So I just got to point with fixing spread attack where some things are possible that are apparently controversial:

Now I dont know if my fixes will even go live from github once whoever decides things about FAF sees them and their potential, and these fixes may instead have that someone remove necessary code from base FAF that allows this, and possibly other mods depending on it, from functioning, causing this mod to go into oblivion instead and further ruining what I am trying to improve, but I managed to fix it (because it wasnt written properly in first place) and as a consequence, what is described here (as far as I understand it) is possible.

aka I can queue multiple different units to different move orders of any different numbers and then select all of those units and queue attack orders that spread attack then mixes properly without failing, all units will continue on their queued move orders and then proceed to attack every target like spread attack normally does. In zlo's example, I can queue strats to fly around aa in different paths each, and then queue attack orders and press shift+g to turn them into spread attack while strats are still flying to move orders.

Not only that, but this can be repeated in queue as many times as player wants, I can again queue move orders after a queued spread attack and once again queue spread attack after those new move orders which are already after previous spread attack and so on. Each spread attack will only effect last group of attack orders and leaves everything prior alone. This allows player to plan attacks way easier instead of having to manually give those orders after strats got into position first. You might say this removes micro from the game, but in my opinion, it merely allows that micro to be done beforehand if player chooses to. Player still has to queue those attack orders (micro), they just now have ability to queue it before if they want to instead of having to do it on spot when they may have something else important to focus on. This is almost exact situation as being able to queue units of factory that isnt completed yet instead of only being able to do so after it is finished and I find it hilarious that it would even be considered OP.

While I think a lot of pro players will see this as overpowered for their own reasons, these controls that I fixed literally allow a player to do nothing more than what they already could do, except easier, they dont give any units additional abilities or allow them to do something they couldnt without them, a player can already do all of this manually, they simply allow player to better tell those units what to do within limitations of what those units already physically can do, nothing more. And I think that its objectively correct that players should be able to tell their units what to do as effortlessly as possible, because the point of this game isnt to fight the controls, but to fight other players.

Speaking of fighting controls, some pro players may have gotten very good at managing their attention and APM to fight bad controls and this may, to them, ruin an aspect of gameplay or remove value of their skill (at fighting the controls) cough Heaven, even some strategies that are designed to rob your opponent of attention and APM by doing something that they have to "translate for a long time" the response orders to (even tho they came up with them in split second), a strategy that wouldnt work if your opponent could "translate quickly" the response orders to, you can see how it has nothing to do with who can "come up with orders" faster or with better ones, but how fast they can translate them into the game thru UI, sure coming up with them exists already, but translating them thru controls shouldnt even have a time component to it, let alone entire strategies or even needed clicking skills. So instead of who can translate orders faster or attack opponent in a way they have to spend more time translating orders to counter, I think strategy is supposed to be only about who is better at coming up with orders in first place, translating them into unit orders thru UI after coming up with them should be effortless.

In general I think its time we separate player's controls and their "skill" in fighting those controls to tell their units to do what they want them to do, from balance equation and instead allow players to tell their units what to do in any way they want, because strategy is about that part, what should the units do, not how do I get them to do what I want them to do. And I think having to fight controls in fact reduces the strategy aspect of this game and we could see a lot more interesting things in games if players were spared the bad controls and could instead communicate properly with their units and thus have more time to come up with plans and better plans, and give out more plans in same time, when they wouldnt need to have a massive "time to translate their plan into orders". Instead of fighting on 1 front, player could be fighting on many, if only they could tell their units what to do easier instead of fighting the controls to get them to do something so simple that they could explain it in 1 short sentence "go here first and then bomb everything there" (which is what player can do with this spread attack fix). Are we really considering translation (not coming up with) of this simple sentence into unit commands a gameplay element and skill?

APM and attention resources imo arent supposed to be used up "trying to control your units", but trying to beat your opponent in strategy, the control of your units should be as easy as saying what you want them to do like example above. APM and attention should be used solely for coming up with those orders in first place. If you remember before advanced target priorities were a thing, bombers could fly into your base and take no damage from your aa and do their bombing freely simply because your aa was busy shooting at fighters, and you had no way of telling them to do otherwise other than manually telling turrets to shoot specific bomber (and likely missclicking on a fighter). I already used this example in infamous steam forum discussion, but this simply shows that bad controls lead to bad gameplay, should the player really have no way of saying "shoot the bombers first" to their units other than frantically spam clicking? Should it really be a strategy to send fighters with bombers, not to protect them from enemy fighters, but to distract enemy aa because other player has no way of telling those aa to ignore fighters?

Better controls may open different problems where units may suddenly become overpowered because they can finally be controlled properly and you may object to that, but like I had pleasure of explaining in Atlantis thread already, thats when you balance those units, instead of another problem with the game "balancing" them. Fix that problem first instead and then balance those units, because only then will you see them in their real form, the units you are currently seeing arent being used at their full potential because of those control problems. If fixing the controls reveals those units' real power by them becoming overpowered, thats when you balance them because only then do you know what they are really capable of. Not hiding behind double negatives to cancel each other out.

I know allowing any UI mods can escalate into players basically having AI microing their units up to point where player doesnt even press a button during a match so I have solution for where the line should be. For example there was a "russian hacker" story here on FAF where someone had a ui mod where units would automatically surround another unit, ex. labs surrounding a megalith. This was considered overpowered and bannable, because labs would otherwise have to be microed around the megalith manually, but this isnt a problem of ui mods, its a problem of labs countering megalith.

While I dont know the specifics of how that mod worked, this shows where UI mods can start "playing the game for you", because if this player had to tell his units to "surround the megalith" imo its fine, because this ui mod simply allowed that player to tell those labs what to do easier "surround that megalith", but if those units instead "automatically surrounded the megalith should it walk into range" it isnt. imo the line for UI mods that are allowed should be where the units themselves start automatically giving themselves orders depending on circumstances (aka "AI"), lets say a fighter that automatically stops attacking and gives itself a move order back to base if it flies too far from patrol waypoint.

This said in abstract form, where its easy to tell if its allowed or not aka a "rule" is: no UI mods that give units "AI" aka allow translations of sentences like "if this then this else this" or "in case of this, this" into orders, but only "this, then this, then this". There can be no decision making that unit itself does, but any order queue of any orders that player wants to give them or manipulate, they should be able to do effortlessly and is fine.

This game was designed from start to give players easier control over their units than other RTS games had thru its UI with the very strategic zoom and many features of orders and queues, they even tried to create something similar to the very thing I started this post with with coordinated attack, where you can queue move orders of different units and have an attack order that they attack at same time from different places. It is ridiculous that progress in better player control is being stalled like this for any reason.

Here are some interviews with linked relevant times where Chris Taylor himself states things about supreme commander's control system and what it is supposed to be:

Its not about who can click faster
With formation move as an example, you could say that not having formation move would add micro skill as you would need to manually give units move orders so they stay close together. Consider formation move a UI mod for example and say is it overpowered?
About player's control, queues and coordinated attack
I already showed factory queue above, if you replace this single attack target of coordinated attack (destroyer) with multiple targets, it literally is this very thing of queued move orders of different units that all then attack multiple targets (instead of 1).
Same coordinated attack from video above

There are probably other interviews mentioning things like this as well that I didnt find yet. You should still watch the whole playlist of those videos anyway because they are good.

Here is a video showing what properly working spread attack combined with Disperse Move UI mod can do. I dont understand how you can considered that overpowered. To me it is merely proper control of your units to get them to do what they could have always done.

TLDR:
Players should be able to give out explicit (no decision making by unit) orders in any way they want thru UI mods, and giving out orders should be as effortless as saying them. Balance should, instead of considering how bad controls are as a factor in balancing (micro) and thus banning any UI modification that improves that control thus tilting the balance which was based on that control being bad, balance units around their maximum potential that becomes more apparent as playerbase's controls improve thru UI mods and UI upgrades in general, allowing players to tell those units what to do easier and thus revealing the real power of those units to balance them based on.

The player's control over their units thru UI should be improving by FAF itself, not banned from it as "cheating", the line between mods "playing the game for you" and not (aka allowed or not) should be where they are giving units orders automatically without player action (unit "AI" basically), and those letting player more easily give and manipulate manual orders and queues of any complexity being allowed. This is better explained above in bold text.

@HintHunter said in Atlantis:

Meh they can still get manually fired up on by battleships, the splash dmg from cannons fulfills that role and prob for the better of the game.

underwater units shouldnt be able to get hit by surface weapons except for massive aoes like nukes, a submarine is supposed to be below the surface where surface weapons cant reach them, which is the whole point of them

if we consider it balanced that underwater units should be getting hit by surface weapons like battleship cannons, then why cant battleships simply target underwater units automatically to shoot at them considering they can technically hit them when manually groundfired? this whole thing even only works when microed intentionally, the current situation is basically exploiting this flaw in game code where surface weapons can hit underwater units simply because water levels arent deep enough for how large aoe those weapons have for their uses and balance on surface combat

so if we consider this situation ok, then all surface weapons that can reach underwater units with their aoe should be able to target underwater units like they do any surface unit, this may seem silly but in this extreme you can see how that ruins the point of underwater units as they get picked off easily by things that shouldnt be able to hit them in first place, atlantis is just one of units that is most effected by it because of it being slow and big and thus easier to groundfire, but all underwater units have this problem that shouldnt exist

just think realistically how is a battleship supposed to hit a submarine with its cannons while its underwater and how nonsensical that is, yet considered fine here apparently?

This is an edit of Spread Move mod that only gives 1 order to each unit instead of all of them as a queue.

More specifically, once you give a group of units a queue of move orders and press the hotkey, the mod cycles thru all orders in queue and for each order selects the closest unit to it, which it then gives that closest unit as its first move order, deleting the rest of move orders for that unit. If there are more units than orders, it repeats this until all units have a first order by restarting from first order in queue again, evenly distributing all units among all queued orders. If there are more orders than units, only the orders up to unit count get given to units as first order and the rest of them get deleted (because there are no units left without a first order).

Another thing is if there are orders that arent move orders queued before move order queue, only the last queue of move orders gets effected (ignoring all non-move orders and all move orders before those non-move orders), allowing you to chain disperse move with other non-move orders in queue. Some orders like reclaim and attack move wont work with it tho and will be deleted.

You can find it in vault under name "Disperse Move".

idk how to credit but it is obviously based on MrNukealizer's Spread Move (and is literally few lines of its code changed) and whatever that was based on (I think split attack).

maybe this picture explains it easier

yes it is not possible to remove unit controls or "translating orders time" as factor from RTS, it being a real time game, but it is possible to reduce its impact by improving the controls, so while you can have 2 players with same knowledge and the one with better apm wins, you should minimize the impact of whose apm is better to point where it matters as strongly as it can whose game knowledge is better and it is as irrelevant as it can be whose apm is better, so you can easily have 2 people with apm difference but the one with worse apm wins anyway because they have better game knowledge

I know whoever is not using ui mods is at disadvantage vs those that do and I think some ui mods should therefore be integrated into base game so everyone has access to those same better controls and thus no one is at disadvantage, however some UI mods are subjective and obviously shouldnt be forced onto those that dont want to use them (like ecomanager)

and it isnt about appeal to authority, it is about showing you what the game was, compared to others at the time and what it was set out to do (improve controls player has over units), and using examples of controls you dont even think are overpowered (because they were in the game from start and not future UI mods) being basically the same thing as what UI mods allow you to do (better controls that dont change units' abilities)

it would take gas powered games coming back and getting the supreme commander IP back, then integrating the mod into the game themselves

this game is forged alliance, not nomads, it should never be mandatory to have them in the game which is what you are asking for, you can already play with the mod if you want, why do you want to force everyone else to have to?

please don't nerf nukes into just another normal explosion but slightly bigger, this is the only game I know of that has them properly powerful and not some minor inconvenience, when a nuke lands, it should destroy everything in the area, it is a... nuke

way more stressful and attention demanding, micro heavy in beginning with all the manual reclaiming and raiding/reacting to, and having to memorize and flawlessly execute build orders for all the maps or lose before it even started

teamgames provide stability for game to get played to its fuller potential unless you are a pro that can do all of this solo while having fun doing it, it kind of seems you need to have "minimum mastery over the game" to be able to enjoy 1v1, and it seems pretty high

or maybe I'm just bad at the game, that's more likely it

I think you could change them so they have air icon with engineer symbol in it maybe (because theyre a flying unit after all)

what if they could only get either mass or energy generation but not both at same time, and if they get mass generation they drain energy while its on like a massfab, basically splitting ras upgrade into only mass or only energy

this is the usual situation of bad controls, and with the expected usual excuse of "but there is nothing better to do ingame so its ok" from pros, imo if there is nothing better to do in the game at start than manually clicking rocks, then that's the game itself being bad in beginning in general, outsourcing gameplay to osu simulator doesn't fix the early gameplay, it just makes it annoying to those that don't enjoy clickspamming miningame and gives advantage to those who are good at it (but not necessarily at the game itself) over them, and like said in the op, additional advantage to those who memorized the map reclaim positions and optimal reclaim paths to then execute at start of the game like a recital of memorized text paragraph, there is zero excuse for bad controls that manual reclaim is

anyways for the solution, is it possible to get engineers to retarget reclaim beam automatically (from attack move) as fast as they do when given reclaim order queue manually? ik it would likely ruin the sim speed but it would close the gap between the 2 a bit without any major changes, at least make the engineer consider the next reclaim target while it is reclaiming the current target so it can retarget as soon as it is done without standing there and looking around for almost a full second between auto-reclaims while the manually queued one speedruns the reclaim for no apparent reason

the only thing worth using money for would be to get the IP back and hire developers to rewrite the engine without touching anything else (impossible task in itself), but that would need FAF budget to be in dozens of millions

I don't think there is anything else worth using money for other than keeping the servers and services (like this forum) running

about promoting FAF, everyone on steam forums seems to get triggered whenever FAF is mentioned unless they specifically asked about it, as do some people on supcom reddits, so idk if it would not backfire to go on an advertisement campaign instead of attracting new players

things that matter, improving performance, increasing modding capabilities, reducing friction for joining (recently someone complained they don't use FAF because it is a hassle to set up), derp's new player tutorial system meme, etc all don't seem to cost money to do, but only voluntary effort, adding money to "official" people to do stuff would be toxic to people who already do it for free, and afaik doing things for free is where 99% of FAF development comes from in first place

@morax said in What would make ladder less stressful, intense, or scary?:

@mach said in What would make ladder less stressful, intense, or scary?:

imo only mapgen ladder would be close to "fixing" it because it removes the map knowledge advantage, but it will always be "scarier" than other modes because 1v1 of any kind is hard

This would make me stop playing 100% because after awhile you realize Map Gen is not all that random and it becomes business as usual.

Not to mention a lot of the biomes are really awful to look at…

sounds like mapgen just needs to be improved more, the concept behind it is sound itself

The previous hq models were a bit excessive in size in my opinion, but the new ones seem too far into the opposite. Perhaps the best would be to keep the normal model for support factories and just add something obvious but not as over the top as it was to the hqs.

Another possible solution is to use the same model but add a obvious different texture to hq to differentiate the 2.

Not trying to change anyone's mind, just state my own take on the topic properly.

I thought game design is about making meaningful decisions and not picking the most optimal use of apm on menial tasks. Still trying to figure out what is "fun" in manual reclaim.

Also on topic but forgot to say, changing the gun range will also effect things like dealing with t1 pd, mobile arty, aurora, experimentals and telesnipes.

@ftxcommando said in Smol ACU Adjustment:

Saying a “strategy” is involved presupposes a choice is being made. That choice is between manual and auto-oc. Saying a unit should attack automatically (therefore arguing manual might as well as be removed) actively removes the largest strategic element of OC.

It removes """"strategic"""" element of choosing between "microing ACU to have it act at baseline value" and "playing the rest of the game", thus allowing you to freely play the rest of the game where you can utilize real strategy involving units/buildings/economy/intel instead of looking at 1 unit constantly so it doesn't trip over a rock, because with auto-oc you know your ACU isn't going to "forget it has OC unless you choose to sacrifice playing the rest of the game for manually shooting its oc every second", it may still be better OCing manually (which it already is, that you keep failing to remember with your "may as well remove manual", which I never even hinted) but at least it will still use OC at all, like every other unit uses all its weapons at all.

To ad absurdum your post as well, tanks shooting their guns automatically also actively removes the strategic element of manually telling tanks to shoot every individual shot.

You could say having option to micro something to have far greater effect than on its own in fact removes strategic options from the game because now you have to manually do said micro as enemy, who does, will otherwise have physically better units than your own. Is strategy to you merely "who can micro more units at same time and thus have same units but physically stronger"? I prefer it being about coming up with a better plan than the enemy and then having the units do it as I ordered them to. It's supreme commander, not supreme micromanager.

Also your original post was about making t2 get used more in game, which according to you is due to specifically auto-oc and nothing else, have you still not considered buffing t2 in some other way to make that happen instead of nerfing ACU's "anti-t2 superpowers" so they "only exist if and only if you are manually shooting it"?

Obligatory reminder that this same thing already and still exists with battleships groundfiring submarines, where they also gain a schrodinger weapon, as it only exists while you are looking (manually telling them to groundfire) and never otherwise.

my take is units should attack things on their own instead of having to be told manually to do so for each shot, yes

last I checked this was a strategy game

idk why it is even a consideration to make something act worse even for "balance", there is already enough bad unit behavior without making additional things work worse, they should only improve and be balanced around their proper behavior

also don't understand why or how you are supposed to make things be used differently based on rating, as if rating is some kind of physical parameter that can consistently or at all effect whether a unit functions or not

basically to make auto OC worse than manual OC you have to either make it act stupid (like mazor joked and I obviously disagree with such change) or have it physically a different and weaker weapon (makes no sense but at least the controls are intact, however now you have a weapon that only exists while you are manually using it (in an rts game)), and it already is better to manually OC if you can spare apm as you can pick better targets or wait a second for units to clump up instead of spamming it off-cooldown and hit less units with it, the only advantage auto OC has is it can shoot without stopping the ACU movement and other orders and ofc, without player babysitting the ACU and instead playing the game

hm never saw that happen, only bug with selections I notice is that when you select many units/buildings at same time with shift drag, pause button is grayed out forcing you to deselect random units until it appears, but idk if it is ui party related or general

I noticed the ACU selection bug but it is minor, also I think you can force select acu by holding shift while selecting it?

idk what second bug means though so maybe it didn't happen to me