Greetings all. I'm an avid player of RTS games and have sought out an issue to the problem of units getting clumped up and the tediousness of attack command targeting. This problem persisted in Total Annihilation, Starcraft, Starcraft 2, Age of Empires and pretty much every RTS I've played with the except of TA Spring. I'd like you to have a quick look at this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRNxdbEx6v8 it shows dozens of examples of the ability to form custom line formations and custom line attack commands. I believe that this is far superior to say 'line formation', 'square formation' and 'triangle formation' options that some games have. Anyway, please look at the video the basics of Custom formations are displayed within a minute or so and more complicated demonstration are displayed later. I really hope you consider this for Planetary Annihilation.
nice idea, i think. also the ability to make a shiltrom oh units around another one could be nice to be implemented (see MIITW)
They mentioned that formations will be a thing in the livestream, they just don't have them fleshed out. Not sure if this means basic auto formations or manual formations.
Really early on, Googlefrog posted a bunch of nifty Spring features that he suggested be considered for PA, including much of the stuff you mention, such as custom formations. The devs seemed very interested, so I'm sure that they'll take this kind of thing into account.
Having movement formations like that in PA would be amazing. It seems like it would fit with their focus on reduction of micro as well since it massively reduces the clicks required to perform similar attack/movement patterns.
Oh, I wasn't aware of that sylvesterink, that's really good. I just wanted to make sure because in my eyes Custom formations makes playing an RTS 50% or so more fun.
Yeah, I've never seen that before either. That would be a really amazing feature! And the bombing area features later in that video would be awesome as well. (for both artillery and air bombing) I always prefer to setup defensive unit formation in half circles, and in every other rts have to do it by hand. (which is very tedious)
I'm an avid Spring player, and I think the line draw tool is a fantastic feature that allows for effortless, micro-free movements of units in tactical ways. The flexibility of this tool makes it superior than traditional pre-cut formations. Having moving lines and crescents of units on the battlefield makes things look great too: it really feel like a dynamic battle line. I'll be really disappointed if tedious micro is required to align units in formations that could otherwise be done seamlessly. Any info on this would be great!
I'm not sure how you would make say a box formation with that. It seems limited in utility to lines and circles. And maybe a wedge. What would be nice is if you could arrange units yourself, say tanks in front, healers in back, artillery even further, antiair evenly dispersed and whatnot. Maybe have some units on the flank. Complex formations not easily doable with a simple line drawing tool. Not sure how this would work, but a preliminary idea could be to have units of one kind behave differently from units of multiple kinds. If you have one type of unit selected they will have the standard supcom behaviour of moving in line, column, box, maybe even wedge or semicircle formations. But with mutliple types they would move exactly as they are arranged. So you could arrange them by type and move them as they are. No complex editor or complex commands, just a simple system. Or maybe just have a special formation-move command that has this behaviour. This would also allow you to use the standard formations if you wanted.
Not shown in the video is the CTRL command, which turns a line into a box area. I don't mind having to manually line up artillery behind the front liners. *Too* much simplification might take the tactics out of it and turn the game into the battle of the build orders
True that, and that's at least something I don't want to see. But cool formations while drawing curves wouldn't be bad at all, kind of like it how that youtube video presents it in spring. Never played that game though so can't say if it actually works in real combat.
What I mind is having to do that for every single move command and not just once for that group of units.
I was hoping they will incorporate more simplifications. PA, TA, SCFA has too massive of an army(multiple dozens of army, mind you) for a gamer to micro the units. Unlike Starcraft 2 and Warcraft 3 where the unit cap is friendly(as in very friggin small) and encourages micro.
