Well this needs to change

[Belanos]

I lost a Colonist to a drone because the path to a location was blocked, and the unit and it's Trooper escort got separated while seeking out a new path. I've run into a few problems before because of this redirection, though this latest has been the worst so far. If a unit finds it's initial path blocked it should cancel it's orders and wait for instructions, rather than try to find another way around. Which usually doesn't work out to well from what I've seen. With the way it is now, you don't really want to move a stack of units more than one tile at a time, because there might be a problem going any further than that. Which is a really annoying way to travel across a map.

[ErissN6]

Yes, a Follow order is needed...

[void]

Yeah, we have something planned for this since it's indeed an annoyance. I guess we'll do it along the lines of all units moving the same path with the speed of the slowest unit, and if one unit can't make the move none will.

[jdmillard]

That would be great. If someone wants their aircraft to zip ahead to scout, they can control that manually. Or if they want a stack of air units to arrive at the destination sooner, they can have two different stacks (which is easy to create, thanks to the intuitive ctrl+click system). Therefore, I don't imagine there would be any problem with that system.

Question: From time to time, I've seen an interesting phenomenon where I'll tell a unit to move a short distance away (2 or 3 hexes) and it takes a different path than the one that was displayed (the one that the UI said it was going to take). This happened to me yesterday. All in the same turn, no aliens or enemies, no fungus or forest, no fog of war, it was a single unit all alone. The tank simply took a route contrary to what it said it was going to take. The destination was only 2 hexes away and it was no big deal because at the end of the day, he arrived where I wanted him to. But why did this happen? Yesterday, it wasn't a problem, but it's gotten me into trouble in the past.

[Belanos]

Yeah, we have something planned for this since it's indeed an annoyance. I guess we'll do it along the lines of all units moving the same path with the speed of the slowest unit, and if one unit can't make the move none will.

That would be much better, thanks. One thing I also noticed about troop movements is that they will simply pass by any enemy units they happen to come across. They should instead cancel their movement orders when there's an option for combat, or even retreat. There's been a number of times when some enemy would appear out of the fog of war, but there was nothing I could about it since the unit was stuck on it's movement order.

[boulugre]

My main grief about movement is that orders given in previous turns will be automatically executed by your units at the beginning of your turn, meaning that if something came up in between turn you are unable to react to it.

The typical case is a former doing some work somewhere, between turns an alien unit pops out of the fog of war next to it, and because at the beginning of your turn the former automatically continues to do its terraforming job and spend its movement points, you have no opportunity to flee.

A way of fixing that would be to execute queued order at the end of a player turn, and not at the beginning. This would also make sense in multiplayer, as previous turn queued order will happen before any human player can react, I think the gameplay would be nicer if you would still need to click each order (yes its kind of a spam click fest...but I am ok with it ) giving the opportunity to the fastest player to retreat damage units, reinforce a position etc etc

Another feature which is badly missing is a 'build road to' for formers.... very annoying to build each road tile by tile, it's a lot of no fun micro management.

[jdmillard]

The typical case is a former doing some work somewhere, between turns an alien unit pops out of the fog of war next to it, and because at the beginning of your turn the former automatically continues to do its terraforming job and spend its movement points, you have no opportunity to flee.

I absolutely agree. It's interesting that the order to heal and the order to "skip" are not executed until the end of the turn. That is to say that you can change your mind or cancel mid-turn but still use the movement points. Why couldn't terraforming work similarly? It would still take the same number of turns to complete the enhancement, but grant some flexibility when giving commands. Excellent post boulugre!

[NightReaper]

There should also be some method of allowing, for lack of a better word, "safest route" vs. "fastest route". Too many times units go trail blazing through a fungus patch on their way to combat ignoring a perfectly good road system only to get clobbered because of damage suffered in the "fungus patch". If player was at least queried before the unit embarked on this journey it would be a good thing.

[Belanos]

Another feature which is badly missing is a 'build road to' for formers.... very annoying to build each road tile by tile, it's a lot of no fun micro management.

Yes, I mentioned this in another post somewhere. It gets really tedious having to build roads tile by tile, especially since the auto-Formers don't build roads themselves. Which I don't quite understand why. Maybe it's a bug since that's an option in the automation choices. I've noticed that not even the AI Formers are building roads, which is something of a handicap for them. Someone mentioned that having roads in AI territory would be an advantage to any attacking force, but all that needs to be done there is have a system like Civ 4 has where an invading unit doesn't get any benefit from a roadway, but the defender does.

There should also be some method of allowing, for lack of a better word, "safest route" vs. "fastest route". Too many times units go trail blazing through a fungus patch on their way to combat ignoring a perfectly good road system only to get clobbered because of damage suffered in the "fungus patch". If player was at least queried before the unit embarked on this journey it would be a good thing.

I agree. I've seen Seekers go through fungus and take damage even though their was a "healthy" path around it that they could have taken, and gotten to their destination in the same amount of time. Units shouldn't be going through the stuff unless there's absolutely no way around it. Which there usually is.

[BlueTemplar]

Introducing a weird rule about roads not being usable in enemy territory to compensate for the shortcomings of the AI doesn't seem like good game design to me...

Endless Space has this button that you have to click so that the queued movement of your units is executed.

I thought that when an enemy unit got into range to strike a former, that former automatically cleared all of its orders?

[Belanos]

Introducing a weird rule about roads not being usable in enemy territory to compensate for the shortcomings of the AI doesn't seem like good game design to me...

It wouldn't just be the AI who'd benefit from this, the player would also. It acts as a defensive bonus, so that it takes an enemy stack longer to get to it's target while the defender can respond more quickly. And it's not as unrealistic as it may seem. An invading army might have to deal with local resistance and booby traps along the roadways, so they might have to move more slowly than they normally could.

I thought that when an enemy unit got into range to strike a former, that former automatically cleared all of its orders?

That's not been my experience. I lost a couple of them when I first started playing because they wouldn't stop what they were doing.

[jdmillard]

I agree with Blue Templar here.

However, the developers were recently looking for specific trait ideas to diversify the factions. What if just Imperium had "local resistance" meaning that enemies would not get a movement advantage when moving over roads in his territory?