Attachments

[alaric99x]

I was having trouble attaching units and I recall someone else on the forum mentioning the fact that they were never able to attach units. I discovered that you have to attach and then immediately give some kind of order to the overall formation. Attachment alone doesn't "stick" without a formation order. When you attach without an order the unit shows up as attached, but doesn't stay attached.

[HansBolter]

I brought this up to Arjuna a while back and I believe it is being dealt with in the upcoming patch.

I was finding that late arriving sub-units of a batallion in a paratroop drop scenario would sit at the drop point and never move to the location of their parent batallion after being reattached following the drop. He has rewritten the code so that they will move to link up with the headquarters and take their place within the batallion perimeter based on the standing orders the batallion currently has rather than waiting for the HQ to receive fresh orders.

I belive it should work better after this next patch, but we will need Arjuna to confirm that for us.

[simovitch]

I just verified that the auto-reattach works with the new patch. I didn't even know it was going to be fixed - it works great!

If you play with orders delay there will be some time while the parent HQ re-asesses it's plan with the new attachment, as well it should.

[alaric99x]

Yeah, it seems that some reinforcements arrive already attached to their parent HQ and some have to be manually attached, which causes some delay until they begin to move with their parent units.  But that's not what I meant, I was talking about attaching units that are not organic to the command in question, such as re-attaching one of the Bde assets to augment a Bn.  

[HansBolter]

My understanding is that action doesn't constitute "attachment" in the same sense as "re-attachment" using the avaiable button in the interface.

As I understand it, the action of attaching an inorganic unit to another for temporary command purposes is accomplished by selecting the desired "parent" unit and then control+clicking on the unit to be attached as a prelude to implementing a new command. If the units are just selected together and no command is issued then the action of "attachment" doesn't take hold. The attachement is only binding if a command is issued. This appears to be what you were referring to.

You are, in essence, attaching them for a specific operation and not just for ongoing administrative purposes which is not what the attachment function is intended for as I see it. If no operation is ordered, then no attachment occurs.

Anyone more in the know, please coorect me if my understanding is incorrect.

[simovitch]

Alaric,

OK, I see what you mean. The ability to attach non-organic units 'on the fly' was not addressed in the Patch. sorry for the confusion. I think the whole attach/detach thing is being reworked for BFTB.

Hansbolter, I would think that eventually we could highlight an HQ that is currently on, say a defend task, and then ctrl-click an inorganic support unit to assume the current defend task. Simply put, have ctrl-click work just like the UI reattach button does now. Just a thought.

[RedDevil]

Alaric,

maybe what you are recalling is the suggestion to issue a defend in situ order after attaching or re-attaching units.
This is because in many circumstances you do not want the HQ commander to shuffle units around to take into account the new unit which came under his command. When you have set up a perfectly nice position and units are dug in the last thing you want is to see them moving about.

So when (re)attaching a unit or creating a battle group with defensive purposes and some of the units are already where you want them to be, it is better to put all the units in position, then attach them and issue a defend (in situ) order.

More in general, you should be very careful with re-attaching since I have seen some coys taking the shortest path to rejoin the HQ disregarding obvious threats.

Cheers,

RedDevil

[Arjuna]

ORIGINAL: HansBolter

My understanding is that action doesn't constitute "attachment" in the same sense as "re-attachment" using the avaiable button in the interface.

As I understand it, the action of attaching an inorganic unit to another for temporary command purposes is accomplished by selecting the desired "parent" unit and then control+clicking on the unit to be attached as a prelude to implementing a new command. If the units are just selected together and no command is issued then the action of "attachment" doesn't take hold. The attachement is only binding if a command is issued. This appears to be what you were referring to.

You are, in essence, attaching them for a specific operation and not just for ongoing administrative purposes which is not what the attachment function is intended for as I see it. If no operation is ordered, then no attachment occurs.

Anyone more in the know, please coorect me if my understanding is incorrect.

Correct.

[Arjuna]

ORIGINAL: RedDevil
More in general, you should be very careful with re-attaching since I have seen some coys taking the shortest path to rejoin the HQ disregarding obvious threats.

Re-attaching does not of itself cause units to use shortest path. They in fact will use whatever route option their boss has chosen. Where the boss uses "unspecified" then they can choose. However, about the only time they will ever use shortest is if they are assaulting or they are very close to the defensive location ( ie within a few hundred metres ).

[06 Maestro]

Ha, and I thought I was doing something wrong; I should have known better...

[RedDevil]

ORIGINAL: Arjuna

Re-attaching does not of itself cause units to use shortest path. They in fact will use whatever route option their boss has chosen. Where the boss uses "unspecified" then they can choose. However, about the only time they will ever use shortest is if they are assaulting or they are very close to the defensive location ( ie within a few hundred metres ).

I wrote shortest but I really meant quickest (i.e. shortest in time [:)])

Since I have learnt my lesson I am no longer reattaching a unit which is more than 2 Km away from the HQ, but I remember vividly the frustration of seeing one coy rejoining the rest of the Bn passing through the objective I was preparing to attack (with the help of that coy). As you can imagine the coy never quite rejoined [:D]
I have to add that this was HTTR, so things may very well have improved in the meanwhile.

Cheers,

RedDevil

[alaric99x]

As I understand it, the action of attaching an inorganic unit to another for temporary command purposes is accomplished by selecting the desired "parent" unit and then control+clicking on the unit to be attached as a prelude to implementing a new command. If the units are just selected together and no command is issued then the action of "attachment" doesn't take hold. The attachement is only binding if a command is issued. This appears to be what you were referring to.

Right, that's what I meant.  It took me a while to figure this out.  You can give a "reattach" command to an organic unit, but the only way to attach an inorganic unit is at the same time that you give an order to the formation that the unit is being attached to.  It's not a big problem, but there should be a way to just attach something at any time.

[Arjuna]

RedDevil,
 

I have to add that this was HTTR, so things may very well have improved in the meanwhile.

[8|] They and a whole lot of other issues sure have. The place to raise issues in HTTR is in the HTTR forum. Can we please keep the focus here on COTA. Thanks.[:)]
 
BTW there are no range limits for re-attaching. However, I would councel against doing so if the unit to be reattached is isolated from its HQ - ie there is a great mass of enemy betwixt and between the two and no obvious bypass route where they can be avoided. Better to wait till after a line of comms is open.
 

[alaric99x]

OK Dave, keeping the focus on COTA, could you consider a way to attach an inorganic unit without having to give a succeeding command to the overall formation?  Something similar to the reattach command for organic units?

[Arjuna]

Yes we can and we are looking at this for BFTB. Well we are at least doing the first part of the work required to affect this - ie we are redesigning the forceGroup class. Currently this class has a subject, atts and dets, subordinates. It's very space efficient, which back in 1996 was a factor. Nowdays saving space is not so important. One of the drawbacks with that structure is that aany atts have to be at the top level - ie they are attached to the subject. It cannot represent cases where you have non-organic units attached to some subordinate down the line.
 
Paul has finished his first cut of the redesign which will see us moving to a tree structure, which will support attachments at all levels. This should then enable us to readily attach units at any level. We hope to first off enable three different views in the OB display, the present organic view, a view of the structure for the player's plan and another for the current task or plan structure. Of necessity these are different but up to now we couldn't really represent these in a timely fashion.
 
Once this is done then we can look at a UI feature to attach units to a players task ( ie update the current player plan structure ) and modify the AI so this can be done with minimum interference to the existing plan execution - ie where possible to avoid replanning. To make this work we probably need to introduce the notion of "reserve tasks" for all plans ( as I discussed elsewhere ). Then we can simply add a new attachment into the reserve group without causing a complete replan. That would work nice. But we would then need new code that would consider committing those reserves during the periodic reassessments as well as on replanning.
 
I'm not sure we'll have time to implement the latter for BFTB. We'll see. It may be a case of taking this step by step and eventually we'll have the functionality.