SCU Management
The way things work at present is ugly. There is the confusing SCU manager and the unintuitive auto-upgrade beacon. Then there is the incomplete, unpolished preset system, which gives balance problems related to the way it interacts with adjacency bonuses, is limited in the number of configurations, and is inflexible if the situation changes and you need to be building a different preset all of a sudden. It also just looked really hacky with its missing icons. This proposal is, I think, the logical next step forward from the preset and manager systems.
Step 1 - Remove the SCU manager and the auto-upgrade beacon. This gives a clean slate to work from.
Step 2 - The SCU: The first thing is to allow upgrades to be queued up, including upgrade chains like T2 and then T3 queued. You should be able to select multiple SCUs and apply a queue to all of them at the same time. While we're at it, I see no reason to not also enable this on the ACUs.
Step 3 - The Gate: This is the real step forwards. A new UI section should be designed to occupy the right of the build UI (Which is pretty much empty for Quantum Gates) visible when you have the gate selected. You will be able to switch between the three upgrade zones, and highlight one upgrade (Or upgrade path) in each upgrade zone as appropriate. When an SCU is completed, those highlighted options are passed to the SCU as an upgrade queue to begin automatically once it reaches the rally point.
Map Of The Week
Something for one of the Council teams to keep going, update, and generally run. I'd like to see a prominant section of the FAF Client, perhaps in the host games tab, given over to a 'Map of the week' chosen by the team. I think this could be a great step towards encouraging players to diversify and try new maps, and could also be used to promote the higher quality custom maps as they come out. As additional incentive to players, perhaps also consider some kind of stat tracking for that week, and then a reward avatar for the player to, for example, kill the most enemy ACUs, or something of the sort.
Better Teamwork Options
This is born of my thoughts considering the current slew of eco-mods and the controversy around them.
Quick Resource Sharing: Introduce two new UI buttons, which can be linked to hotkeys, and are related to new sliders in the main options menu. The sliders, one for Mass and one for Energy, can be scaled, and a checkbox used to make the sliders represent either a set number from 100 - 10000 or a percentage. The buttons, when pressed, bring up a quick selection window which has each of your allies listed and ready to click on. This means that you should be able to very quickly transfer resources to an ally on request, and each player can set how they want to transfer things according to their preference. The current transfer sliders will also, of course, still be available for use.
Quick Unit Transfer: This may already be possible, but following on from above, if we have a window listing allies ready and waiting as a popup, it can be very quickly reused with a third button and hotkey to instantly transfer any selected units to another player.
Improved Automated Resource Overflow: There must be some way to improve this. There's a case to be made for some more main options menu sliders to say at which point in your storage you want your resources to begin spilling over to allies, if needed, defaulting at 100%. Once storage goes over this, if an ally or allies are stalling on that resource, it is split between them in an intelligent manner, leaving you at net +0 in that resource.
Integrate Upgrade Notifications: This mod was a great idea and it really aids teams in knowing what each other are doing, especially when one remembers the vast majority of players don't communicate via VoIP or ingame chat.
Integrated Voice Communications: I've no clue if this is even possible, but it's the next logical step from the current Mumble system.
Lobby/Client Chat Integration
I'd like to see the game setup lobby linked with the client chat IRC. This would allow things like typing a player's name in lobby to ping them to ready up, and PM certain players in and out of the lobby.
Abuse Reporting For Teamkills
A popup which appears when the game detects a player has died and the guilty party was an ally. It gives the player the following message: "Team-kill detected. If you feel you died as a result of unsportsmanlike conduct, click the Report button below." and three buttons, Report, Exit, and (If applicable) Spectate. Clicking the report button will automatically generate a message to the moderator team including who died, who killed them, replay ID and the game time of the event. Obviously, abusing the report function when it was an accidental death will lead to you being punished, not the killer
Remove Automated Ecomods
Some players won't agree with my stance here, but as far as I'm concerned there's a line, and some UI mods have already crossed it. I would like to make sure that certain capabilities are removed from the realm of UI mods, in particular the automatic pausing and unpausing of activities based on current resource status. In return, additional tools outlines below can be introduced to reduce the desire to use such mods.
Better Mass Generation Management
Extractors - The first part of this would be some kind of Mass Extractor management to make the sequence and action of upgrading easier to control. Several mods already have good approaches to this, and should be looked at for ideas. I'm talking things like single click upgrading, Storage surround shortcuts etc.
Fabricators - To reduce the desire to use auto-pause mods, this idea is to make it easier for a player who has legitimately decided "I need to pause my Fabricators!" to actually take that action. Four UI buttons, again Hotkey bindable, two each for T2 and T3 Fabricators. One button for 'Turn On' and one for 'Turn Off'. Hitting the button would turn on/off one randomly selected Fabricator of the type, with Shift-clicking it (Or something) turning on/off all of that type you posess.
Reclaim - The proposed Area Reclaim mod has been causing major controversy, and I see a Paint Reclaim command doing the same. I don't think either of these solutions is very good. I would much prefer to see both Attack-Move and Patrol modified so that they identify and execute reclaim at full manual reclaim speed. The selection process should not be intelligent, with no more power than now to prioritise rocks/wrecks/trees, in order to preserve some of the value of manual reclaim, which IMO should remain a thing. This should be coupled both with the removal of the extended Engineer Reclaim range when Attack-Move is used from a factory, and a reduction in the rate at which things are reclaimed. In short, assigning things to do their reclaim tasks will be easy and efficient, but reclaim taking longer to actually carry out should create more drawn-out fights over large reclaim fields and battlegrounds.
Improved Unit Interaction
Formation - Formations have the potential to be enormously improved. Not only do we have the power to create more formation options to cycle through, but we can change the layout and position of unit types within them, the inter-unit spacing, and make them more intelligent at moving units around when parts of the formation die.
Target Priorities - Currently quite well set up, there is nonetheless room for improvement. Giving each unit or unit type carefully constructed target priority lists should make unit behaviour in battle more intelligent on average. No more blowing through a base with all your tanks shooting entirely the wrong thing.
Paint Attack - The ability to modify the cursor into a large paintbrush and drag it over a number of enemy units, assigning them as manual, direct targets for everything you have selected. This could be useful in all sorts of situations, say when you want to eliminate a line of mobile artillery and sacrifice your tanks to theirs to make sure it's done. It would also result in spectacularly easy carpet-bombing. Note, no more powerful than now, just easier to actually pull off. IMO this is the one thing currently standing between T1 Bombers and being used as a real, true anti-T1-spam solution.
Paint Priority - Domino came up with a mod which I really liked, allowing you to select enemy units for automatic priority attack, helpful in lots of circumstances, and coupled with the above changes we should end up with a very comprehensive system.
Random Map
I think, given a working rating-based automatic team balancer, a random map option could make for some really fun games, and again could encourage players to branch out into new maps.
Main Options From Lobby
This one is simple, I'd like to be able to access the main game options from in the lobby.
