Game patch 3728

Was discussed already

Where is the discussion?

Ras Boi's save lives.

Don't remember, lol

And on the official Didscord in either #game-testing or the thread about capping 🙂 . If you set the option to extractors only then it is the same behavior as before.

A work of art is never finished, merely abandoned

Great so I now have to change game settings for something that wasnt an issue before. Lovely stuff.

Ras Boi's save lives.

yeah,was about to make a forum post about it,can we not have it automatically turned on? or rather can those be set up/generated when making a new game.prefs?
last time,it took me a while to realise i wasn't high and my mexes had the setting on:D

queuing with a newbie to show him the beauty of tmm and meeting tagada be like:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLcRpdZ0Xb0&ab_channel=Tomoko

I think you guys can just go and turn the settings off, it won't take more than a minute or two. I think you guys are looking at a tiny issue when compared to how great it is going to be that we get more customization in our own gameplay.

Congratulations to all the contributors on this patch, I'm loving all the capping (way more intuitive) and how we were able to provide our own feedback as community members on the official FAF Discord. Your hard work is greatly appreciated and pushes FAF to being a greater game everyday! ❤ ❤

FAF Website Developer

When introducing a new feature there's two things we can do:

  • (1) We turn the feature off by default.
  • (2) We turn the feature on by default.

If we pick (1) then new players will not be aware of the feature and they'll likely never use it even though it can be a great feature. If we choose (2) then the best we can do is inform people they can turn it off, but everyone does get to experience it.

When adjusting a feature we have one additional option:

  • (3) We add a 'legacy' option where the behavior is the same as before.

If we'd choose (3) then we'd have the same issue as (1) where a lot of people would never know the full potential of a feature as it is 'hidden' in the options menu. Therefore it is again best to turn on the entire feature and inform people they can change it in their game settings with a similar rationale to (2).

Bottom line: if we'd always disable features by default then we may just as well make no more features at all as nobody gets to use them. As an example of a great feature that is turned off by default: being able to drag / drop the queue of a factory to change the order. That allows you to move an engineer to the front of the queue without wasting the queue.

edit: note that this feature can be tweaked by UI mods in the patch after this patch (3.g., 3729). That way everyone gets to define their own behavior as they see fit.

A work of art is never finished, merely abandoned

@jip said in Game patch 3728:

Bottom line: if we'd always disable features by default then we may just as well make no more features at all as nobody gets to use them. As an example of a great feature that is turned off by default: being able to drag / drop the queue of a factory to change the order. That allows you to move an engineer to the front of the queue without wasting the queue.

Well case in point, I didn’t know this was integrated into base Faf… why is this not on by default with a loading screen tip? I see no downside to it…

put the xbox units in the game pls u_u

@zeldafanboy said in Game patch 3728:

@jip said in Game patch 3728:

Bottom line: if we'd always disable features by default then we may just as well make no more features at all as nobody gets to use them. As an example of a great feature that is turned off by default: being able to drag / drop the queue of a factory to change the order. That allows you to move an engineer to the front of the queue without wasting the queue.

Well case in point, I didn’t know this was integrated into base Faf… why is this not on by default with a loading screen tip? I see no downside to it…

Not totally related to this patch but gotta comment, I tried this feature before long time ago but encountered some issues, for instance the queue could reset/stop the factory back then if you tried to swap the order. Not sure if it has changed since then.

More on-topic, I did a few test games with this patch and it did feel significantly smoother later on in the game with many units on the field, so looking forward to the release.

Yeah, the draggable factory queues are extremely buggy and cause people's factories to randomly break in weird ways. Tex was having a lot of issues until he turned that off. It is good that it is disabled by default and an argument could be made that it should be removed from FAF.

I have no issue with that game being "improved" and the patch making speeds better and anything like that. But I am yet to actually see someone simply state what the benefit is to this new mex capping, to the engi assist orders or anything.
Will a dev please put in simple terms what the actual benefit is.

Ras Boi's save lives.

@thomashiatt if that is the case then it should be fixed or removed. I never experienced issues, but maybe I'm not using it often enough.

A work of art is never finished, merely abandoned

@noonecares said in Game patch 3728:

I have no issue with that game being "improved" and the patch making speeds better and anything like that. But I am yet to actually see someone simply state what the benefit is to this new mex capping, to the engi assist orders or anything.
Will a dev please put in simple terms what the actual benefit is.

Note that this feature already existed in the game - this patch works with what was already there and tries to improve it. The feature (if I am not mistaken) was already enabled by default. The idea of the feature at the time was to reduce template usage because that can be apm intensive.

First of all what it improved upon:

  • When capping the group of engineers assists one engineer and that one has the orders issued. This would cause issues where an engineer would lose the assist order for some odd reason, causing half of them to move on to cap the next extractor. If I am not mistaken this is described by blast_chilled a post that I can't find anymore.

Then what is added to it:

  • Being able to cap various structure that you often see capped in-game, such as radars (with pgens), mass storages (with fabricators, when surrounding an extractor), t2 artillery (with pgens), t1 pd (with walls) and tech 3 fabricators (with storages).

Note that this isn't originally my idea - someone mentioned it on the forums, some people agreed (including me) and I started working on it. And here we are now, where you can determine to have the old behavior (except for the assisting behavior) and the new behavior (with all the additions).

A work of art is never finished, merely abandoned

Ringing structures and reclaim seem like basically the same thing to me. You gotta click some stuff quickly and accurately to get an economic boost. With reclaim you get attack moves to help you a bit, and with capping you can make templates to help you a bit. Now people have decided that auto-capping things with 1 click is okay, but using area commands or reclaim macros is still deemed a bannable offense. It seems quite logically inconsistent to me. If clicking reclaim quickly and accurately is important, then placing ringed structures quickly and accurately should be considered equally important.

So basically you just made it noob friendly
And those of us who have half a brain and more than 5 apm are still basically fine.

Ras Boi's save lives.

@thomashiatt said in Game patch 3728:

using area commands or reclaim macros is still deemed a bannable offense

The "paint manual reclaim orders into an area" command should be added to the base game. It's consistent with what FAF is supposed to be. Maybe even with a modification so reclaim orders are only painted on wrecks of a certain size (big enough that it catches every tree group but not individual trees, if you want to scoop individual trees or small rocks, you might as well just put a patrol order)

@ThomasHiatt if that’s what you want then you are basically advocating for getting rid of templates entirely. Because templates do exactly the same thing as this “right click to cap” feature except just not as well. You can keep using templates if you want and it won’t make you any worse at the game than someone who uses the “click to cap” feature. The only difference is it’s a quality of life change where the person using “click to cap” doesn’t have to bind and memorize as many hotkeys.

I don't want anything, I don't even play the game. I was just stating that the decisions don't make sense to me. If it were up to me I would allow reclaim macros and auto-reclaim mods and allow for the easy ringing of structures. Templates do the same thing, not as well, in the same way that attack move does the same thing, not as well. Everyone is forced to use attack move because the better solutions are deemed cheating. By the same logic, auto-ringing structures should be deemed cheating.