Controlling large empires difficult - some suggestions
AshesoftheSingularity ForumsLarge-scale warfare and economic management is still pretty micro-intensive (some of you can handle that, but hear me out). These are some suggestions to help ease the issue.
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Factory assisting - allow factories to assist other factories and ‘steal’ part of their work queue. This allows for the dynamic scaling of production without re-creating queues on the other factories - new factories can be created and ‘slaved’ to the original factory at will.
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Newly-slaved factories should inherit the waypoints of their master, but can be changed at will afterwards (streamlines large-scale production but still gives options and allows for edge cases).
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Battlegroup/metaunit templating - the ability to create a template of a battlegroup and then build and queue that template from a factory, i.e. 10x brutes, 10x archers, name it “Light Attack”, then select a factory (especially a ‘master’ factory as per the above) and choose the “Light Attack” template, which will add 10x brutes and 10x arches to the queue, and then automatically group them into a single unit when all are constructed.
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More complex post-production rally-points from factories - allow for a ‘staging’ waypoint and a then the usual ‘move’ rally point with the above suggestion - the units are built and move to the staging point, then when all units from the metaunit have been constructed, group them and send them to the ‘move’ point as normal.
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Give metaunits an ‘auto reinforce’ option, whereby the ‘best’ factory (closest vs least busy vs whatever else) will automatically produce units that join up with the metaunit WITHOUT causing it to change its movements/formation until those new units arrive at the location of the metaunit and then join it.
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Defaulted to off for normal metaunits and defaulted to on for template-created metaunits [see above], so that the player doesn’t have to select each metaunit created by a factory and manually set its reinforcement status. Maybe make this default setting a part of the template, or enabled/disabled at the (master) factory level?
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A faction-wide display showing the economic drain of each unit/building - it is difficult to determine which units and buildings are using resources.
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A heatmap that adjusts to the zoom level would allow the player to see, at a high-level, the areas (entire sectors are probably not granular enough) that are the most expensive economically, and then as they zoom, more detailed displays are shown, down to the individual units. Colour code i.e. red -> blue; biggest drain -> no drain. This leads to:
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Infographics, infographics, infographics - The player is blind to the larger war without any serious displays of information.
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As per the above; heatmap of economic drain or deficit for each area being displayed (green for net gain, red for net drain, etc)
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Military strength - friendly vs hostile etc
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Overlay depicting radar coverage
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Filters for battlegroups containing unit of x type (artillery, bomber, etc) - “Where are my bombers across the entire map? What about my siege dreadnoughts?”
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Traditional graphs and other non-spatial infographics - predictions/extrapolation to help the player gauge future circumstances?
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Streamline construction of resource buildings - when an engineer is selected, right-clicking a resource deposit should construct the appropriate extractor (metal vs radioactives), since taking over large areas and having to specify each type for numerous deposits adds nothing to the process or the user’s experience but more time.
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Allow multiple, selected engineers to assist in construction automatically - when several engineers are selected, and then instructed to build a structure, all engineers move to the indicated location, but only one actually constructs. This requires the player to manually specify that the other engineers are to assist for every single building they wish to construct in this way. All engineers selected when the construction is ordered should participate, even for multiple structures placed in succession (i.e. whilst holding the shift key).
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