I have a feature request for something that I feel is long overdue in RTS games. I had high hopes that Supreme Commander would be the first to implement it, but I was disappointed (With the lack of said feature, not with the game. Great game.)

What I want is the ability to assemble groups of buildings or units and order them all to be built with a single click of a button. It's sort of like customizing a ship in a standard 4x game, but instead you're customizing a fleet or a planetary infrastructure and greatly simplifying the process for the user to build them.

Fleets are easy - Dictate that a strike fleet has 2 Kols, an Akkan, 8 Flak Frigates, and 5 Siege frigates. Then select your factories or planetary system to work on the fleet and tell it to build them - the units are then automatically qeued up in the available factories, and you've just instructed the game to build a 16-ship fleet with a few mouse clicks.

That's the basics. For increased sophisticated you could have that fleet form up in formation, have it's own group designation or fleet icon at zoomed out levels, and (getting fancy here) have factories automatically build the fleet reinforcements when it's recuperating in a friendly system with factories.

Regarding buildings, it can range from the simple defended interdictor (Phase space interdictor surrounded by four Gauss defense platforms) to the complicated (Just colonized a terran world in the back? Let's make it a research world. One click later I select the 'research world' customized building set I ordered earlier... six research stations, resource mines on the local asteroids, a few hangers and turrets for defense (later on this planet gets a bit closer to the front lines than I like, so I'll manually build a few more defense structures.), and an assortment of trading posts and broadcast centers.)


If you guys can implement something like this, even just the basics of a 'one click fleet or building set' with static selections instead of customizable ones it will be a giant leap forward in managing RTS infrastructure. And if you can let us customize the fleets and building sets we can build either in or out of game, we will respond by building vast interstellar empires at the touch of a button, and we can focus on the overall strategy game instead of clicking on 'build frigate' a dozen times.

I have faith that one day this feature will be an RTS standard - how could we ever have played games building one structure at a time? And I'd love to see Sins of a Solar Empire make it's mark as the first RTS to do so.