For players without commander, if you have a building or research with 25 minutes left, and use a bronze KRACKEN or NEWTRON item you picked up from Import/Export, the extra 5 minutes of time is lost.
For players with commander, they can queue up another building or research then use the item to take advantage of that wasted time.
The 5 minutes in my example isn't a huge deal, but imagine we are talking about a gold item and 25 minutes remaining, where the majority of the time is wasted. This seems unfair.
I propose that when a time reduction item is used (KRACKEN, DETROID, or NEWTRON) and exceeds the work currently in progress/queued, a timer begins counting down for that extra time. Players can then begin more work, and the remaining time on the timer is applied to that work (potentially even completing it immediately, and beginning a new, shorter timer. This does not give a commander feature (building/research queue) to non commander players, as they still would need to start the next work manually, but would allow them to waste less items.
While typing this, I just realized this might allow for interesting player strategy as well, where items could be used preemptively to enable the timer, then building immediately built for purposes of a ninja.
For players with commander, they can queue up another building or research then use the item to take advantage of that wasted time.
The 5 minutes in my example isn't a huge deal, but imagine we are talking about a gold item and 25 minutes remaining, where the majority of the time is wasted. This seems unfair.
I propose that when a time reduction item is used (KRACKEN, DETROID, or NEWTRON) and exceeds the work currently in progress/queued, a timer begins counting down for that extra time. Players can then begin more work, and the remaining time on the timer is applied to that work (potentially even completing it immediately, and beginning a new, shorter timer. This does not give a commander feature (building/research queue) to non commander players, as they still would need to start the next work manually, but would allow them to waste less items.
While typing this, I just realized this might allow for interesting player strategy as well, where items could be used preemptively to enable the timer, then building immediately built for purposes of a ninja.