Movement: shake it up to move it

[johndoesecond]

Hi all,

I believe I now have played quite extensively the game to be able to see one pattern with movement orders behavior.

By design, when you give a movement order (or any other order requiring prior movement tasks) to a HQ (at bn, reqt, or higher levels), the battlegroup starts moving after the planning period.

Then, if something happens (e.g. enemy unit encounter), the battlegorup halts here and there. However, after the enemy unit has been dealt with, the whole force sometimes still stays still for quite some time.

Now, I know this is a reasonable behavior in the real world (it takes time to reorg, replan, ecc. to re-start the movement of 600+ people with all their equipment). However, I discovered that sometimes "shaking up" the formation in some way makes it immediately to start moving again.

I want to be very precise here: by "shaking up" I mean sorts of changes in the order settings that do not require re-planning. Things such as aggro level or a quick few seconds change from one to another Rest level and back. Especially effective in this regard is moving slightly an intermediate waypoint by few millimeters: that really does the job!


Let me give an example.

Let's say I have a Regt. with 2 Bn. I order the Regt. to move somewhere. Along the road something happens to halt the regiment. That something is now solved. All the units in the battlegroup have the move icon and if you click on them the status is "moving", but they are still still.
You'd say, "give them some time, they need to pick their bits and rethink things a bit". BUT, if I click on minimal rest and then after few seconds put it back where it was (say to normal), they immediately start to move.

It doesn't work every time (and of course, if that obstacle is still there, chances are nothing changes).


My point in all this is the following:

1. I WANT to have delays as in the real world, so it is appropriate to simulate that.

2. However, I do not want there to be a gamey trick that "shakes up" (or "wakes up") the game engine which due to a bug or an internal glitch fell asleep.

I mean, if there are good reasons the formation to be halted, it should stay halted no matter how much I try to wake up the engine.
On the other hand, if there are no good reasons to stay halted, the engine should alone shake and wake itself up (so why not put the "shake up" routine programmatically into the main internal loop of the software?, so to say).


Don't get me wrong: this is not a rant: I love this game and think it is the best operational level game out there, leaving others behind by cosmical distance. That's why I enjoy contributing to make it even better.

Cheers.

[Shadrach]

I've noticed this same behaviour as well. Usually when for some reason a formation appears to not follow orders I try for instance to toggle the speed setting and voilâ they start moving again... I'd say a bug and not intentioned behaviour.

[simovitch]

This method of 'shaking things up' has been used by players, including myself, since Highway to the Reich. You can coax your forces out of their current re-assessment or inactivity up to a point to where they are simply exhausted and won't go no more.

I never got a rock-solid explanation from Panther about this (i.e. is it a bug or a feature?). It finally seemed to me to be just another form of micro-management and only gamey in the fact that the AI can't do it AFAIK.

[Arjuna]

Moving a waypoint should force a replan with orders delay.

What I suspect here is the underlying cause for why you want to "shake things up". Is it not that the force is not moving as it should. SHouldn't we then be focussing on making sure that the force moves as inteneded. I suspect a lot of this has been due to the formation lockup issues and route problems that I believe I have addressed in the latest set of builds.

We need to keep an eye on this. If you see a case where you want to shake up a force" then please save first and I'll try replicating it here. then i can ionvestigate and see what the reraql cause is.