I have been neglecting my IndieDB page for a long while now. Now that I'm beginning to finish up the base functionality of the game, I feel I should post here as well.
This is the latest interface addition to Her Majesty’s Royal Space Armada.
In order to simplify control over the economy, there is a single global build queue. This is a compromise between the pay-at-once (seen in Starcraft) and the pay-as-you-go (seen in C&C and Total Annihilation) methods for purchasing decisions. The former requires you to waste time, or get distracted doing something else, as you wait for the precise moment when you have enough money to build the next thing you want. The latter allows you to queue up everything you want to build, but because it is all building simultaneously, when you run out of money you run into an “economy gridlock” that you must carefully sort out in order to build the things you really want.
The build queue follows the inuitive, pay-at-once model but merely places these orders in a global queue so you can put in a build order at any time you want. Because there is only one queue, there is no need to remedy “economy gridlock”; when your queue gets larger, you need only take a moment to decide what is most important to you, and put those things at the beginning of the queue. Since squadrons resupply their own units, you don’t need to worry about cluttering up this queue with constant reinforcements, and therefore it should stay relatively small and easy to manage. Currently you can’t easily drag or re-order queue orders easily, but that is on the to-do list.
I will try to make more detailed posts like this as I implement significant features. Hopefully they will convince you that Her Majesty’s Royal Space Armada is not just another RTS. There are only a few features and bugfixes I need to do to get a playable, alpha-quality game which I might release to the public.
nice idea