Unit Heirarchy

daikyu · Post by **daikyu** » Apr 19 2008

Old time SR 2010 player here. One of the drawbacks of the original game was in the larger scenarios managing the masses of units involved in a conflict.

Way back when there was a lot of discussion about how to group units together in a logical way and control the groups fairly easily. What steps have been taken to make this possible in SR 2020?

Keep up the good work gents. It is nice to see a good product being made outside of the "major studio" system.

Post by **Balthagor** » Apr 20 2008

if you search the forum there are a few discussions of hierarchy going on, the latest/biggest one is here

Feltan · Post by **Feltan** » Apr 20 2008

Chris,

I think the operative question posed was, "What steps have been taken to make this possible in SR 2020?"

The SR2020 product has to be pretty stable by now, can you spill some beans and tell us what is being done in this area?

Regards,
Feltan

d0mbo · Post by **d0mbo** » Apr 21 2008

*subscribes to this thread.

Curious what the answer is.

Draken · Post by **Draken** » Apr 21 2008

Tagged and bumped

Post by **George Geczy** » Apr 22 2008

This is obviously a topic that has received a LOT of discussion on the dev team, starting even during SR2010 development.

We had a lot of ideas tossed around, but for one reason or another most of them were just too ambitious, complicated, or flawed (or some combination).

I know people won't be thrilled to hear this, but there are no major innovations in unit hierarchy in SR2020. There are some tweaks that we've put in here and there, for example we've reduced the use of Garrison infantry by making Garrisons an element of cities and industrial/military complexes, and not separate units when they are idle. The overall production balance of the map has also been reduced (less production slots and more disincentives to build a lot of them). This is actually more realistic when considering how much of an active force modern armies such as the US can truly put in the field at one time.

There are also other small elements that we've put in to help in this regard, but there is no single hierarchy miracle.

-- George.

d0mbo · Post by **d0mbo** » Apr 22 2008

I know people won't be thrilled to hear this, but there are no major innovations in unit hierarchy in SR2020

Indeed. And if i am correct, i read somewhere that naming units is also not possible anymore. Tedious organising ahead :s

Oh well.... too early to judge right now, let's wait for SR2020 first !

Feltan · Post by **Feltan** » Apr 22 2008

How very disappointing.

Regards,
Feltan

Draken · Post by **Draken** » Apr 22 2008

Very disappointing inded...

- No unit renaming
- No hierarchy

At least it seems that the AI will built less units, hopefully it will be more intelligent using them.

I'll wait for the demo to see how smart is the AI... So far that's the only factor that could still save SR202o for me...

Post by **George Geczy** » Apr 22 2008

Sometimes we do have to be careful about hoping for a cure that is more troublesome than the disease... as a general view, the big Unit Hierarchy ideas we reviewed were often either too complex (replacing one type of micro management with another), or too generalized/inflexible (resulting in restricting what the player was able to do).

As I say, we've made some smaller tweaks to help in this area, and there are also a few more incremental ideas we're playing with in our final few weeks of development.

-- George.

tkobo · Post by **tkobo** » Apr 22 2008

Bummer, i was really hoping at least the "container" idea for units was gonna be used.

Where you could create a locked group of units by simply putting them into an empty container that than acted as a single unit,composed of 7 parts.

Much like your doing with facility complexs now.

SGTscuba · Post by **SGTscuba** » Apr 22 2008

i thought they were already going to do that?

tkobo · Post by **tkobo** » Apr 22 2008

Not sure what you mean Scuba,they are doing it for facilities.

AND you can make "groups" in sr2010, but only like 10, and they dont always behave as one like they should.

They can sperate due to movement paths and movement speeds for instance.

BUT the idea that came up some time ago, was allow a new unit type that was bascially an empty box that you could put units into.
WITH all units put into said empty box acting ,orders wise, as one unit.

So that if you ordered the box to move to a location,it would move all units in it as one unit following the same path (set by the most restricted unit)and at one speed (set by the slowest unit).

While this was hardly everything people were asking for, i personally felt it was a near perfect step in the direction people wanted without making things overly compliacted.

AND although BG never said, "we'll do this" i really hoped they had decided for it and were just being silent on it.

SGTscuba · Post by **SGTscuba** » Apr 22 2008

Yes i did read the heirarchy topic and i do like your ideas but i dont think they will make it into it this time, UNLESS they are hiding something from us! Mind you everyone is hiding something from someone nowadays(says my history teacher)

Feltan · Post by **Feltan** » Apr 22 2008

tkobo wrote: ...AND although BG never said, "we'll do this" i really hoped they had decided for it and were just being silent on it.

Ditto. The "empty box" or "rubberband" concepts, either or, were sort of my base expectations for functionality in this area.

Absent this functionality, and without the ability to name units, SR2020 may well fall off my "must have" list for 2008. At a minimum, I will try the demo first -- something I normally don't do. I just don't see a lot of enjoyment from trying to manage scads of independent battalions.

Regards,
Feltan