You know how we have that problem with players running around everywhere and preventing building drops? Why not just push players outside the building space of the building. Well honestly it may be disorienting to players, a possible troll device, and if it's actually set to push in a certain direction I would assume commanders could use it to accelerate players in that direction. I would say I don't think commanders would use it to troll with, they tend to have better things to do and it sounds like a great way to never get voted in as comm again. Pushing players in a certain direction would be incredibly expensive and not very useful either to be honest. So that just leaves disorienting players, which I don't really have a good answer for but generally when a commander is trying to drop buildings it's not really in a war zone so this doesn't feel like a big deal. I guess it wouldn't make sense to push vehicles though, that might be a bit much. It's not often that I find vehicles blocking though, so again that might not be a big issue either.
What about putting a timer on building set-up, and after the timer building appears and THEN the players that are still in the zone gets pushed aside?
make the buildings blueprints visible for players aswell. of course with a way higher transparency than for comm. i imagine that quite cool and maybe it helps removing the detachment between players and comm a bit. the code should be in place, in the end comm sees the buildings already, but having heard a lot of stories about empires' codebase it might be not easily reuseable?!
I think just giving the players a nice big notification of "Move out of the way, you are obstructing a building". Then with the bounding box of the building shown to them as an area that they can't go in. That would make players aware that they need to move, without giving the comm the ability to effectively teleport players...
I have never liked that the buildings just magically appear out of thin air. I always imagined that drop-ships should do a flyby and drop a building kit which engineers would they build up to become whatever you requested. I imagine a more futuristic oriented version of Empires where you are colonizing new planets and you have your main force in orbit, which is how you get the top-down view from the commander, having satellites. Researches would be downloaded from your mothership in orbit and building kits dropped from the production ships. Of course these are just dreams, and I'm going off topic...
Northern Faction, using genetic modifications developed 'rad soldiers' being able to mine tunnels, which they started using to transport large quantities of gas to extract in the shape of buildings.
Then its not really a version its more like a new game. Also sounds awfully close to what Section8 was, watch out for them lawsuits.
Inb4 comm "tactically" pushes units aside. I think this is kinda why most RTS games don't have this feature.
in most RTS games you control your units. but keep telling yourself empires would be an RTS, it doesnt really matter anymore anyway.
that already kinda happens Not sure if this is only clientside or something, but people get pushed by unsuccesfully placing buildings on top of them. Example, if you drop a turret on someone, he will be pushed on top of it and then fall to the ground. (not sure if that happens all the time or only sometimes.) Best if you start spamming them with shift on someone So I wonder what would happen if you would just allow placing buildings on top of people, if they would get stuck or actually just pushed away. Anyway, it would maybe be fun if the buildings grow out of the ground like walls do, although might be a bit exploitable.
I dunno about all this pushing business but send a player a notification on their screen when I try to place a refinery and their fat ass is sitting on it.
To be fair you can't place buildings when enemies are near, something you can do in a lot of other rts games. It's also incredibly expensive to do that and if the push is random you'd probably end up just disorienting your team. This also works, along with a message to anyone in it to get out the way. Really I just not want to have to sit there looking in an area waiting for someone to move out the way, I've got other things to do.
In those RTS games, buildings also have ridiculously low starting HP.(some games give them 1 hp) It's a pure waste of money if you drop buildings next to enemy.
This is true but it's not much better in empires, most building drops die in like 2-3 mortar shots when new.
