How to 'deselect' a unit on the map?

[larryfulkerson]

ORIGINAL: goodwoodrw
To prevent unwanted movement

Great point. It's happened to me more times than I'd care to say right now.

[Tamas]

ORIGINAL: radic202

ORIGINAL: alwaysdime

I vote for a deselect as well. The use case would be you have a unit selected and you want to click on an enemy stack to cycle thru their units you can't do it. You have the combat arrow so you have to select a different unit not adjacent to the enemy. Not a huge issue but something that should be patched at some point. I'm surprised its never come up in the past 20 years.

I am actually surprised it did not come up during Beta Testing? Please consider this for an upcoming patch.

Indeed this is a perfectly valid point, and something we should had thought of that will bother new players, so we will see if we can add a deselect function in the first update.

The reason it didn't come up is that once you have a bit of routine with the game you never notice this. You'll be going from one unit to the next, not wanting to deselect.

[aperfecturkel]

Understandable! I also think I'm with some of the folks here -- necessary or not, it would mean parity with most other strategy games new players may be coming from, on something as fundamental as unit selection/deselection. Anecdotally, I'm new to TOAW but certainly not to grog games, so it doesn't throw me too much - but I can't shake the feeling as if something is stuck to the pointer. [:)] I appreciate the consideration for adding it in!

[terry1040]

Great request.
It has always bugged me to constantly have a unit selected. Please add "the deselect / not select" feature in a future patch.[&o]
I at times just want to move my mouse w/o dragging a movement arrow.
Cheers
Terry

[ralphtricky]

I'll look into it and see how much work it would be simply setting the currentUnit to null when escape is hit is easy, but I suspect that a lot of code expects that there will be a current unit.

[thewood1]

Does it hurt anything to have a unit selected all the time? I was just wondering what the underlying issue is.

[larryfulkerson]

ORIGINAL: thewood1
Does it hurt anything to have a unit selected all the time? I was just wondering what the underlying issue is.

It doesn't hurt anything in my opinion but it does increase the chance of an unwanted movement of the current
unit. Your finger twitches and a unit moves as a result and you have to undo it. Some people, including me,
would like to not have that happen.

[thewood1]

OK, just seems like it might be a lot of effort (potentially) for not much value. But I guess the devs will answer that one.

[rocketman71]

I find that always having a selected unit to be bothersome, is that the movement red arrow appears all over the place which clutters things. I did eventually get used to it in TOAW III, but if a "ESC" button hit would remove it all the better to have the option.

[winkr7]

Suppose you wanted to play a board game, and as soon as you opened the box one of the pieces was stuck to your finger. You could still play because you have to move pieces, but wouldn't that bother you?

[thewood1]

My finger isn't stuck to the screen. Frankly, I have play the game since version 1 from Talonsoft and never even considered it. All of the old hex games were like that.

[winkr7]

Computers iterate through every piece when they plan a move, and when programmers want an easy to program user interface they make sure that a unit is selected at all times so all they have to do is make the user iterate through every piece. If you play chess though, you look at the board and select a piece, you don't iterate though every pawn rejecting each possible move.

So, to reiterate, it would be nice to be able to put down the piece.

[Stardog765]

This is a really great request if we can get it. Its always been something I would have liked in TOAW.

[ralphtricky]

I'll put it down as a request. It's not as simple as it seems like it should be. The problem is that the unit panel on the top right is tied to the current unit, so changing that is going to be harder than it sounds. There are also things like the formation which expects a current formation and several other dialogs.

[Stardog765]

Makes sense ya, isnt that always the case? Things that sound simple never are quite that simple.

It is appreciated you guys are willing to look into it though.

[Meyer1]

This really bothered me at first... now I don't even notice it. Not sure if we want to invest the programmer precious time in this...

[warspite1]

ORIGINAL: larryfulkerson

Why would you ever want a condition where you DON'T have a current unit?

warspite1

I think its really annoying. For example - particularly early on - there will be a lot of clicking various buttons to find out what is going on. I really dislike the red trail that accompanies my every mouse move...

To be honest I can't think of a game where there isn't a deselect. I am sure its something that will be gotten used to, but if at all possible I too would like a deselect feature added please.

[geozero]

ORIGINAL: ralphtrick

There isn't a way to deselect all units that I know of, it's never come up.

Then it wasn't tested properly.

[thewood1]

I think he means in the 20 years TOAW has been around.

[winkr7]

Make up another piece that is just the no_piece_selected piece and have it get selected when nothing is selected.