My Idea Box

[Golkombie]

Here is a collection of my ideas. All examples are from the Roman faction. Units refer to Buildings and Soldiers. That's really it.

Key Bindings for Army, Buildings, and Research to be produced.
Have each unit be bounded to a key. I'm thinking of an unorthodox method.
First, select a unit that can produce Army, Buildings, or Research.
Use the following key binding to select units. I will use the Training Field as an example.
zxc for the first three units. ex: Spearman(z), Archer(x), Guard(c)
Shift + ZXC for the second three units. ex: Swordsman(Z), Improved Training Field(X)
If MG adds a production tab that includes more than 6 units, then I suggest: Ctrl + ZXC for the last three units.
This applies to any unit that can produce/research/build.

Uniform Select for a Type of Building.
Have multiple buildings of the same type be selected and able to be put under a single hotkey. 10 Training Fields under 1 Hotkeys rather than 10 Training Fields over 10 Hotkeys.
This will allow us to produce armies much faster and also allows us to organize units much easier.

Infinite Resource Production Facilities
Expensive/Time Consuming buildings that produces resources very slowly.
Mineral Mine - A building that produces Stone and Gold. It requires workers to be operated and can hold twenty workers. Each worker produces 1 gold + 1 stone per second. Workers ---> Miners
Market - A building that produces Wood. It requires workers to be operated and can hold fifteen workers. Each worker produces 1 wood per second.
Workers --> Merchants

Tier Flattening
All buildings lose their tech requirements, except for defensive buildings, since none of the later tiers units are over powered. In addition, there is no point to restricting players from choosing their preferred tech path.

Militia
All workers should be able to equip weapons and fight back. Perhaps some factions require research to become a militia. Furthermore, militia strength between factions should vary depending on how weak they are early game. Ex: A worker converts to a militia in 10 seconds. It gains 100 health, 10 armor, and 100 damage. It costs 10 seconds to return the militia to a worker. This allows workers to defend against early rushes.

[-Archmage-]

Key bindings
Sounds interesting, but I don't think to many changes would be needed if units were to have a little more autonomy and act like actual soldiers would. Reducing the amount of useless clicks would allow for more actual gameplay and is certainly a complimentary approach to adding more key bindings. I'm speaking of many of the unit AI features GAE had with auto repair, auto return, and more.

Uniform Selection
I think this should happen automatically, buildings in the order they are built. Then production could happen at a much more rapid pace, in keeping with how the AI is able to operate.

Resource Buildings
Would love this. Perhaps have upgrades affect the speed as well, and have unit manning optional.

Militia
This might be more common in factions if we had AI tags for units. Non-combatant(cow), defender(militia units), military(guard), hero(General). AI tags or some similar approach would stop the AI from using these units so poorly.

[Golkombie]

Can you explain more in depth about you meant about Uniform Selection?
What I meant is that a player should be able to put multiple buildings of the same type under a single hotkey, so we he/she can multiple units at the same time from that set of buildings without cycling through multiple hotkeys.

This is my interpretation of your Uniform Selection. A player builds a bunch of production facilities. The first production facility would be put under a hotkey automatically. The next type of production facility would be put under the next hotkey automatically. Under this system, all buildings of the same type will be put automatically under the same hotkey regardless if the player is going to build more of the same type of buildings.

I can gather from this that you are a C & C or similar style of player. I'm a Starcraft style of player. Maybe this will help us understand each other more.

I have a game example for Involuntary Actions. Search up Warzone 2100 and its unit commands. It has firing options, return to healer at X%, patrol, defend, and etc for every unit.

[-Archmage-]

I've never played any of those strategy games, I find that virtually every "strategy" game is heavy on micro, which has absolutely nothing to do with strategy. I desire to play a strategy game that is more like real strategy, where you focus on actual strategy instead of tedious clicking just to keep your units from killing themselves. I just find it ludicrous that as things currently stand, you have to tell the worker to fix the building that's about to fall on him. It's also always a bit awkward when a soldier is standing there and doesn't respond as archers he can't see slowly fill him with arrows. The units are pretty much brain-dead.

Sorry for my little rant. My uniform selection idea was just a quick thought, as hopefully a way to spend less time assigning shortcuts.

[titi]

Uniform selection is checked in now ( my son did it ) but the data does not use it yet.

https://github.com/MegaGlest/megaglest-source/commit/74ed3d73bed73bbf3c6586c3e182576a9954ae8e
https://docs.megaglest.org/XML/Unit#uniform-selection

Please test with your own data

Code: [Select]

...
<multi-selection value="false" />
<uniform-selection value="true" />
...

Update:

About Tier Flattening
This will not come, I prefer the non flat way as this makes the gameplay deeper

Fighting workers:
Will not come too. This is already possible and was discussed and decided a long time ago ( when the techtrees were made )

If you want "Tier Flattening" and "Fighting workers", I encourage you to take the original data and modify it in a mod.

[MoLAoS]

I've never played any of those strategy games, I find that virtually every "strategy" game is heavy on micro, which has absolutely nothing to do with strategy. I desire to play a strategy game that is more like real strategy, where you focus on actual strategy instead of tedious clicking just to keep your units from killing themselves. I just find it ludicrous that as things currently stand, you have to tell the worker to fix the building that's about to fall on him. It's also always a bit awkward when a soldier is standing there and doesn't respond as archers he can't see slowly fill him with arrows. The units are pretty much brain-dead.

Sorry for my little rant. My uniform selection idea was just a quick thought, as hopefully a way to spend less time assigning shortcuts.

Mandate had that, Majesty had that decades ago. Actually in Mandate you only controlled your sovereign unit directly. I had units doing relatively complex behaviors. Of course its basically just a priority list. Like a wizard would check if a blacksmith have a fantastic new stave available, check his gold inventory, check the cost, then decide whether to buy it. A smithy could build a forge for mithril and then check if any nearby smelters had mithril ingots, send a worker unit to buy them, and then make mithril plate armor. I had a bit of budget checking so that a smithy wouldn't blow a whole budget on mithril and not have any money to get iron for iron swords for poorer customers.

The major difficulty is primarily the quality of the AI. For instance my mages had a mana pool. They'd run through the spell list and find the lowest mana cost spell that did enough damage to kill an enemy or the lowest mana cost spell that did the most damage. Spells even had cooldown checks. But they couldn't behave in a much smarter way. For instance they couldn't calculate that the enemy was x distance away so we can pop spell Z, wait for the cooldown, then pop it again for maximum mana savings. They'd do the check for each attack individually. So they might end up casting spell X, then spell Y which combined cost 10 extra mana. I could have had them run a larger number of checks for various things but then you start worrying about performance issues.

[Golkombie]

I always wondered why the features of Mandate weren't adopted by Megaglest after Mandate shut down. There is a lot to learn from Mandate and we aren't exploiting it. I dare say that Megaglest is quite inferior in some aspects.

[MoLAoS]

Its a matter of time, different coding practices, and different code bases. For instance a lot of Mandate relies on GAE features which increases the amount of changes that would need to be done. Also nothing is Mandate is multiplayer safe. So you can't even just copy paste the code from GAE/Mandate over to MG. You'd have to copy the data structures and then rewrite a lot of the functions with multiplayer, cross platform, etc in mind.

[filux]

Uniform selection is checked in now ( my son did it ) but the data does not use it yet.

https://github.com/MegaGlest/megaglest-source/commit/74ed3d73bed73bbf3c6586c3e182576a9954ae8e
https://docs.megaglest.org/XML/Unit#uniform-selection

Please test with your own data

Code: [Select]

...
<multi-selection value="false" />
<uniform-selection value="true" />
...
...

I just tested this a bit and does not work yet. Someone forgot somewhere enable e.g. "double click" and "shift + click" when

Code: [Select]

<uniform-selection value="true" /> && <multi-selection value="false" />, classic square selection should still be unavailable as it is now.

(For now to check how it may work you also need to set multi-selection, which is wrong and interfere with units.)

[titi]

I tried to fix it. Is it ok/better now ?

[filux]

Yep, now really looks ok. For me personally the best part is related with the process of setting multiple meeting points at once .

btw. if anyone will look for this, to enable selection you need to have:

Code: [Select]

<multi-selection value="true" /> && <uniform-selection value="true" />

[titi]

So do we want to change the data to enable this in MG ?

[titi]

It looks like filux already updated the data of MG too, so it should be available in git now. 

If you want to try it, eihter checkout and build on yourself ( https://docs.megaglest.org/MG/Development )

Or try it from here ( you will need data and binary ) :
http://snapshots.megaglest.org/