Explosions, Fusion Powerplants and other nonsensical raveing

[Caydr]

One thing I really admire in Spring are the dust clouds after large explosions. They are very cool. The blocks your sight and everything, very realistic, like a smoke grenade in CSS or something. Very, very nice.

Though I agree, the explosions themselves don't look very fiery or powerful.

[Zoombie]

Well i think that units sould blow up REALY cool, as i have said about i dont know 3 billion times!. Maby i sould be more specific. The ARM units need blood in specific secemstances. For example if a small plams shot blows through a cock pit on a Pewee then blood sould fly out to. On low gravity planets, it could spew quite a why. Also big units sould have more then one explosion. Krogoths and other large K-bots sould have cataclysimic blasts whitch reward the player that manages to take one down. Also i looked at one of the new movies and noted that the fly pices of snrapnal and flaming wreakage have improved a LOT. However the actual explosions are still rather weak, exept for the Comaders explosion!

Also i had a rather striking idea.

I have often had energy resours problems. Not in the amount or how im getting it, but where the damn energy is going! I want to be able to put up, lets say, a defencive grid of 5-7 sentanls and a few anhillators (or gatt guns and Doomsday Machines if your Core) and want a group of 2 fusion reactors to power the weapons so that you will have the things firing. The effect would be that you wouldent be getting 2000 energy, and insted it would be allocated to the defenceive lasers so that when the enemy force comes by it DIES!. This also means that you can have a defence have secondary energy soucses if your useing a ton of energy in building progects. Or maby i just like heaping extra micromanagement on myself as a kind of self-mutilation for the purification of my RTS's spirit.

[Michilus_nimbus]

Power redirection sounds interesting.
I don't think it fits very well in TA Springs sheme, but I guess it could be of use in the future non-TA game.
If you have 5k of energy:

lvl 3: shuts down if energy < 2k (so you still have some room to fire an annihilator or a berta, or you could use it to shut down some defences to concentrate on building)

lvl 2: shuts down if energy < 500k (to keep your HLT firing, or you could use it to auto-shutdown metal makers)

lvl1: never shuts down

[Warlord Zsinj]

While I can see the advantage of a shutdown system based on ranked necessary systems, I think from an offensive point of view, a system where a lack of energy drains equally from all units would be the best, so that an attacked is able to know that if he targets enemy energy systems, he can be safe in the knowledge that for the most part, the defensive grid will have less bite. Otherwise the attacker has to remember what systems are given preference, and whether its even worth targetting the enemy energy generators based on the defensive makeup (potentially eliminating a common TA strategy).

[AF]

I think const units should have 3 levels of resource usage.

Full pelt: resourcestorage maxed out,They use their max resources possible in cosntruction
Midway: The resources arent maxed out and their above halfway so we're gonna lay off a bit
slowdown: The resources are less than halfway so we're gonna simply keep the building building btu with veyr little progress, just enough to keep ti building.

[Zoombie]

Their sould also be a Hold button for buildings. It sould use the least amount of resourses, but the building wont disintigrate if your builder unit is away. Also if you can direct energy to specific turrets, then why cant you have sabature units that specify in directing enrgy away from things. They are invisable, and you sneak them up to a Anhillator or BEtha or the CORE equibilents, and then put a energy dampener (or someother cool sounding name) so when it fires it uses an insane amount of enrgy and dosent work (or explode!).

So if you sabatouge the enemy's defences, their souild also be counter sabatouge mesures. For example if you jamm a bomb down the barrel of a Punisher, then their sould be some indication of this to the enemy so he can send a Cbot to repair it. But you can also have anit-sabatuore units that can detect the bombs, dapenters, transmitters and varius other things that cal kill, maime, or otherwise hamstring your (and the enemy's) defence. You sould aslo use this on allys, just to keep themin check!

Also will their be a doppelr effect for shells? Casuse i want the "Oh crap we are getting shelled" feeling that only the doppler effect can bring. It gose like this BANG! Whiz! Fizzzz! BOOM! Then you look up form the trenches and try to see through the cloud of dust sent up by the blast.

Also in movie 15 i noticed something odd. THe explosions are better (but thats not whats odd) but for some reson the units dont actualy "blow up" they get hit (and the shell blows up) then the unit disapears and wrekage apears. Sometimes it looks good, cause the explosion caused by the shell covers the units disaperence and rplacement with wrekage. However sometimes it looks realy bad. So the shell sould hit, and then the unit sould actualy EXPLODE! I think i need mantra from now on. It will go like this! "Explosions... NEED MORE EXPLOSIONS!!"

[PauloMorfeo]

When we are using more energy than we are producing, which is extremely bad, when the stored energy reaches 0, all metal extractors stop producing. They use up some energy, remember that...

That's why reaching 0 energy is so bad...

And we have no control over where energy goes, for example, deciding that energy goes prioritaly to metal makers.

[Caydr]

Priority system would be too much unnecessary complexity maybe. What most people do is have any high-energy-use buildings on a hotkey like 9. If you need to divert all your energy to lasers and d-guns, first select that group and turn them off.

[Dragon45]

If the "complex" hotkey system (where a hot key is actually a string of 3 or so characters) were implemented, it could make management a lot easier.

Also, it might be helpful to see all units of a certain type (say, metal makers) automatically added to a certain hotkey group.

[ILMTitan]

One could probably use the hotkey editor (http://taspring.clan-sy.com/screenshots/screen53.jpg) with the "name contains" box to select all of the metal makers at once with a hotkey.

[[K.B.] Napalm Cobra]

Metal makers already have a managing ai.