Small suggestions topic

Another idea might be something like built-in timers, for example for scouting. Or alerts in another kind of way, maybe when a factory finished building or some other conditions are met. This could also be scoped by team or player or subset of players, this would help coordinate teams a lot I think.

also a resource "expenses" display in player list (right now there are income/balance/storage)

@longhead said in Small suggestions topic:

I see a lot of improvement in the selection and command UI. For example when we select a group of engineers, the group should be able to build anything the highest tech engineer can build. right now, the group can only build what the lowest tech engineer can build. Something like an automatic "higher tech starts build, lower tech support build" would be very nice.

This has been suggested before, I am already looking into the viability of it 🙂

@longhead said in Small suggestions topic:

Then I noticed formation move commands can't move sideways. This might be a bug though. When a formation faces left and you want it to move up, while still facing left, the whole group rotates to face up, moves there, and rotates again to face left.

Not a bug, but also not possible I am afraid. The engine does all of that.

@longhead said in Small suggestions topic:

Also a "select air only" or "select land only" or "engineers only" would be useful. Something you can put on a hotkey like "hold e+mouse select" to select engineers or something. Would be nice if this was in the game fully supported without having to use mods.

These already exist - see also the F1 menu for hotkeys.

A work of art is never finished, merely abandoned

Can we fix that annoying thing that resets the currently selected construction tab for various reasons? Like when you selected a T3 engi, switched to T1 to choose something from there, and then an event happens, and you are back in the T3 tab.

Could you make please somewhere on the top visible how many mass extractors you have and what level those are?
By clicking on the icon would be cool to be able to select all Lvl 1 or Lvl 2 to upgrade. That would be useful. I get some struggle with finding all the mass extractors around the map to get the max capacity from those.

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@tankertango said in Small suggestions topic:

Could you make please somewhere on the top visible how many mass extractors you have and what level those are?
By clicking on the icon would be cool to be able to select all Lvl 1 or Lvl 2 to upgrade. That would be useful. I get some struggle with finding all the mass extractors around the map to get the max capacity from those.

There is a mod that does this: UI Party

Here is a link to a live stream of EspiNoob who is using this mod. You can see the icons for the mass extractors in the top-left. They show the number of mexes and you can click on them to select certain kinds of mexes (not just t1, t2, t3, but also "t1 being upgraded not paused" "t1 being upgraded but paused")

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlxYh5Qhrzo

Should this be part of the base game? Maybe. It would be a lot to add to the base game UI. It would probably have to be an option because not everyone would want it on their screen. It might make the game less accessible to new players if this was the default option. We don't want to scare new players with a super-complicated user interface. So, for now it probably makes sense to leave this out of the base game, and leave it as a UI mod. I certainly wouldn't hate seeing it in the base game. This is one of the mods I use. But the devs probably don't want to bother with it. It would be a lot of work to add. And one of the nice things about UI Party is the ability to customize it. It would probably be a lot harder to do that if "UI Party" was part of the base game. At the very least, anyone who wanted to customize it would need to download a UI mod to do that.

Please don’t add that to the default game. We already have hotkeys to select nearest idle mex and a hotkey to upgrade said mex.

@longhead said in Small suggestions topic:

I see a lot of improvement in the selection and command UI. For example when we select a group of engineers, the group should be able to build anything the highest tech engineer can build. right now, the group can only build what the lowest tech engineer can build. Something like an automatic "higher tech starts build, lower tech support build" would be very nice.

@longhead When selecting the stack of engineers this is indeed annoying that the lower tech gets the advantage with no ability to switch to higher tier and not losing the lower tier from selection.

Total map reclaim count in lobby or map details

@f-odin said in Small suggestions topic:

Total map reclaim count in lobby or map details

Reclaim for dead units is generated dynamically and would change with balance patches (the game spawns in "live" units and then kills them, that's why balance patches can change how much reclaim there is in the middle of Seton's)

And any SIM mods could change the total amount of reclaim

It would be possible for FAF to track the total amount of reclaim based on "no mods at all," generate the map with no ACUs spawning in, check the reclaim totals 30 seconds later, ignore the fact that a small amount of reclaim will die to ACUs spawning in. (And programmatically "kill" every civilian unit/structure on the map before counting the reclaim totals)

But this would have to be done per-map. Maybe someone could make a script to do this and then every time there's a balance patch, re-run it for every map.

And then you'd have to update the lobby to query FAF to ask for each map what the reclaim totals are.

It also should completely not work with adaptive maps, not that that matters. (I wouldn't throw away this innovation just because on 5% of the maps that people play it wouldn't work)

So basically I think it would require a lot of work, probably not worth it, but I certainly wouldn't mind if someone can get it done.

Alternatively, the host could generate the map and count the reclaim based on the active mods every time the host picks a map in the lobby just to get the number to display. This seems like a big waste of computer resources and would delay being able to start a hosted game. It would become super annoying to the host every time the host changed the map.

Edit: MAYBE it would be very easy to generate this number for mapgen maps. And that is where it would be the most useful to HAVE this number.

@f-odin said in Small suggestions topic:

Total map reclaim count in lobby or map details

I'd like this too - but I'm afraid it is not that easy. The Ozonex editor provides a small table that one can retrieve for total mass / energy reclaim values, but it doesn't appear to be accurate and it only takes into account props. Let alone that older maps and the GPG maps do not have this table.

Computing the total mass / energy reclaim values is easy once the simulation started, but before that we do not have access to the content of the map beyond a preview and the information in _scenario.lua.

A work of art is never finished, merely abandoned

@arma473 @Jip , yeah the suggestion was based off of mapgen maps having no real hints at how much reclaim is on the map. Didn't even taken into account adaptive maps, and how unit reclaim is generated.

My initial thought was just port ozone values. Taking a look, I didn't realise how far off some of these values are. Maybe it'll be simpler just to have part of the vault description dedicated to reclaim values and allow map makers to manually input initial figures, giving a ballpark figure for mass.

A generated map can take that into account and show it accordingly. It could even take into account wreckage.

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@jip said in Small suggestions topic:

A generated map can take that into account and show it accordingly. It could even take into account wreckage.

Unfortunately a generated map doesn't know the reclaim values during generation.

@Ctrl-K He means something similar as discussed last year.

A work of art is never finished, merely abandoned

An option to unbind the ctrl-click to select all of the same unit on the map.

Make the show "reclaim labels on holding ctrl+shift" be adjustable, so that you can e.g. show reclaim by just pressing and holding shift, or just ctrl or just pressing any other key you want.

I'm mostly thinking of having it work when just pressing shift, as that would make queuing up reclaim and move orders easier imo

A setting that allows queuing of the same structure on top of each other, combining their orders into one as if given to multiple engies.

Example use case:
I have two engies, reclaiming some rocks along two different paths on their way to an external hydro. If I give the reclaiming orders and then the order to build the hydro to the 1st engie, I can't do the same with the 2nd engie, as the game wont let me queue a hydro on the spot where there is already one queued.

So currently I can either have the 2nd engie assist the first one, which sucks if the 1st one gets killed,
or I have to give both engies their separate reclaim order, then select both of them at the same time, and then queue the hydro with both of them selected, which is cumbersome and error prone.

What I'd like to do is to just have the hydro be queued by the 1st engie, which then gets combined with the 2nd hydro build order once I give it