Aftermath's Feedback/Wishlist

Aftermath, very cool stuff. Relic take notes

Feature: Picture in Picture

A fairly niche game that came out a few years ago was 'Planetary Annihilation', which, for its many faults, had some really innovative features. One of these features was called 'Picture in Picture'. This was where you basically had a smaller second camera which you could set to watch wherever you wanted on the map at any zoom level:



You could then swap the main screen for this small screen at any time, this allowed you basically to have eyes on the back of your head.

It would be amazingly cool if we had the same thing in Coh, where a small second camera could be set watching an engagement and we could switch between them via hotkey.



Then switch....



This way its much easier to keep track of multiple engagements at once. Like the minimap, you would be able to issue commands directly on the second screen and it would also have its separate zoom. As to where to put in, having it either bottom left or top right I feel would be sufficient but it would also be cool if you could move the minimap to top right instead and have this there or top left also. Ideally we would get the option of just putting this where we like. It would also be good to have a setting which switches off the feature entirely for those who don't use it.

Feature: Hotkey to Select all Units of the Selected type.

This is perhaps another improvement to the selectors which I said earlier but it would be cool if you had a hotkey which expands the selection to all units of the unit you have selected. So say you have a Pio selected and you want to select all Pios regardless of where they are to power repair something, you select the pio on screen and then do Ctrl + A or something to select all your pios.

Feature: Events For When Units are Fully Reinforced/Healed/Repaired

This would be extremely useful event types and its kind of surprising they don't already exist. When a unit is in base and ready to come back out onto the field, I want a notification for that.

Again, being able to configure when this is triggered would be nice, maybe I want to get the event once they're fully healed or merely fully reinforced, its a preference thing.

Feature: Global Unit Control Improvements

There should be a layer for team weapons, this would be far more useful than the emplacements one, although I don't suggest replacing it:



It would also be nice if we could configure ourselves what the ordering within this row should be, as everyone would have their own preferences.

In fact, better would be a screen like this:



This way we have total control, we can:

- Edit what units go on what row (in this example I have a dedicated AT row and a support weapon row)

- Drag and drop which order the unit types should be in.

- Set whether or not control groups should be ignored on the row ordering.

- Set which order units of a certain type should be ordered, such as time built, highest health, lowest health, max vet, control groups.

It would also be cool if we could place this UI element in the top left if we wanted and swap it with the events.

Feature: Selection Display Improvements

Similar to the Global Unit Controls, I'd want to be able to order the unit cards in the selection as I see fit, currently the ordering is pretty haphazard:



I'd want to be able to set which units appear on which rows and in which order:



Resulting in:



This is useful for a couple of reasons, not only because it makes it easier to understand visually, but also from the perspective of navigating the matrix, its far easier because you know what the ordering is going to be, you can get to the units that you care about most via tab (in this case the full health units) faster, but also because you can cycle through the rows of the selection rather having to tab a single really long row, its easier to navigate. This indirectly makes selectors like select all on screen way more powerful.

Feature: Events For Idle Units and Events for Resource Floating

It would be so useful if you received notifications whenever units became idle, as most of the time this happens off screen and is not something you immediately notice. Likewise for resource floating, if you could set at what limits you want to receive the event (for example, I personally would want a notification once I hit either 300/500/700 manpower, 200/300 munitions or 150/250 fuel) then it would remind you to spend those resources. Everyone has their own idea of what float means so that's why it would be better if it was configurable.

Feature: Configuring Idle Unit Time

This is a simple one, we should be able to configure how long a unit remains idle before it is marked as idle.

Feature: Custom Team Colours

With all the changes to team colours to get them 'just right' its wonder we aren't able to configure what the team colours are ourselves.

Feature: Show Team Resources



The use case for this I feel is obvious enough, see how far your ally is from a tank, loiter, if they're floating etc. That's what this feature is used for in other RTS games.

It would be good though if in the settings you could configure an opt out, so in random team games you don't get pestered.