What I'm looking for is a UI mod that would allow me to more effectively manage my economy when building large projects, specifically commander upgrades.
Here's an example: I have a relatively large T3 economy (let's say + 5000 energy, +100 mass), with a T3 level commander. I want to add the teleport module, or T2 stealth/maser/
The trouble is, all of those upgrades use huge amounts of energy. As soon as I start upgrading, my energy plummets into the negative and completely stalls other projects (eg, ASFs).
So, when this situation arises in game, my current (lousy) solution is to select my ACU, and spam the tab key to pause/unpause construction. This sort-of works, but I can't do anything else at the same time very effectively.
I only ever did unit mods, so I'm not sure if this is even possible/feasible to do. But, what I would like is a mod that either detects when your economy is crashing like this and appropriately throttles the build power to that project (so that you still have + ~10% of your energy production left; everything else is dedicated to the big project), or alternatively, allows you to set the build power individually on a project.
The end result being that you would be able to throttle back build power to an expensive project, so that you can continue producing other units whilst having an expensive project on the side, or on the back burner so to speak.
[edit]: Come to think of it, this could be useful for other big projects such as T3+ artillery too, which consume huge quantities of mass. Since mass generally increases at a slow rate, manually toggling construction isn't as bothersome as energy, though.
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So is this possible/doable? If someone is willing to make it that'd be fantastic; otherwise, I'm willing to learn how to do it myself if someone can get me pointed in the right direction. Or if it's completely impossible and I'm crazy for asking something like this, that's fine too - I'd just like to have a final answer to my questions of "IS THERE A BETTER WAY?!?" when this happens in a game.
Thanks for reading!|||You may want to take a look a how those fab managers work. I will try to dig up the right mod that I use but it basically works by adding a selected mass fabricator via a UI element to deactivate it when energy supply drops too low. It deactivates fabs in sequence and tech level (I think T2 turns off first then T3).
So I think it has all the pieces you need:
- Movable UI element
- Ability to select a unit for "control"
- Perform a function based on energy reserves
The only thing you may need is to figure out how to access the pause function rather than the turn off function that mass fabricators have.
Edit:
Found it, Mass Fab Manager by Goom
Remember mod creators, please list you mods in the Relased Mods List, the top sticky in the forum. So very useful.|||Thanks for the link! That looks like it has all the pieces needed to get this working - as soon as I get some spare time I'll see if I can get this to work.
Thanks a ton mate!
|||ThaPear's Helper Tools mod (viewtopic.php?f=7&t=39435) has an energy/mass consumption autopause feature that would be ideal for this. Set its update frequency to 1 (so it runs every tick), and then enable energy autopause on your ACU before starting the upgrade. It probably won't throttle it perfectly, and you'll want to make sure you have some energy storage so it doesn't bottom out repeatedly - any UI mod will have this problem, since there can be a small 1-2 tick delay between detecting something and issuing a command in the UI, and having the sim reflect that.Also, it looks like Goom's fab manager is specifically for vanilla SupCom, and probably won't work for FA. There are a few fab managers for FA, but AFAIK none of them except Helper Tools will work the way you want with non-massfab units without some serious changes to their code.|||Goom's Mass Fab manager works just fine in FA. Use it all the time even in online multiplayer games on GPGnet.
Thank you for ThaPear's mod, will have to try it out.
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