Movement: shake it up to move it
Posted: Wed Nov 10, 2010 9:56 am
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.
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.