Factory grouping inheritance - make it an option

[Lupus]

Once I started this topic in "General Discussion":
Factory grouping inheritance

My request is, to make "factory grouping inheritance" an option. Let us decide, if we want to use it or not.

What I understand by "factory grouping inheritance": when you assign your factory to a group (and bind it to a certain key), all units produced by the factory are being put in the same group. This is sometimes useful, for example if you want all your newly produced units to follow your attacking army. But it's usefulness is very limited! I can't find many situations in game when it would be useful, really.


For most of the time I find "factory grouping inheritance" very annoying! Now I'll write why:

1. You can't instantly centre your view on a factory.

Binding (grouping and assigning to a certain key) a factory would be useful to instantly centre your view on it. But right now, it's useless, because most likely since you grouped your factory you most likely built some units, so if you double-press the key, the screen won't centre on your factory, but somewhere where the centre of all your units is.

2. You can't control your factory's production and waypoints using a keyboard.

I have key bindings for units in a factory. I'd like to bind my factory to a key (for example CTRL+5), and then using just a keyboard I can choose my factory (I press "5"), order to build some units (I press some more keys) and maybe set a waypoint by clicking right-mouse-button somewhere on the ground.

Right now the above is impossible.

I use setting a waypoint often in my games. If I group my factory, each time I want to set a waypoint I must pay special attention to regroup it (ungroup all other units) first, otherwise I may end up sending all units produced since last grouping to the point I wanted to set a waypoint.

Also, if you have some units grouped along with the factory, every time order your factory to construct some new unit, all grouped units just STOP! If the units were moving, they stop, if there were constructors constructing something, they stop... I don't know if this is a bug, or a feature, but it makes grouping a factory plain useless!

3. You have a factory grouped and you build in it some units. Then, you want to double-left-clicking on one of the newly built units, to select all visible units of the clicked type. But it won't work. Instead, all grouped units will be chosen.

[aegis]

i've resorted to less grouping of factories and more microing

[lurker]

There's also the opposite problem. You try to select all units a fac built, and you end up screwing with the waypoints.

[Soulless1]

I just set factories to a group, and have a couple of selection keys defined: one ('t', I believe) takes the current selection and removes all buildings from it, and the second ('y') does the opposite, removing all but the buildings.

Most of the time I want my factory rally point to follow my units around anyway, but in the other cases it's simple to press one of the keys and then give the order either just the units or just the factory.