Allow repeat build for (air) experimentals

I don't like the idea. Having to manage your buildpower by microing your engies can be annoying at times, but it has also become a FAF staple. It forces you to work tidy in some sense and I like it for it.
That said, I also think it is a rather weird inclusion to make, when you make a repeat build for air experimentals, but not for any other experimental.

@spikeynoob said in Allow repeat build for (air) experimentals:

In reference to which post? If this is responding to bullies post, why?

Because you're here to play a game. This is part of that experience

@jip said in Allow repeat build for (air) experimentals:

@spikeynoob said in Allow repeat build for (air) experimentals:

In reference to which post? If this is responding to bullies post, why?

Because you're here to play a game. This is part of that experience

I feel like the same could be said in opposition to the fancy shift g stuff you just added, or to the auto mex capping on right click. I'm not for or against the suggestion either way, it just seems slightly odd to oppose this specific case of automation but approve of others. I don't mean to do some sort of "gotcha" just interested in the reasoning.

Just have the behavior of assisting t4s with engies have them place the t4 again if they are capable. I don’t see why it’s any different than assisting a factory with your engies. Gameplay justification is weird, you drag a line of t4 near your engie clump and reset it after 3-4 t4s now.

@spikeynoob said in Allow repeat build for (air) experimentals:

I feel like the same could be said in opposition to the fancy shift g stuff you just added, or to the auto mex capping on right click. I'm not for or against the suggestion either way, it just seems slightly odd to oppose this specific case of automation but approve of others. I don't mean to do some sort of "gotcha" just interested in the reasoning.

To me they're not the same. It would take you a lot of time to distribute attack orders across moving units (yours) and targets (enemies). The experience would be frustrating; without shift-g you would likely not even bother trying.

In contradiction to this: it's 1 click and then you're done. The only thing you need to do is not forget about it. I'm sure there could be a UI mod that can send you a personal ping as a reminder to queue the next experimental.

On top of that, say we do want this hypothetically. How would the interaction work exactly? How do you communicate to your engineers that this specific (air) experimental is the one that you want to keep building? And how can you as a player (or as an observer) observe this behavior happening?

@jip said in Allow repeat build for (air) experimentals:

@spikeynoob said in Allow repeat build for (air) experimentals:

I feel like the same could be said in opposition to the fancy shift g stuff you just added, or to the auto mex capping on right click. I'm not for or against the suggestion either way, it just seems slightly odd to oppose this specific case of automation but approve of others. I don't mean to do some sort of "gotcha" just interested in the reasoning.

To me they're not the same. It would take you a lot of time to distribute attack orders across moving units (yours) and targets (enemies). The experience would be frustrating; without shift-g you would likely not even bother trying.

In contradiction to this: it's 1 click and then you're done. The only thing you need to do is not forget about it. I'm sure there could be a UI mod that can send you a personal ping as a reminder to queue the next experimental.

On top of that, say we do want this hypothetically. How would the interaction work exactly? How do you communicate to your engineers that this specific (air) experimental is the one that you want to keep building? And how can you as a player (or as an observer) observe this behavior happening?

I can see distribute orders being different, but what about the assist capping feature. It automates something that otherwise you would do manually into 1 click.

I would think this feature could look like enabling the repeat build button on engis, then when an engi is finished building an exp it just requeues on the same position. If a group of engis is set to repeat then which ever is fastest starts the building and the other ones just repair the existing construction. Maybe this could be done in a way where you can queue multiple experimentals and it just loops through the queue building them on the originally specified location.

Currently spending ur eco on a paragon is quite stressful. It is quite hard to spend it all unless you spam a ton of build power on game enders. It would be nice if i could just set a bunch of engis to pump out czars without worrying about either pathing being shit or having to requeue them in a circle around the bp.

@stormlantern said in Allow repeat build for (air) experimentals:

That said, I also think it is a rather weird inclusion to make, when you make a repeat build for air experimentals, but not for any other experimental.

i left it inbetween parentheses because it was just an idea but i forgot to elaborate on it in my post. I initially mainly said it because air experimentals move out of the way way easier meaning t3 engies wont obstruct the build site like they probably would with land t4s while the land t4 is moving out of the way. I disagree with my past self though and think this should be for land t4s aswell

@jip said in Allow repeat build for (air) experimentals:

I'm sure there could be a UI mod that can send you a personal ping as a reminder to queue the next experimental.

this isn't the problem, the problem is that its tedious to reselect your t3 engineers around the t4.

1. you wait for the t4 to leave the area, box select the t3 engineers, and queue a new one, pray to god no other unit is inside your box selection
2. you shift box select the engineers and deselect everything that isnt a t3 engineer, can sometimes be many things, does not work well with a mod i use, but personal issue i guess
3. you had all of your t3 engineers assisted to one of them (makes it easy to requeue), but after finishing construction of the t4 they will all move towards the assisted engineer and block the building site you wanted to use

alternatively you could queue up multiple t4s but this will mean your bp will move around a lot which will lead to you floating mass. micromanaging engineers to resolve this is not an option in the scenario i mentioned: >1000 income, especially >5000 with a paragon. you'll have way too many groups of engineers to micromanage like that, and requeueing t4s is quite the hassle especially when you don't have all the space in the world

@waffelznoob I get your points but automating it isn't trivial. A lot of your problems would still apply, but then from a code perspective instead of a user flow perspective.

What would be a 'trivial solution' is the 'build pad' idea of @arma473, where you can create a faction-specific build bad to build land and air experimental units from. Would give you everything you need with the bonus of being able to queue different experimental units and even set up rally points for them.

hmm, i feel like that is a bit too radical to solve the minor issues im bringing up

tbh if you're in a game that's gone long enough to be mass producing experimentals like that, you should have no problem getting an engie from a teammate. Just build engineering stations and have a small number of T3 engies starting the experimentals to avoid pathing hell. This feels like such a niche issue as to not be worth radical changes or a lot of coding.

you could slightly increase the niche where this is usefull, by allowing the looping function for all buildings. (This would also keep the user experience consistent)
That way engineers could automatically rebuild defenses that get destroyed and such. (walls probably?)
For the use case on t4 production, I don't see how this is more engaging gameplay than limiting factory queues to 5 units and disallowing repeat.
whether it is feasible to implement I cannot say.

well once you have 1k income maybe consider Engineer presets instead? they are much less prone to milling around between builds.

altho - what would be interesting is if these presets came with their own ' factory' module similar to new fatty / carriers that you could select separately and which would have repeat build option available for XP's. If you could place two templates on repeat build that didn't disappear, they could have orders to move off and the boys would alternate between after each finishes

@nex said in Allow repeat build for (air) experimentals:

whether it is feasible to implement I cannot say.

That's the issue, these may be considered as minor issues but scripting the behavior appears to be quite difficult on first sight.

I think it is acceptable if the game experience is not as fluent or convenient when you have > 1000 mass income. You are approaching the limits of the game and only natural that you will run into nieche usage scenarios more and more that not present in the average game.
That wouldn't be an argument against it if it was easy to fix, but it seems like there are no easy/good options to solve this, so it seems acceptable to me to leave it as is

The next problem once you automated repeat build is how do you automate setting the rally point? The game never expected mass building of experimentals, so all sorts of (technical) choices around them makes it difficult to now add repeat building on top.

@blackyps said in Allow repeat build for (air) experimentals:

The next problem once you automated repeat build is how do you automate setting the rally point? The game never expected mass building of experimentals, so all sorts of (technical) choices around them makes it difficult to now add repeat building on top.

You don't really need a rally point do you?
the next build order will tell the unit to clear the buildspace and that's it.
sure they will "clump up" next to it, but there is just so much you can do without an awkward UX.

All in all we are at the point where it's a nice to have, so if someone finds himself worthy enough to implement it we'd take it?
Or are you still against it @Jip ?

Could you implement it by having a ui button in engineers to repeat build experimentals; then you put code in the callback for when construction finishes (which triggers for each engineer assisting the experimental I think) and if a toggled engineer just finished building a mobile experimental it gets given an order to build another experimental of the same type in the same spot if it is able (ie the right faction and tech)?

Unless I’m mistaken in how reliably the callback triggers, the only bit I don’t know how to do would be the ui button for engineers to give the option (but if this was hard then you could just have a hotkey to toggle and some sort of vfx so you can tell which engineers have been toggled); the callback logic part itself I’d have thought would be relatively straightforward

@nex said in Allow repeat build for (air) experimentals:

Or are you still against it @Jip ?

I'm personally not convinced of a solution that doesn't involve a build pad that acts like a factory. Maybe even a different build pad for each experimental.

Without a build pad, how would it work? As an example: say you have multiple tech levels building a Fatboy. When finished, through some scripted mechanic the tech 3 engineers / SACUs will re-issue the build order. They can't start constructing right away however, because the Fatboy needs to move first. This takes between 10 to 15 seconds. Then, once they start building, the scripted mechanic needs to somehow decipher which non-tech 3 engineers were building the experimental and the scripted mechanic needs to re-issue the assist order on the Fatboy that is being constructed. But, the scripted mechanics also needs to check and confirm that the engineers did not receive new orders in between (that is possible too), and whether the engineers were assisting the Fatboy or just happened to be assisting because of a patrol or an attack move order.

You can't assist the tech 3 engineer with non-tech 3 engineers to call it a day. Because then they do this:

you had all of your t3 engineers assisted to one of them (makes it easy to requeue), but after finishing construction of the t4 they will all move towards the assisted engineer and block the building site you wanted to use

And even if we manage all of this and create a dummy-proof feature that just works, the next thing people will ask is what BlackYps mentioned:

@blackyps said in Allow repeat build for (air) experimentals:

The next problem once you automated repeat build is how do you automate setting the rally point? The game never expected mass building of experimentals, so all sorts of (technical) choices around them makes it difficult to now add repeat building on top.

And once we're there then we essentially made a build pad. But one that doesn't look like a build pad. Instead we have a scripted mechanic that is difficult to maintain, difficult for (new) players to understand and difficult for observers to see while casting.

edit: and I sort of agree with @BlackYps where he writes that it is okay for the game to be come difficult when you can spent more than 1000 mass a second. Managing your engineers is part of the game

@jip My idea for how it'd work was a lot simpler.
just a repeat button for the engies order queue. No shenanigans with assisters or anything.
just once the exp is built tell them to build the same exp in the same spot, that should make all units occupying the build area try to move away or not? (including the just finished exp).

Maybe this repeat function would (if it even can) also apply to non-build orders, but that might be hard to do.

@jip said in Allow repeat build for (air) experimentals:

But, the scripted mechanics also needs to check and confirm that the engineers did not receive new orders in between

This I'd also completely ignore, since normal factory repeat also just repeats the entire queue and simply appends whatever just finished again.

@jip said in Allow repeat build for (air) experimentals:

And even if we manage all of this and create a dummy-proof feature that just works, the next thing people will ask is what BlackYps mentioned:

and that's where I'd draw the line. It's not an exp factory, it's a repeat function for engineers.

I can totally agree that this is something we don't really need and I'd personally be against a build pad solution, just to make exp units work again like non-exp units.
But if someone comes around with a working implementation for engineer repeat build, I wouldn't say no.

Isn't there a mechanic to rebuild a structure if it's destroyed while assisting it? How similar is that to this?