Posts made by SlickNixon

I will offer to help. I have 1 (one) mod to my credit, but it involved a deep dive into the control group/selection set UI, and am now familiar enough with the lua structure to go into the weeds on a particular element and A. figure out what's going on/what makes it tick and B. help develop a solution that isn't a total piece of shit.

I also think updating old mods/having a solid set of common mod tools is super valuable to the community, both from a player standpoint and for having a set of mods to point to as examples for people who want to implement other things.

And you always get more done working as a team.

@arma473

Aside from recklessly modifying the game in a huge way (not terrible imho), this would be interesting to see with mexes as factories for little mass-storages-on-wheels that make their way to the base to get reclaimed (so keep the supply lines but ditch the engineer fetching).

Aircraft have limited ammo and need to rearm at air staging.

(I'd adjust costs as well but that's against the rules)

Background

Hoping what I need isn't locked away in the engine: can anyone help me find the logic for factories assigning control groups to the units they build? I've gotten a rough handle on the hotkey assignment (controlgroups.lua) and selection (selection.lua), but am missing that last piece.

If anyone can point me in the direction of the factory assist scripting that would also be neat.

What about increasing ASF min airspeed?

@black_wriggler

...

This is the exact use case that inspired me to write this post (+ transports). Fingers crossed on feasability.

@maudlin27 said in Assisting Factories Inherit Control Groups:

Re point 1 (inheriting control groups) I might have my factories go to different locations on the map so would want them to have different control groups.

Yes, definitely. For a factory producing units from its own queue, that factory's control group would take priority.

Example: Factory B is assisting Factory A. Factory A is set to ctrl group 1, and Factory B is set to ctrl group 2. Factory A is producing interceptors on loop with orders to patrol your front line. Any interceptors produced in an assisting capacity by Factory B will be assigned to ctrl group 1 and inherit the patrol order, but if you insert a transport into the queue of Factory B that transport will be assigned to group 2 and inherit whatever B's local orders are.

Ctrl group inheritance would only occur when one factory is assisting another, and then only when the assisting factory is constructing units from the master factory's build queue.

No reason not to toggle (aside from option bloat) but I'd argue how it functions now is mildly unintuitive.

Re point 2, if I select units and give them a control group I expect that to overwrite any existing groups. With your suggestion it sounds like that would be actively prevented.

Totally fair, toggle would be necessary in this case to prevent hidden functionality.

Right now when a factory is in a control group, any units built by said factory will inherit that group. You can then select the units in a group with one keybinding, and the factories in said group with another keybinding. This is neat, but I have some suggestions:

1. When a factory is assisting the build queue of another, the units built by the assisting factory don't inherit the control group of the assistee. When a factory is assisting another, have the assist-constructed units inherit the control group of the assisted factory, but have any "side project" units in the assister build queue inherit the the assisters control group (if there is one).

2. When a control group is set for units only (eg there are no factories selected when you press ctrl + num, in the default keybinding) don't strip the control group from the current factories. Likewise, if only factories are selected when the control group is set, don't strip group number from any units currently in the group.

3. (minor) Currently when you set the control group of a factory (even if it's to the same one, like when adding additional factories to an extant group) and a unit is being construction, that unit is stripped of its control group and doesn't inherit the new one. It would be nice if any unit under construction got the number of the new control group when the group of the factory is modified.

tl;dr:

• assisting factories inherit control group
• changing control groups of units doesn't affect factories in the group and vice versa
• when the control group of the factory is changed, any unit currently under construction gets the new group

@ftxcommando said in AOE against air:

Low asf = sams decide air = investing in air is pointless beyond 25 to snipe strats = make sams and nuke rush

I'm not buying the logic that nerfing a counter (ASF) to something (other air units) would make that something less useful.

@zeldafanboy said in AOE against air:

Well it seems that more people are comfortable with adding a new unit than I previously thought.

I think other options should be explored first. Any AA unit that's good against fast, tough, high altitude aircraft is going to be good against anything. T3 MAA has a bit of an "aftermarket" feel to it, as it is (at least at first, I got used to it).

If men with batons came to my house and said "you need to add an AA unit to FAF to counter ASF swarms or we're going to beat the bricks off you" I'd say the solution would be an anti-air nuke, small yield, built and launched like a tactical missile (with homing). Keeping the rate of fire low is the only way to prevent it from blowing out Czars/Soul Rippers, etc, AND it would potentially (depending on damage) give you the opportunity to retreat and repair heavier planes.

@ftxcommando said in AOE against air:

All these ASF nerf ideas are gonna result in is converting every current air slot in teamgames into a min 15 nuke rush slot.

This doesn't follow. ASF are a fundamentally defensive weapon; if they were nerfed (or disappeared entirely) you'd see gunships, strats, etc. (the sharp end of air) become that much harder to counter and that much more useful.

The time to refuel is the time it takes for units to fly to air staging and return to where they are needed, and the cost is the opportunity cost between having your units where you need them (with less time on target) and having them staged in the rear (but fully fueled). Superimposed on those decisions is the location of air staging facilities, which can be far from the action (safe, but longer sorties) or near (dangerous, but quicker turnaround time). All of which are macro elements.

the reality is that you can't make any good and fun gameplay with it anyway considering the game we are playing

Could you expand on this?

Also "air units crash when out of fuel" is a hard no from me. That information (fuel range and time) is presented to the player with low resolution, and heavily punishing for misjudging it turns what should be a tactical opportunity for your opponent into a banana peel.

I ran some rudimentary tests a few months ago and found the range and projectile speed of T3 MAA (UEF) to make it the best at point defense against strats, though they do struggle against massed lower tiers due to overkill. Looking at the stats for the Cybran t3 MAA I agree they are terrible and wonder what's going on there.

t2 MAA is also about 1/3 the cost of its static equivalent for a ~35% reduction in DPS, while t3 is slightly more expensive (and much slower to build) for an equivalent DPS reduction (though, as previously mentioned, it's capable of stopping strats from getting a bomb on target at a much greater radius--SAMs simply won't make their first hit until the bomber is almost directly over them).

I think some key questions are:

• How feasible should an all-ground AA defense be? (not very, I'm thinking, and it isn't now)
• If the answer to the above is no, what use cases should ground AA be effective (in terms of cost, maneuverability, and the value of what it's protecting)? Ex: T2 MAA, and T3 MAA especially, currently do a pretty decent job at fending off gunship attacks on massed units, and that seems like a role that should be preserved.

My suggestion: reducing ASF fuel from the current 16 minutes(!) to something much lower would require splitting up the deathball or risk getting caught flat footed when they all gas out at the same time.

tl;dr: fuel is an underutilized mechanic that could solve this problem without throwing AA out of balance