Currently studying CS and some other stuff. Best known for previously being top 50 (OCE) in LoL, expert RoN modder, and creator of RoN:EE’s community patch (CBP).

(header photo by Brian Maffitt)

  • 19 Posts
  • 75 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 17th, 2023

help-circle











  • It’s a small instance with fairly low activity (322 monthly active users reported). [edit: excluding this one] The only two local magazines I know with semi-consistent activity and >100 subs are @floatingisfun@fedia.io and @firefox@fedia.io and even the latter seems to be only sporadically active right now. The head mod of the former mag (hitstun) has done some cool local CSS stuff though!

    The thing about federation is that you can subscribe just fine to communities on remote instances, so that’s where you’ll probably end up getting most of your feed from.
















  • Rise of Nations (originally released back in 2003) had/has some interesting ideas to reduce some of the busywork:

    • Worker units will automatically try to gather/build nearby after a short (configurable) delay if they’re not doing anything.
    • Cities (the main worker-producing structure) has a rally point option that’s essentially “all nearby empty resource gathering”, so you can queue a dozen workers and they’ll distribute themselves as they’re created.
    • Production buildings can be set to loop over their current queue, letting you build continually without intervention as long as you maintain enough resources each time the queue “restocks”.
    • Units that engage in combat without being given an explicit target will try (with modest success) to aim for nearby units which they counter.

    For the most part, none of the implemented options are strictly better than micromanaging them yourself:

    • You will always spend less time idling workers if you micromanage them yourself.
    • The auto-rally-point doesn’t always prioritize the resources that you would if you did it yourself.
    • Queueing additional units is slightly less resource-efficient than only building one thing at a time.
    • Total DPS is higher if you manually micro effectively.

    But the options are there when you need them, which I think is a a nice design. It doesn’t completely remove best-in-class players being rewarded for their speed as a player, but does raise the “speed floor”, allowing slower players to get more bang for their buck APM-wise, and compete a bit more on the strategy/tactics side of the game instead.