Since Interceptors and ASF can target other interceptors and ASF, and gunships can target other gunships, clearly bombers should be able to target other bombers.

... Of which I am one...

Try playing more zoomed out. The more time you spend at max zoom the more time you spend watching for flanks and planning your own. You pretty much only need to zoom in to build structures or micro your units - everything else should be zoomed out. If you find yourself still not spending much time zoomed out, then you need to start making allowances because intel is critical in this game. -> "do I care how precisely these buildings are placed / is it alright if these units don't make it" this is an attention game after all...

My suggestion is to allow factories to set their waypoint to a unit group. When the factory finishes constructing a unit, it'll receive the same orders as the rest of the units in the group. If there's more than one order, it'll assign one randomly (or maybe by unit type)

The reason I want this is because then I can setup air patrols to be continuously replenished by a factory. Right now if you make a patrol order from a factory then give an order to the patroling units, there's no way for them to rejoin the patrol again. But if a unit group had the order and the factory was just assisting the unit group, then you could give the units any order you wanted and the factory would create more units for them.

Give it an upgrade that adds 4 t1 AA turrets (one on each corner) and a shield generator that costs ~100 energy. Also give it +100 energy production and the equivalent of 4 energy storages. Basically an upgrade that makes it immune to t1 bombers and gives your com enough energy storage to overcharge anything.

A couple years back there was a community run tournament for Overwatch called "The Scrub Cup" - basically it was for low level players, and it introduced a whole host of people to the competitive tournament scene. That game is heavily team focused, and having a randomly assigned dedicated team to work with for a couple months before the tournament was incredible in showing people an entirely new side to the game.

I think FAF could benefit from something similar. A tournament designed specifically for noobs, who could work together on a team to learn and grow and improve. I don't know if it'd help with player retention or anything like that, but I think it would certainly help people see why competition can be fun without all the pressure of being the best of the best.

Here's a link that explains what Scrub Cup is (was, RIP)

https://www.reddit.com/r/OverwatchUniversity/comments/frttsu/announcing_scrub_cup_7_2500sr_and_below/

Similar to how air units can return to air staging facilities to be repaired, I believe land units should have a button that marches them home to the nearest engineering station (maybe with a shorter range than the air staging facilities) to be repaired.

Also, engineering stations should automatically repair units near them. When I was first learning the game that's what I thought they did, sorta like a stationary mechanic or field hospital. However they don't do that, and I think it'd be pretty neat if they did.

There's been some great discussion on the viability of increasing repair speed / decreasing repair costs so I'm not going to comment on that. Besides, I'm only rank ~300 or so on ladder so my opinions aren't worth much.

Right now repairing is an underutilized mechanic. Whether that's good or bad is beyond me, but the fact is that people don't use it. I think this suggestion would add an automatic method of using it, which helps prevent it from being the APM sink that it is now.

In terms of how this'd affect the game, I believe it would encourage players to keep their units alive rather than throwing them to their doom. This encourages players to be less wasteful, and it gives the engineering station another role besides "passive stationary build power" which could already be accomplished by spamming engineers.

It'd also add additional flavor to the space behind the frontline / firebases, which could do with some additional utility. Right now firebases are mainly used to control space, but with an engineering station repairing units just behind them they could act as a rallying banner for previous missions to regroup at before again pushing into enemy territory.

The way I picture it working is the player selects a group of units, some damaged some not, hits the "return to engineering station" button, then queues up an additional movement order for afterwards. Essentially, "repair yourself if you need it then meet up here" - this would allow the player to send some damaged units home partway through a mission, while keeping the undamaged units on task. Sorta like how if you select all your air units and then make an order that only some of them can follow (like, shoot down that spy plane) only the interceptors will move to engage while everyone else will do nothing / do any other orders you specify (like "shoot down that spy plane and then return to an air staging facility" causing the bombers and spy planes to immediately go repair+refuel)

I believe this adds an interesting decision for the player to make - do I send my units home to repair, or do I push further and risk losing them?
More meaningful decisions == more gameplay == more fun.

This is my first suggestion so let me know what you think.

Make repair cheaper and make engineering stations automatically repair units nearby is my suggestion

@bulliednoob I literally never see anyone else doing that so it's probably just a noob trap that I fell for lol don't listen to me xD

See title. I think it'd make it more difficult to put the PD in an objectively bad place, and it'd help ameliorate the difficulty in seeing the bumps in terrain.

... I'm confused, why is the context based template system better than the system I described? It seems like extra key-presses for... marginal at best gain. I'm assuming that I'm missing something. What else would you build atop a mass deposit than a mass extractor...?

and to clarify, to get the functionality I want I need to mouse-over the mass deposit and hit tab? will attempt in my next game

hi, it's been a while since I've played this game but when I logged in and started a game, I was quickly flatfooted because my commander couldn't build any mass extractors.

I realized that I needed to click the button in their build menu which was weird to me because I'm used to just clicking on the mass extraction point.

I realized it was the same for engineers building a hydrocarbon plant.

I looked through the in-game options and I couldn't see an option to re-enable the old behavior.

Does anyone know how to fix this issue? Thanks.

"It's a feature, not a bug"

Aeon t2 should be used in different circumstances than the t3 shield. It's low radius means you need to design the rest of the base around it, while other factions (with larger radiuses) can build more spread out. I think it could be an intentional design decision, and it's interesting to try and figure out what the thinking was behind it.

Oh neat, probably should have looked through the keybinds before I suggested that. WELL the "select idle bomber/gunship/interceptor" request still seems valid

A couple years back there was a community run tournament for Overwatch called "The Scrub Cup" - basically it was for low level players, and it introduced a whole host of people to the competitive tournament scene. That game is heavily team focused, and having a randomly assigned dedicated team to work with for a couple months before the tournament was incredible in showing people an entirely new side to the game.

I think FAF could benefit from something similar. A tournament designed specifically for noobs, who could work together on a team to learn and grow and improve. I don't know if it'd help with player retention or anything like that, but I think it would certainly help people see why competition can be fun without all the pressure of being the best of the best.

Here's a link that explains what Scrub Cup is (was, RIP)

https://www.reddit.com/r/OverwatchUniversity/comments/frttsu/announcing_scrub_cup_7_2500sr_and_below/

There should be a way to select the nearest idle air unit of a certain type. I'm thinking it could be implemented similarly to how engineers can be "idle" and selected with a keybind.

Need scouting? Select the nearest scout plane and send it forward.

See a radar station? Select the nearest bomber and blow it up.

Enemy bomber on the way? Select ~three interceptors to patrol near where it's headed.

I think this would make the air game a lot more approachable and flexible for new players. Sure they'd have to learn keybinds, but I think that's a good thing overall. It's much easier to apply land pressure because all you have to do is move some waypoints and your units will queue near the front - with air, currently it's more difficult to make precise gestures because your units are either way back in the base (meaning you need to scroll over and manually select however many you need) or they're patrolling above your base and it's difficult to select them without accidentally grabbing some land units underneath.

In addition it'll allow for more precision. Need to bomb something specific? With the "idle" keybind, you can select a single bomber. Right now you can select all bombers, but what if you already had orders queued up for some of them? What if you don't want to send them all into enemy AA? What if you want to attack multiple places at once? There's many reasons why you might want to quickly select 1-5 air units of a certain type without selecting all your air units.

A workaround currently is to have at least three air factories producing units. One for scouts, one for interceptors, and one for bombers. Give them each a separate waypoint and you'll have three different "piles" of units that you can easily click on. But still it feels a little wasteful because it requires you to remember where you put each waypoint (is there enough room on the map?) and it can be fiddly and precise when you need air support asap. Plus if you want to select more than one you'll need to shift+click, and that can be prone to errors since it might select buildings on accident.

See title. I think it'd make it more difficult to put the PD in an objectively bad place, and it'd help ameliorate the difficulty in seeing the bumps in terrain.

Oh. That doesn't make sense to me because in order to use my package manager my system time has to be set to the current time. Why is the server time so far ahead?

EDIT: My system time was set to 7 hours behind. What the heck, how did that happen? So weird. TYVM for the help.

I'm guessing this isn't normal. When I scroll down there isn't a way to view a second page or anything - these are just the only options available