Can anyone explain to me what wait is good for? Bonus points if you can link me to a replay where it was used advantageously. Seems to me that "wait" is nothing but a noob trap. In addition to being useless (or rarely useful) it also has a precarious default keybinding that causes me a lot of problems. Specifically, W is too easy to fat-finger. Not only that, but arguably the two most used key combos (c-w for LLT, ctrl+w for area mex) are perfect for missing a key and suspending your constructor. When I first started it was a common experience to enter a large queue for my com ending with an attempted area mex command, only to come back later and find nothing had been built and a spinning hourglass ("Is my commander... loading?"). Experienced players seem to just rebind it anyway, so could we change it to something less likely to thwart noobies?
+6 / -0
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Wait is pretty useful for managing your eco (preventing Estall, rushing stuff, etc)
+1 / -0
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The priority system has kinda replaced that use of wait.
+5 / -0
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you can wait silo missiles and then emp four antis at once, or any other shenanigans like that. could also imagine it beeing useful with bombers, tho it might not work as exspected (tried it once and was a bit funky).
+2 / -0
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While the priorities supposedly obsolete the need for "wait" in eco management, it doesn't quite work that way. If you have a con on medium and a con on high priority, the medium one will still drain resources that the other one could've used. This means that "wait"ing cons can/will improve building speed of other projects compared to just lowering their priority. Another case would be stopping unit production of a repeating fac because you just don't want those units (rather save up the resources). You could just empty the queue, but wait is faster (especially in the case of a detailed queue) and preserves it in case you want it again later. In general, you use wait when you queued up something but don't actually want the queued commands to continue until a later point in time. That can occasionally happen, but the use cases are niche. I do agree that the wait functionality (and possible use cases for it) are unclear to new players, without being of any real help.
+1 / -0
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Wait is kinda used as zero priority. Low priority does not guarantee no resource drain but Wait does. You can get a bunch of bombers or tacnukes on Wait, and queue a different target for each one. Then when un-Waiting you will get the exact split you want to which is else somewhat hard to do. I think this was the main reason for Wait's original inclusion, because it replaced the Jeffy Guard trick from OTA. Some processes that currently disobey Wait could be made to work with it, to temporarily stop them. Morph and Stockpile come to mind. In the past there existed other forms of Wait. Perhaps they are still available but are very likely broken because noone is known to use these. [Spoiler]These were:
* Deathwait - this was targeted onto some unit. The wait would automatically go away when the target died. Example use cases would be to Deathwait some raiders onto a Stardust so they go in IFF it's gone.
* Timewait - this one goes away automatically after a specified period of time. Pretty straightforward.
* Squadwait - this one is interesting. It accepts a number parameter: when there are that many units waiting together, they are released. An example use case is automated wave attacks: add eg. squadwait 5 into the factory waypoint queue. Units from the fac will wait until there are 5 of them and then attack in that squad.
These use cases may seem a bit awkward but these are from the very early days. They seem more suitable to make a simple mission AI. For example you could implement simple chickens without Lua by having the enemy comm be an instabuild factory, with timewait to emulate the time between waves and squadwait to emulate the wave behaviour.
+2 / -0
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I suggest making W the default hotkey for area-mex and moving Wait to either Ctrl W or Alt W.In my settings the W key is used for area-mex, Ctrl W for a custom selection command and Alt W for the wait command. My idea is to reserve Ctrl for all selection commands (Ctrl C for commander, Ctrl Z for all units of selected type, Ctrl B for idle builders, etc.), Alt for all unit states (Alt R for repeat, Alt F for firestates, etc.; not sure if Wait technically is a unit state, but for me it is, I should also move selfD to Alt D for consistency) and single keys for unit orders (R repair, F fight, etc.). To answer    kaen's question: I use Wait for my initial factory. There's not enough metal to use all the starting build power, so when I feel like expanding I set my factory to wait. Sometimes I forget about the Wait command though, I thought about two ways to help me deal with this issue: 1) Factories set to Wait blink crazy in the factory bar, 2) give the Wait command a timer. Or maybe I should just leave the factory queue empty instead of using wait.
+3 / -0
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Lol I see that you have taken my suggestion to heart kaenAlso resurected is binded to "t" when target is not binded to anything. 2 units in the game can resurect things. 90% of the units in the game can target things. This oughta change.
+0 / -0
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Oh I just noticed I didn't set Wait to Alt W, but to i. Don't remember why, but I think I once planned to move all unit states away from Alt to make them easier to toggle in the midst of action. Forgot about that. Also I set target to T and resurrection to U. Aaand Jump to Y (on qwertz keyboard, so left of X). :) Is this thread still about "Wait", or a general thread about hotkeys? :D
+0 / -0
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I would say that wait is too obscure to be bound by default. I would vote for unbind.
+2 / -0
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Until it gets added to the icons that are displayed above units. SelfD should go there too.
+0 / -0
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Leave bind as it is, but change the colour of the rotating hourglass instead. Make it reddish or else, current white one is hardly noticeable. And add flashing "W" in the middle to indicatethe bind key.
+1 / -0
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I use it a lot. I prefer to have it changed to say alt - W and have it colour changed as failer mentioned.
+0 / -0
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quote:
I would say that wait is too obscure to be bound by default. I would vote for unbind. |
Imho, proper design would have every single menu command have a corresponding hotkey. You should be able to give every command in the game without clicking on a gui menu button. It might be way too late for that though.
+0 / -0
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Personally I've found it's coherent to use "alt" for state-change bindings and "ctrl" for obscure commands. I'd move "wait" to a "ctrl" command as an obscure one.
+1 / -0
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My vote is for changing Wait hotkey to something harder to press accidentally.
+5 / -0
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and it would be nice to have an more visible wait icon. if u do not know there is wait and u do not know to look for a nearly transparent sand clock, it occurs like strange misbehaviour especially to new players I think.
+1 / -0
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