around at first.

But whenever I get into thinking about that seriously, I realize most/all of it is "sounds really cool, but would be a tremendously complex UI for the player", not to mention the implementation cost.  I did a bunch of "sounds cool" commands as part of the pre-Unity context menu and many of them were barely used at all because what sounds good on paper is really not all that useful, etc.

Yea, I remember a bunch of those esoteric commands.

Two I did use, and I still sort of miss, are construction templates and radial place (both edge only and filled in). Among other things, the filled in radial place was really nifty for building things in bulk.

[MaxAstro]

Man, I ~really~ miss constructions templates, considering I typically build the same set of turrets around every wormhole...

On the limited FRD thing: How hard would to be have right-click and drag when issuing an FRD order have a special function?  Basically if you right click and hold then dragging the mouse draws a circle, centered on the location you click, and when you release the selected units FRD only within the described circle?

That seems easy to understand, easy to use, and quite useful, but I'm not sure how hard to code it would be.

[Diazo]

Diazo spends 7 hours on 10/10 doing what a player could do in less than one hour on 8/8. 

*wince*

That was an offhand comment about economy with starships and not unlocking harvesters, I'm not sure how applicable it is due to the AI's I'm facing.

I left it on random and drew Camouflager and Turtle. I then went and did deepstrikes on 3 datacenters, one 3 hops, one 4 hops and one 5 hops out, all in different directions. I then captured a planet 2 hops out.

I highlight the AI types because Turtle has a *lot* of ships, even on non-alert planets. It's up to 200 minimum at this point on a planet I have not alerted all game, that slows things down majorly. Camouflager is also annoying because I'm never sure how many ships it has for defense so I wait for a bigger fleet then I would otherwise.

Add in that I have one of the more defensive (so slower) play styles I've seen on the forums I'm not sure how correct that comment is.

Would what I'm doing be faster on diff 8? For sure, but I would also have 3 or 4 planets captured by this point as I would not insist on keeping AIP at 10 for my first two planet captures.

Even having said that, I'm worried the core worlds are going to be so built up by the time I get there that I can't win the game.

Not sure how this applies to the blobbing conversation but I'm hesitant to hold my game up as an example for either side, it's a very weird game that I'm honestly not sure I'm going to continue despite the fact that I'm quite a good position strategically at this point.

D.

edit: ARGH!! EMP Guardian + Teleport Battle Station. Home Command Station survived with 0% health (17,000 of 2,000,000). Ow.

[Hearteater]

Not really on blobbing, but on economy.  I wonder if the reason I've been opening Harvester at least one (metal or cystal) Mark III immediately is because single Command Station m+c just feels too low.  Would an extra 100 or 200 m+c/sec make me feel better about saving Harvester unlocks until I actually start capturing planets?  If that is true, maybe making Human Home Settlements produce 100m+c instead of 25 would have a better early game feel.  I suggest the Human Home Settlements over the Home Command Station because those you can lose without ending the game, so it gives a little more effect to close calls.  Just kinda pondering out loud.

[doctorfrog]

Two I did use, and I still sort of miss, are construction templates and radial place (both edge only and filled in). Among other things, the filled in radial place was really nifty for building things in bulk.

I actually often manually place turrets in long arcs, because it not only allows for wider coverage of a given area, but in the map overlay, it makes it much easier to see how far into the mess the AI is swimming. I'd like to see arc placement make a return, and up until now I thought I had hallucinated its existence.