QWERTY Fleet Subdivision.

[godsvoice]

posted on December 20th, 2011, 8:07 pm

Last edited by godsvoice on December 20th, 2011, 9:04 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I am interested in knowing if there is a way and a desire in the community to subdivide fleets.

I would suggest having a fleet be able to split in to 5 or 6 smaller parts.

If I create fleet 1 with 30 ships. I can further subdivide it into 1Q, 1W, 1E, 1R, 1T. etc.

Placing ships into fleet 1, and into smaller groups within fleet one. By hitting 1 and Q simultaneously, I can organize parts of my fleets to do what I want. For instance:

Recently I have completely reorientated my build order. I used to do a massive Kvort and Kbeajq spam against AI. Now I do a much more concise Qawduj and Vorcha spam, or just straight vorcha spam.

So if I were to have say 9 Qawduj, and 9 Vorcha in fleet 1, I could subdivide this fleet in say six. With three x three Qawduj, and 3x3 Vorcha. I can single out different vorchas to attack multiple stations with their special, and use all three of the Qawduj specials if desired. It would ease up on the micro I think.

As it happens, I can manage this just with normal fleet numbers. I.e. I can make fleet one 3 qawduj, fleet 2 etc fleet 3 etc, fleet 4 3 vorcha, fleet 4 etc etc etc. And control it that way. But then I'm giving twice as many orders for fleet movement and fleet attacks.

I'd like all fleet movement orders to be done by clicking '1'. And fleet attack orders to be managed by hitting '1' + 'Q', then issuing attack order. Conversely, if I select a ship. Perhaps hitting Shift 1 Q places it in that subdivision.

I dunno, something to maul over if you like it.

So, for something I think I've read with what other people do with their fleets. Fleet 1 is fast ships, fleet 2 is slow ships. So within the fast fleet ship, you can subdivide it by ship class. i.E by monsoon and defiant, and for fleet 2, slower ships by akira and e2. Or whatever.

EDIT: Just to clarify, the fleet is still selectable as the entire 30 ships, and will be displayed as such. But the organization within the display of the 30 ships can get maybe a colour scheme showing 5 or 6 parts. So it is still a fleet of 30 in the display like usual. But then select groups of the ships can be made to do certain things. A sort of mish mash of micro and macro. The post does make sense, doesn't it, or no?

[Nebula_Class_Ftw]

posted on December 20th, 2011, 9:49 pm

Last edited by Nebula_Class_Ftw on December 20th, 2011, 9:54 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I'm fairly certain hotkeys are fixed and hardcoded. So it would require the devs add some more stuff in the menus unless they want to make tying 1+QWERTY always lead to fleet assignments.
I'm using a Dvorak keyboard layout, and the game responds to my press of p and . as if I had pressed r and e (the QWERTY r and e spots hav p and . instead in Dvorak.) Being able to change keys would be nice.

posted on December 20th, 2011, 10:08 pm

That would be interesting, but I think it might 1, be too complicated, 2, impossible, and 3, would interfere with hotkeys already in use.

posted on December 20th, 2011, 10:21 pm

i know there are other games where 1 unit can be in diferent groups, that would not create any conflict with other hotkeys (you need only 1 aditional key to get a ship out of a group)

but if its hardcoded it still would just be to dificult i guess

posted on December 20th, 2011, 11:36 pm

Hmm, I was hoping it wouldn't be too complicated (but on top of the complicated part there is an impossibility part... how unfortunate). If it is, it isn't that important.

But I mean, to not interfere with hotkeys... there are quite a few keys to choose from, it doesn't need to be QWERTY. Those are just convenient. R I know probably has quite a few uses, T maybe for transporter... hmmm. Oh well. but I also thought that if you made it like control shift 1, requiring all three... control shift 1 can only mean one thing. If it's a number of hotkeys together, I thought.

Also, I was gonna put if you just hit 1Q together, it would automatically queue you to fleet 1, subdivision Q.

It felt like this would have just fit Dominion to a t though. Don't all of their ships have a little subtext on them saying part of some fleet division or whatever. I dunno I haven't played Dominion in a while, but I though they had something like that.

In any case... worth a shot to see.

[Nebula_Class_Ftw]

posted on December 21st, 2011, 12:49 am

Last edited by Nebula_Class_Ftw on December 21st, 2011, 12:51 am, edited 1 time in total.

The devs could certainly do it, but it would definitely would require configurable hotkeys unless everyone wants their top row keys to do different things when other keys are pressed. That's probably too much work for something of low priority right now.
I think that once the big important stuff is mostly done, we could see configurable hotkeys (and proper key detection. Position-based detection is quite a pain when not using QWERTY.) Fleet subgroupings would then come a few patches after that maybe.

posted on December 21st, 2011, 2:34 am

2 things:

First, the Starcraft method of grouping ships was one of the greatest innovations in the history of RTS games.  Each hotkey maps to a set of ships INDEPENDENTLY, meaning each ship can be in multiple groups and you can have one group to control all your ships, another for just some of them, etc.  I would love to see this implemented, but as Nebula pointed out this is something that needs to be included at the very base of the game engine.  I don't think it would be possible for Fleet Ops without reworking some stuff they don't currently have access to.

Second, I have found that control-group lag is my number-one micro problem in Fleet Ops.  I was trying to figure out what messes me up so badly, and it's my penchant for using multiple groups.  For example, I regularly spam 1-click-2-click-3-click-4-click in the space of 1-2 seconds to order my fleet to move.  Unfortunately, the groups sometimes take half a second to select, some of my ships don't get the message, and my entire strategy is blown as a result.  Strangely, I've found that the "2" control group loads slower than any others, taking almost a full second to resolve.

I don't know if there is anything the devs can do to improve this, or even if it's a game problem.  It could be my keyboard.  It could also have something to do with Asynchronous cursor, which I frequently use because otherwise my cursor lags at the worst possible moments.  If you CAN find a way to make this work faster, that would make me a very happy person