Limited Simple Unit control

first i just want to say that I really love the game and appreciate all the work you put into it.

i have a small suggestion, from what i can see now in alpha 5 and 6, the AI for the villagers needs some work, it’s a bit buggy and sometimes they frustrate you.
so I think that a limited unit control system would be very useful specially in this early stage of the game.
explaining farther you could tell your workers to Build this building (with a right click menu maybe?) and they make it there priority no matter how far it’s.
and also make the gather command apply to left down objects on the ground so that it makes picking up those objects a priority.
you can also add a simple move command (“go here”) but it’s not necessary if it’s not you want.
i don’t not now much about AI programmer (nothing really :P) so it might not be as easy as i think it is.
and also if this is not the kind of approach you wanted for your game, i understand. but (if it’s not super hard) can you add this feature for the alpha stage, or until you squash those bugs, so that the game is more playable for people. and thanks again, and sorry for the long post :P.

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Personally I don’t like that idea too much, and it did not work out too well to have something along these lines for the trapper before. It might be that some middle ground could be found, but my preference is to have as little direct control as possible. Just my two cents.

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well as i said it doesn’t have to stick to the actual release, it’s just to make the alpha more playable until they fix the bugs…

True enough, you did say that. Might be alright in that sense.

Then again, it might make it trickier to identify problems with the autonomous unit AI. I guess the best would be to have it as an option, or something… but that might then be too much of a development time investment for something that would perhaps only be temporary…

Well, I don’t know :slight_smile:

Its a good idea, but its not the angle Team Radiant seem to be going for. and as @Phagocytosis said it would be to much development time to make it as an option.

Something else to consider: if you add this in as a temporary fix to AI issues… will it ever disappear? Bug reports come in about fixing the unit control, AI fixes are put off in favour of other things because there is a temp fix out there, and before you know it you’re shipping a very different game.

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I agree with some of your points, @Vampire737, I think there should probably be a ‘priority list’ UI feature which shows what people are doing and the order they will be done in. From this feature, the priorities could be edited without getting too micro-manigey

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i agree with @dwarf
and i just want to say that i don’t know about you but the game is currently 30mins playable at tops for me.
as eventually the works stop doing anything and they become idle forever and then everyone else just stops working as well. so i though if there was a temporary fix system (maybe a mod?) to -force- the villagers to do something you want them to do, then the game would be a lot more playable.

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Is this Alpha 5 or 6, this bug was very frequent for Alpha 5, it was reported and put down to pathfinding, which has been improved in Alpha 6, it would be worrying if it reappeared

Well, it is still there, as reported here. However, when I ran into it in alpha 6, and I then saved and reloaded, the workers started working again (see the same report). @Vampire737, you might want to try that when it next happens.

i don’t mean to whine but I did try saving and loading although it did fix it -sometimes- the bug will occur a few mins later, which will result in the continues process of saving and loading…
but again i understand that this is an alpha

although after reading through the topic provided by @Phagocytosis … i saw that one of the team members said that it’s a path finding issue which will properly render my suggestion useless, but it was on an older version, not sure if it’s the same problem. anyway i will try and see if the bar on the left bottom corner is yellow when the problem occur (as suggested by the team member in the topic)…

I didn’t see the recurrence yet, but to be fair I only played for something like 10–15 minutes after that save/load workaround, so you may well be correct. That’s a good idea, by the way, about checking the debugging information. It could be the pathfinder… but in the case of my latest report, you can see that most of the processing is in “idle” with occasionally a bit in “lua”, and hardly anything in the rest, including the pathfinder.

after testing i noticed that the problem IS path finding indicated with the yellow bar on the bottom right corner, and also i noticed that this problem occurs mostly with buildings (although it happens to everyone else doing everything else) and saving and loading DOESn’t help cause only -some- workers would work and then they stop again, anyway it appears that my suggestion is pointless if this is indeed a path finding bug. nevertheless i will keep my suggestion as they might find it useful.

@Vampire737, I would recommend posting your findings in the relevant topic as well, so that we have that as a centralized point to discuss the issue. I understand the post here as well, as it’s also relevant to the present discussion, but I think in this case it’s fine to have it in both places :smile:

A simple “go here” command would be very nice I had some workers chase a goblin very far and finding them a task to get them to come back before more goblins killed them was very hard since at the time my community was at a stable place and there was little for them to do at the moment.

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Also without at least simple control of single or groups of units how will we explore the world?

A “Rally here” button could be added alongside the current one on the fight and defend menu. Exploration would need some different tools, though. It could be put on either the ? tab, or the Fight and Defend menu could be renamed the Campaign menu.

I think its a great Idea. recently my carpenter was just chilling and he got killed by goblins and the goblins didn’t enter my footman’s range so he didn’t do anything.