@stormlantern my thought process was that I only want to play 1v1 because I don't want to subject my horrible play to a potential teammate 
But ya, I figured clicking the 1v1 box was enough. The brown box says "PLAY FORGED ALLIANCE FOREVER", which I guess is kind of vague. It's a big enough box that it could theoretically say "Choose game type below and click here to search for game..." or something similar.
My apologies. I just figured out the reason I wasn't getting games was that I wasn't also clicking the brown "PLAY FAF" button (or whatever it says) in addition to the blue 1v1 button. There's a case to be made that I'm just stupid and didn't understand how it works, but also, I'm not really that stupid and maybe it needs to be made a little clearer how it works. Thank you all.
@sladow-noob I'm in Toronto. I just tried turning on the Matchmaker this morning. I understand that there are times of the day that are more ideal than others to find games, and now might not be one of those times. But I'm sitting here looking at the "IN QUEUE" number go up to 5 or 6 at times, so obviously someone is playing. Again, I'm not suggesting that the Matchmaker is unfairly keeping me from playing. What I'm suggesting is that one of the things that causes ME to stay away from the game at times is the frustration due to lack of success, so anyone who is an appropriate opponent for my rating, as judged by the Matchmaker, is possibly also frustrated enough to not bother playing. I understand that a similar problem of high-rated players also finding it hard to be matched up also exists - in that case, I'm sure those players would agree that an AI that is a worthy opponent for a +2000 rated player doesn't currently exist, so the discussion on whether AI should be allowed in rated games in that context is moot. But as you suggest, M27 certainly should be a worthy opponent for anyone with a sub-zero rating, and could function as a way to get ratings up enough to generate some attention from the Matchmaker. Just my two cents, in the context of a discussion about "player retention".
@mostlostnoob I started using JIP's "Hover Over Deposits" and it does exactly what I want, and I'm not experiencing any performance issues as far as I can tell. Thank you...
Here's a current frustration of mine, and a suggestion for a solution...
I'm not very good at this game, partly because I'm not particularly good at video games in general, and because I developed bad habits specifically with SupCom, as I wasn't aware of FAF, only played Vanilla, and got addicted to being able to pause the game and treat it like a turn-based game. I have at various times forced myself to play against human opponents but quickly got consistently beaten by low ranked players, resulting in a sub-zero rating and enough frustration to cause me to put the game down many times.
Recently I've started playing again, and while I don't think I'll ever be able to play according to the widely-agreed upon META, I have changed a few things that I do so that I can play more strategically... so that I can focus more on growth of my economy, my production, and my tech level, and focus less on where my tanks are. I've been playing against DilliDalli and M27 and have developed a way of playing that has resulted in more success than I've ever had against those AIs, and that I've developed muscle memory for, to the point where I no longer need to pause the game in the first couple of minutes to keep up with the requirements of setting things up properly. I feel as though I have a better understanding of the true nature of the game and what is required in order to improve and be more successful, and now I would like to start playing human opponents again.
Problem is, that I've been sitting here waiting for the Matchmaker to give me a game for the last 3 hours. This isn't a fault of the Matchmaker - this is the fault of my -45 1v1 rating. People who have been as bad as me usually don't stick around for continued punishment and frustration, and rightly so, players who are better than me don't want to waste their time playing someone with a -45 rating.
This isn't a complaint about the Matchmaker - I am happy to keep waiting for a game - but I do have a suggestion that might help people in my situation - allow AI to be an opponent for very low rated players so they have a chance to demonstrate that they have improved. I won't be able to reliably get matched unless my rating increases, and I can't increase my rating without getting matched. There should be some sort of "release valve" at the bottom of the 1v1 ladder to help returning players who feel they have improved to resurrect their ratings, and maybe one of the better AI mods could serve as this release valve.
@indexlibrorum right, ok... I'll try and find the mod then... thank you...
Another question.
It used to automatically build preview a mass extractor if I hovered over an empty mass point. I seem to recall this being an integrated feature, not a mod, but I can't find the option anywhere... any help?
Right. I was testing Hotbuild Overhaul when it started happening. Disabled the mod, and now the game works. Sorry, I should have tried that.
So next question is where do I find this file and where do I put it? When it says "/mods/umt/modules/", is that a folder, like something I can find in Windows Explorer? Windows puts application files in 800 different folders these days.
The other day I opened the FAF Client and an error message popped up saying something about my mods and replays folder needed to be changed from being on OneDrive. I tried to copy whatever was in the mods and replays folder that was in OneDrive to somewhere on my local harddrive and set the client to use the folder on the local drive, but I guess I didn't do it right because all the mods I was using disappeared. No big deal, a lot of them I wasn't even using, so I've been trying to reload the mods I have been using so I can just get back to playing again.
I don't know if one thing is related to another, but today as I was testing to see if I got the right mods again and they are functioning properly, whenever I try and launch a game, after the loading screen I get nothing but a black screen with the mouse cursor. There's not even a menu button so I can exit the game, I have to CTRL-ALT-DELETE and kill the application in Task Manager.
I figured that maybe there was something wrong with the SupCom installation so I went to Steam, uninstalled and reinstalled SupCom. No change.
I uploaded my most recent game log, if it helps.
@jip said in Developers Iteration IV of 2023:
Other note worthy changes
Context based templates
- #5543 Add the ability to use the context of the build preview
It is best shown visually. See the pull request for a video. With this feature you can create templates that use the build preview as its context. As an example;
- imagine you have a radar as a build preview. If you hit tab (the hotkey to trigger the context based templates) then it turns into a radar that capped with power generators
- imagine you have a tech 3 air factory as a build preview. If you hit tab then it turns into a chunk of air grid
Can someone please explain how I get this to work?
First off, I have "FAF Develop" selected as Game Type in the Create Game dialog.
Second, the feature as mentioned in "Developers Iteration III" does work - if I have, say, a radar already built or being built (not just queued) and I hover my mouse over it and press TAB (which is set to "Orders - Mouse Context > Cycle Templates"), a ring of 4 pgens will appear as a build preview.
I cannot however, get the behavior as described above. If I select an engineer, click on T1 Radar, and hit TAB, it only says "No templates available". At first I thought that I needed to create a template myself of the radar ringed by pgens, but even after creating that template, it still doesn't work.
Thanks in advance for any advice.
@sladow-noob fair points. I'll be the first to admit that some of the things that I do are because I don't know any better. It's simply that I know I don't Intel enough, and I'm trying to make more use of hotkeys to help me do stuff that I'm not doing enough. I have a hotkey for air scouts, and it helps me to use them in a purposeful way instead of just spamming them on a unchanging patrol route like I used to. I figured a similar hotkey for land scouts would do the same, but one thing that has been hard for me to learn is that certain units become irrelevant very quickly. I often include land scouts in my unit comp to make use of the T1 arti's range beyond its own vision, and I figured since they were on the field, if I had a hotkey maybe I could use them to scout more than I am currently. But maybe I should consider the idea that my efforts are better spent on air scouts. Thank you.
If "Select nearest idle air scout" is useful enough to be a possible key binding, why not land scouts?
@sladow-noob I'll reiterate that the biggest problem in my attempts to improve is ME. I'm not here to complain about trainers, but this is a discussion on player retention, and my own experience is that while the resources to improve are out there (various guides people have written, and trainers that graciously donate their time), it's been my experience that it's hard to know what to prioritize, so not only is playing frustrating to me because I need to improve, but my attempts to improve are frustrating because there's so much to improve and I don't know where to start. And so it becomes less of a discussion about who's advice is more valid (I'm certain it's mostly all valid), and more of a discussion of regardless of what's being taught, what's the best way of teaching it? The person with the best advice might not have the best way of disseminating that advice. And so my position in this discussion about player retention is that somewhere in this somewhat diverse community there might be someone who has some real-world experience in the field of training and education and can maybe help to organize all the resources available into some sort of clear path for players of various levels to improve. This person or this group of people don't need to be high-ranked players because they're not the ones creating the advice, they're just organizing the concepts created by others so that it's more educational to more players, just like high-school chemistry teachers don't make scientific discoveries themselves, they just organize the information created by others into an effective tool for learning chemistry. It's a matter of approach to training, not the advice itself.
@arma473 I'm actually a big fan of your guide. It has helped a lot. My main problem is that I just don't have enough time to commit things to muscle memory, and I when I do play, I don't do the kind of things that are going to help me get better because I get overwhelmed and frustrated. There is no lack of quality advice from a plethora of sources, I just think it could be curated better in tutorial form within the game. I think the tutorials are the one area where the FAF experience comes up short. I say that with the humble acknowledgement that it can't be easy to make a tutorial in the first place, and that in a community driven volunteer project such as FAF, the people giving their time to build the tutorials are ultimately going to prioritize the topics they want, and not the ones I want. I just think, if we're talking about player retention, to me the tutorials seem like the biggest lost opportunity.
@sylph_ said in Why would you have left FAF?:
- with the UI (keybinding with commands like : "copy orders" or "select nearest onscreen idle MEX' -> 'upgrade structure" - are really good for building bases or scaling economy without spending much attention at crucial moments, not to mention the (far) more well-documented 'spread move' and 'set target priority' commands),
- outside of a match (factory queue templates - so that pressing tab-leftclick makes a new factory spam a big, versatile combat army),
- that don't require a large mental stack during a match (easy-to-remember build orders like: factory, 2power, 2MEX, 2power, 2MEX, 2power, factory - (a palindrome!) done before anything happens), and
- habits that can make complicated-sounding issues really simple (like how I have 'select idle engineer' bound to tilde, so I can just spam "tilde -> alt+rightclick" around the map to sort out reclaim in seconds.)
I think what I'm saying is that there should be at least some tutorials that focus on this kind of stuff in addition to build orders and economics and tactics. I find APM to be my most scarce resource, and things like this would help me to just play faster. And yes, this info is out there for anybody to use, but it would really help if those who have more experience with this kind of stuff can curate a training regime to help guide lower-rated on how to use the key commands and templates properly and efficiently. I already know that I don't use either as much as I should, but I wish I knew how others were using them so that I don't waste my time using them incorrectly.
@Nex it was my experience that if I expressed any kind of genuine interest in improving (I wrote a review of one of my games) that I was immediately referred to a couple of high-rated players (trainers?), with the expectation that I would play 6+ hours a day with them to get my rating up to 1900+. It only seems ridiculous to me because my rating is was and is currently below zero, not because I don't understand the motivation of high-rated players to seek out and train literally anyone with the potential to play at that level. They want more players at their level so they can play more games. I get it. I'm not offended by it. It did scare me away a little bit.
I use music analogies a lot because it's a world I'm familiar with. Music can happen anywhere. FAF only happens on FAF. Unlike music, if you FAF at all, you end up interacting with FAF "rock stars", because there's only one place to FAF, and they're here and you're here. 99.9% of musicians that I've met and/or played with are not rock stars, but I've met a couple. They're not interested in raising the general level of musicianship. They're interested in meeting the 0.1% of musicians who have the potential to be rock stars. As a consequence, they are only useful sources of advice for those 0.1% of musicians. Worse than that, the advice they do give to the other 99.9% is actually harmful in most cases.
The training ideology here at FAF seems to be that the only people qualified to train are those rated 2k+. I think that's a consequence of FAF existing in a compressed space, where everybody is forced to exist regardless of skill. What might be valuable advice to a sub-500 player from a 500+ player is often quickly shot down by 2k+ players. The 2k+ players are not wrong, but the 500+ player isn't wrong that his advice will help the sub-500 player, and get him to the point where he can even understand the advice from the 2k+ players. Nothing that the 2k+ players ever say to me is particularly useful, and it is often the case that the advice they give actually makes me play worse. That's not because they're wrong; it's because I'm not yet at the level that I can see and understand their advice. What I need is more advice from 500+ rated players, just like there's no point in me taking guitar lessons from Paul Gilbert until I've taken a bunch of lessons from guys who are only slightly better than me. I don't think there's anything wrong with the advice that 2k+ players have to offer, I just think that they need to accept that their advice isn't productive to players of every skill level, and they need to make room for the idea that lower-rated players can benefit from advice from sub-2k players that might not fit the current state of the META. Training shouldn't come from only 2k+ rated players. In no other endeavor is training and education handled solely by the "rock stars" of that endeavor.
I'm not in any kind of position to argue with the validity of this piece of advice or that piece of advice, but I've been a musician a long time, and I've given and taken lessons, and I can say with some authority that the training culture of FAF is not sustainable. Even if the goal is to spam 2k+ players, in the long run, this is not how to do it. The idea that learning something "wrong" is harmful, or at best a waste of time, is patently incorrect. There's value in learning what doesn't work. Everybody in a position to tell the rest of us what works only found that out by trying a zillion things that didn't work. Let the rest of us have that same experience.
@nex said in Mod suggestion... Reclaim counters...:
I have actually heard people say that, but more as a way to "break down" the game to something simpler, because reclaim is often placed on maps to enable faster early scaling, so it's just natural that during the game when you pick up that reclaim the best way to use it is to improve your eco.
And when you win fights and thus get the reclaim from them, your opponent will need time to recover and build up enough units to push you back.
So unless you can win with the reclaimed mass it's often better to put it into eco since you now have a bit more breathing room till your opponent recovers and you will win in the long run instead of risking to throw your advantage away.
It's interesting that I just posted in the thread about player retention being difficult because it seems that there is no room for marginal improvement of low-rated players, and this rather obvious concept of using reclaim to build eco being dismissed as being outright nonsense. If this concept doesn't hold water in the 2k+ world, I'm not in a position to argue with that. But it's a basic concept that might help sub-500 rated players start to approach 500+. I'm horrible and eco is a big problem for me and spending reclaim to build my eco makes a lot of sense to me, and I think some indication of how I'm doing on that front would be helpful. That's all I'm saying.