I got an idea reading the constructor comment on the Let's brainstorm ... thread: Currently, when units reclaim metal, they do it at full speed, even if your storage is full, or indeed when you have no storage. This results in wasted metal. Especially when you have no storage, your total metal income should be limited to your build power being used to spend metal. In 1v1, reclaiming metal when your storage is full beyond current usage only serves to deny the enemy that wreckage, but in most situations it would probably be better for you to be able to use all that metal and having to defend that wreckage a little bit longer. In larger matches it would make sense to limit team reclaim to team expenditure; reclaim at full speed until everyone's storage is full, then limit reclaim to the total amount that the team as a whole is currently spending (taking into account other sources of metal income as well, of course).
+3 / -1
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Your idea isn't bad, but its not imho the most pressing issue to resolve. If I know I am going to be reclaiming a lot of metal then I build a storage or two. If I'm excessing and I can't absorb it, I'm OK with my team getting a boost. If they're bleeding metal as well, then I quickly switch to my comm and cue an upgrade. How hard is it really to click on a spare con and tell it to build a storage? Seems to me that while your idea is cool, it would take a fair bit of extra programming to resolve what is essentially a non-issue for most players.
+2 / -0
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This is too little. We also need to disable construction of everything except energy sources when stalling energy, and if you are excessing metal, everything except more caretakers should be greyed out and ongoing constructions frozen. This is because caretakers have better buildpower per cost, and we don't want the player to shoot themselves in the foor by resolving the excess in any other, suboptimal, way. [Spoiler]
+4 / -1
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Caretakers prioritizing reclaim over construction is serious problem on speed metal maps to the point that wrecks can hurt your construction as much as the damage done by the enemy.
+3 / -0
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Did the earlier responses read the OP. And why the hostility and strawmans? What he's talking about is a clear issue, and one that people have complained about for forever. It's not like anyone actually thinks it should be in the game to force players to mindlessly micro (and keeping in mind that removing such tasks is literally the defining characteristic of Zero-K). It's just that no one's got around to coding it yet. When the Starcraft 2 devs announced they would be adding an ingame clock to the game, the players went nuts, complaining that it would "remove skill". They were fixated on making sure the game never changed because they'd spent years learning mindless micro tasks to compensate for the game's shortcomings, and thought that they deserved an advantage for having gone through that struggle. For a literal clock. The thing that there's an average of 4 per room in a modern household. https://us.battle.net/forums/en/sc2/topic/628080373I've been wanting to get back into Zero-K. If Zero-K never gets an update again, fine. But it breaks my heart to see us turn into that mindset.
+3 / -0
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quote:
Caretakers prioritizing reclaim over construction is serious problem on speed metal maps to the point that wrecks can hurt your construction as much as the damage done by the enemy.
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Speed metal just should be modified so wrecks get auto-reclaimed by game in the moment of death... Would be so much better UX and less laggy for everyone
+2 / -0
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quote:
And why the hostility and strawmans? |
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But it breaks my heart to see us turn into that mindset. |
Because the OP is arguing to make the UX worse in order to railroad the game, and you fight the "straw men" by more strawmen, comparing a non-simulation UI improvement to an oppressive simulation railroading proposed in the OP. The OP is not asking automatic reclaim from patrolling nanos to deprioritize when excessing. He is asking for all reclaim anywhere to become impossible unless matched with the same amount of expenditure, including combat reclaim of enemy turrets or reclaiming zombies to prevent their corpses from rising or reclaiming wrecks to deny them to enemy or free a path. This makes your comparison to ingame clock a much larger strawman than my comparison of reclaim block to mex block. Unless you can provide me any arguments for reclaim block which do not also apply to mex block in full. I guess a much more valid comparison to both, however, is ZK's own replacement of metal makers with energy overdrive, but that change was a bit more involved than automating metalmakers to only use the energy that is not used by turrets or construction. Nor did it require my "strawman" of blocking metal maker construction unless both excessing energy and stalling metal. Going back to reclaim, i think that gives us something like the Puppy.
+0 / -0
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Well, if I am in a team game and I'm excessing, I let my team to spend my excess metal. If I', excessing more than 10 m/s steady, I upgrade my comm or porc. If I am in a 1vs1 game, I porc. The issue for me is to actually notice that I'm excessing! I am definitely too slow and monothreaded for ZK...
+1 / -0
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It popped into my mind that it's both possible to automate reclaim block using a widget and to make it opt-in in which case you can both automatically reclaim zombies and skip reclaim on speedmetal, all user side
+1 / -0
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A simple UI-side toggle to pause unforced reclaim on excess sounds good. Having cons behave smartly (for example patrolling nanos switching between prioritising reclaim if available and not excessing, repair if stalling, and construction otherwise) would also be desireable but doing it properly (good defaults, efficient implementation) is not really realistic.
+1 / -0
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quote:
Caretakers prioritizing reclaim over construction is serious problem on speed metal maps to the point that wrecks can hurt your construction as much as the damage done by the enemy. |
yeah but it's fuckin speedmetal
+3 / -0
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It should be toggleable(on a per-constructor and a per-default basis).. Like so many things already are, such as disabling shooting at radar targets, automatically cloaking, preventing overkill, chasing enemy units, repeating build queue, retreating, transporting, automatic strafing, etc.. So many of these convenience changes already exist -- The fringe case where you want to use a strategy prohibited by the convenience is allowed by the toggling of it whenever you want. The arguments of "this removes skill," and "what if i want to do something else" can be applied to all of these convenience changes and are no reason to deny further ones.
+0 / -0
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I'm not sure if anybody's actually said this explicitly so: Reasonably often players want to reclaim even when they are excessing metal so as to deny the wrecks to the enemy. As such I wouldn't make this anything more than a toggle. To avoid toggle bloat not every convenience toggle can be practically added - whether this crosses that line is a judgement call for somebody to make.
+4 / -0
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This seems like a niche thing, so it probably should be default off. It could be a constructor setting, similar to construction priority. Maybe call it reclaim priority. Normal reclaims normally, low reclaim priority reclaims only as fast as the metal can be used.
+1 / -0
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this surely only applies to 1v1, since in teamgame the excess is shared to your team which is a good thing* and then only to certain circumstances in 1v1 I am all for making the interface and unit AI do things automatically where there is no decision involved, just busywork - but reclaiming entails a fairly sophisticated path of reasoning. eg. Can I share to team-mates? Do I want to share to team mates? Do I need to clear these wrecks before enemy takes them? Do I need to clear these wrecks for gameplay (zombies? pathing?) Am I reclaiming an enemy nanoframe? I think just a flashing BUILD MORE STORAGE would do the job.
+0 / -0
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