Attending to the small comforts

[Waraddict]

This game looks almost too good to be true, I feel as excited about it as I used to for the classic C&C games, AoW seems to have the charm and originality of the original C&C and I really hope it gives EA a deserved kick up the *** to see how it should be done.

That said, I was wondering, will AoW make it's fans knees wobble with glee by rounding up this potential world wide high seller with comfort features?

By comfort features I mean...

- Player logins
Some of us have to share games with brother's, maybe even our Dad's :P, I find it discouraging when they complete singleplayer missions before me, it may seem trivial but I find it much more satisfying if our saves are seperated by player logins.

- Auto Save Settings
There was a game called World War III: Black Gold, it was slow, agonising RTS, quite dull but its realistic gameplay appealed to me, along with its understanding of pampering the player a bit, with player logins and auto saving settings. Now, before I played an RTS with that feature, I probably wouldn't care less about it, but seriously it really is comforting to know that your mission has been saved atleast 5mins ago, WWIII:BG did this by default, as an added sprinkle on the side you could set the autosaving time yourself.

- Complete and utter control of unit behaviour
Tell a unit to Guard in an RTS, in most games it will annoy you somehow, either it will wander off to kill a target before coming back or do nothing until it is too late, like in WWIII:BG it would be nice if you could set the following behaviour of a unit. (I would suggest a cycle button to save space for each setting)

Ordering a unit to fire/move will overide the behavior.

Unit Attack Behaviour: Fire at Will / Fire When Attacked / Do not Fire.
Unit Movement Behaviour : Do not move/ Move at will.

Any other comfort feature ideas?

[AgmLauncher]

There is quite a bit of polishing that goes into an RTS game to make it really outstanding. Blizzard has pretty much nailed them all down and they should be copied more often than they are for it. Yes, you obviously need to look at improvements and originality, but Blizzard really paid attention to the core details that every RTS game should have.

I think more in terms of multiplayer features and capabilities than single player though. Multiplayer quality will make or break a game. For MP, I would like to see these things put into place:

Replays
-Recreate fog of war for each player (this is crucial)
-Have the option to save camera movement for at least the player saving the replay
-Smooth fast forward ability (like DoW, not choppy like Zero Hour)
-Rewind feature
-Indexing timer that indicates total time, and your current position to help point out key events
-Consistent and unique player IDs in the replays for player verification (also crucial)
-Save text logs in the replays
-Provide detailed statistics of gameplay (cash floating, unit mixing and useage indicator etc)
-A replay manager of sorts
-Replay autosaving ability

Online
-Accurate stat recording (if in fact stats are recorded)
-Well designed ladder that enforces quality of play, not quantity of games played
-Easy to use buddy communicator (ability to add someone by typing in their name, ability to join a game through the communicator, ability to remove your name from someone else's communicator and block them from re-adding it without your permission)

There's all kinds of additional features that should be implemented into multiplayer, but this is a list to give you an idea of what a quality MP game is all about.

[Waraddict]

Here's another, complete control of the camera (if skies are always there)

[TheHitman]

More unit control in terms of new options. For infantry maybe a posture option (stand, crouch, prone) would be good maybe even a construct fortification so infantry can create a hasty chokepoint defense. the posture option would be excellent in terms of using cover in the case where they would take less damage due to exposure of their body.

[Waraddict]

That's kind of going outside the idea of game comfort, adding postures for infantry would be useless unless they effect the gameplay behaviour which if they do, instead of just making it easier to manage the unit like my unit control behaviour point would just complicate it further.

Think of little extras on the side, to get rid of tedious uneeded tasks that don't really reflect the skill of the player if it is an ingame feature.

[BOMBLORD]

and most importent thing of all :a good lag free net code :biggringr

[T-bone]

posture for infantry.. hmm it will be to tactical for me... i like "acrade RTS" (C&C)

[Slacky]

Comforts? hmmmm..... i would have to say the biggest one for me would maybe be logo's that could go on your troops, or something of the sort - on buildings etc, so that you could signify you are in a clan and so forth. Bringing me neatly to my next point, good clan controls and options, and free page to put stuff on in the game itself. Put a link for a main site there and what not. Even though this is a bad example, different genres in all, but Planetside, my Ava and picture under this, has brilliant clan controls, as you can see on my character, which is now a very out-of-date picture I might add, I have a logo on my right part of my chest plate, your right that is, thats my outfit (clan) and I can bring up a page with members and the website for them on it, tis very well done.