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?

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?

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)

if anyone needs it, I found "ranges" mod works exactly like additional camera stuff and can render all ranges, you need to enable other ranges in minimap though, it is a bit convoluted

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

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

@cunnismeta said in What would it take for Nomads to be FAF's 5th Faction?:

does vanilla supcom truly reference seraphim repeatedly? would be insanely cool if the cinematic videos could be played directly though the FAF client at any point. seem to be in some weird format... the videos play through VLC... with no audio...

original supcom intro mentions seraphim as origin for aeon, aeon intro also mentions them, naturally, in the story itself seraphim artifacts are a plot point in cybran's second mission and exist as real objects in game, brackman himself talks about them in some cutscenes, I think QAI does as well, idk how many other times they may be mentioned in story cutscenes

in "secret" outro of each faction shows seraphim arriving on Earth in different ways even if for few seconds, example of UEF, and cybran, (for some reason it is very hard to find an isolated video of those on youtube)

so yes seraphim were very canon from beginning

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

it is powerful for wrong reasons -> removes faction diversity because every player gets access to every faction's unique unit, making them ironically, not unique

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

since everyone else is talking about build orders

the problem with build orders is if your build order isn't as good as your opponents, which is different on every specific map (oh you missed 1 reclaim wreck here, you didn't take this path but a longer one, you should have sent transport here earlier, etc etc), you will not be starting on even ground and will be at a disadvantage from beginning and for the rest of the game in a constant uphill battle, and next game you will get a different map with different optimal build order that you will fail in a different way for same result

so you have to get past (master) build orders to even start playing the game itself, which are specific to each map, maybe it is more like "openings" in general rather than build orders that I mean, it is not just about what buildings you build but everything else you do in beginning, such as the path your engies take and what/whether they reclaim in between, which definitely isn't the same on every map

all the "pro" players that are saying otherwise are simply too good to notice what they even do in beginning of the game because it is second nature to them and just seems "normal", meanwhile to those that don't it is like their opponent starts better off than them and they have to play catch up instead of the game, all because they didn't memorize what to do in beginning of this specific map

in mapgen (didn't play yet so idk) it seems this is removed because no one knows where mexes or reclaim will be to have a predefined optimal opening for the specific map (because it never existed before) to gain immediate advantage over someone who doesn't, they both have to figure it out on the fly instead of one of them going "ok I should take this path with this engi, don't forget to send a raid to here, no one expects it, this path with this engi, reclaim these wrecks in between..." while other goes "what even is this map, I better expand here, oh wait there were wrecks in other direction, where did those labs come from?..."

the "real life lore" is called physics and this game is based on them, what you are saying here is that broken physics are fine because it takes micro to abuse them properly (because even from start the game itself wasnt designed for battleships to be able to shoot at underwater units, this just proves the brokenness of this mechanic further as there isnt even a control to tell your units to do something like this and you have to work around to get it to happen by using groundfire), unlike artillery hitting air units (which even has some sense sometimes unlike this), this takes a lot less skill to do

yes it works balance wise, but thats like fixing a hole in a ship by blowing another hole on opposite side, its not a ship anymore and sinks faster, the solution like I said is to stop fooling yourself into thinking this is balanced and instead fix the broken mechanic first and then nerf underwater units so they are balanced without it, currently they arent OP because of a broken mechanic, without which they would be OP and then you nerf them, and then you get a balanced game without using nonsensical mechanics like this to seesaw the broken units

I guess its once again up to whether the "micro pros" on balance team can stand their skills in fighting the controls be turned obsolete by fixing the controls instead, something which seems to stall this game for a while now

@ftxcommando like I said idk about mapgen because I didn't play it yet, it just seems less predefined than static maps that players played thousands of times over and already know exactly what each unit should be doing for first few minutes down to individual reclaim and move orders in queue for each, than when they play a map that never existed before where they follow some more general sequence of actions

the point is that you need to know all this "overhead" startup stuff in ladder just to start the game on even ground as the players that already know it, which is different on every map that is randomly picked even if ever so slightly, or you will be behind your opponent from start which only escalates farther into the match, and like I said, maybe build order is not the term for it but that doesn't make it not exist or irrelevant

I should say I also disagree with loyalists not being able to deflect billy, because it is a funny interaction and because it makes sense, and I never saw it happen before to see why it would be a necessary change, after all all it does is make uef player check if there are any loyalists around before sending a billy

with this change (and air crash nerf) we are getting more and more towards everything being "sterile" and unable to do anything outside of their carefully designed bubble of effect on the game, when that is one of things that makes supcom fun - how many different things can happen that still make sense

someone else said, billy should get a buff instead of loyalists getting nerf if there is a problem, I never see anyone using bill at all anyways

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

in original supreme commander, SAMs used to rapid fire aa missiles without pausing, like t1 pd shoots, if rate of fire is increased but individual damage reduced, the weapon becomes stronger vs multiple weak enemies rather than fewer stronger ones, such as asf (low individual hp) vs gunships and strats (high individual hp)

this would also make units that are just passing through SAM range take less damage in total since it is more damage-over-time than alpha now