Do You Use Commanders in the game? Yes, No, Why?

[Giani]

I also think the players are lazy.

The players aren't lazy...
It is just difficult to micromanage, macromanage, or whatever is it's name.
But maybe you were playing whit some "random zombies" that were playing WZ at 03:00 AM.

[Merowingg]

Well many of them is I think.

I also like your 3 a.m. theory of gamers very much! I remember myself falling asleep many times in the past, but my two friends were willing to play another, and yet another Warzone session, and I played as this sort of vegetable

I even remember once I was producing units, so I waited, I look again, and wow, I have so many units! I have fallen asleep during the game and the chat was spammed with. Mero go. Mero are you there? Mero! Meeerrrrrooooo! and finally "Great he is sleeping.." hehehe it made me laugh and wake up a little. My friends knew it was very late hour at my country.

[zerosum]

Commanders are good on the paper, but at the end they cause more problems than they solve. They're expensive, behave strangely and even worse, they make the units attached to them as smart as a vegetable. The only pro I would grant them is that they get XP faster than lambda units.

The factory rally-point is not really interesting for me because I tend to use 2 (or more) factories to gain time. The repair facility rally-point would be good, if I didn't find units stuck at the station waiting for God knows what. Many times, I have detach and retake control of units manually to get them out of the queue, repair them, and re-attach them to commander. Not really efficient.

To finish, attaching units to a commander leads previous group assignment to get lost (apart from artillery group, but I never attach them to commander), so that I have to re-select the units and re-assign them to a group after being attached to a commander. A real pain in the ass.

[Giani]

Commanders are good on the paper, but at the end they cause more problems than they solve. They're expensive, behave strangely and even worse, they make the units attached to them as smart as a vegetable. The only pro I would grant them is that they get XP faster than lambda units.

The factory rally-point is not really interesting for me because I tend to use 2 (or more) factories to gain time. The repair facility rally-point would be good, if I didn't find units stuck at the station waiting for God knows what. Many times, I have detach and retake control of units manually to get them out of the queue, repair them, and re-attach them to commander. Not really efficient.

To finish, attaching units to a commander leads previous group assignment to get lost (apart from artillery group, but I never attach them to commander), so that I have to re-select the units and re-assign them to a group after being attached to a commander.

That is the reason of why I don't use commanders...
Instead of making everything more "simple", they make you to micromanage more

[Merowingg]

and we do not want things to be difficult! we want games where we pres "W" button all the time and a characters go through the game authomatically! in RTS, lets say W and T, as target, well we do not want to go beyond with easyness do we?

[zerosum]

and we do not want things to be difficult! we want games where we pres "W" button all the time and a characters go through the game authomatically! in RTS, lets say W and T, as target, well we do not want to go beyond with easyness do we?

Wow. You seem a little on edge about laziness, don't you?

It's not about making the game easier or not, but rather about allowing to focus on important actions while delegating less important stuff to the machine: there's nothing wrong with that in my book. The problem with commanders being that you need to check them every now and then whereas there is probably more interesting / important things to do.

[Giani]

It's not about making the game easier or not, but rather about allowing to focus on important actions while delegating less important stuff to the machine: there's nothing wrong with that in my book. The problem with commanders being that you need to check them every now and then whereas there is probably more interesting / important things to do.

+1

[Merowingg]

Like what? I believe suing the commanders show even a sort of style

[Tim9]

Yes I do, by now they are the unit why I love WZ. I'm pretty new to WZ and didn't go MP yet. In SP I build one at the beginning and than the force rises.
As said above, path finding is an issue (with direct fire, U cant fight through over hills with them)
But they greatly manage all other things, rely points, repair, bonus sharing, assigned artillery structures.
Still don't know if an assigned sensor unit helps them.

[E-102 Gamma]

An idea occurred to me a bit earlier, after reading up on the kinds of bonuses and whatnot commanders provide:

Why not just build a bunch of them, assign random units to them, and mix them in with one's otherwise normal attack force?

The assigned units would enjoy movement speed and accuracy bonuses, if only small ones, and would take less damage, if only slightly less. And given their high hit points and long ranges, the commanders themselves could potentially make good distractions from the main attack force (read: bullet sponges).

Some cons with this strategy that I can think of would be that the commanders and their units might potentially end up out-running the rest of the group, thanks to the movement speed bonuses. And I'm not sure about this, but I think that if one of the commanders is destroyed, the units that were assigned to it would not be re-assigned to the group. Commanders might also be simply too expensive for this to be worth it.

Not a perfect strategy, of course, but it might make a good little something to try sometime.

And I haven't actually played any of the 3.x versions yet (my excuse being that I've been too busy with other things), so this could all be nonsense coming from someone who has no idea what he's talking about. If that's the case, never mind.

[NoQ]

E-102 Gamma, it is extremely hard to properly micromanage a group that has both commander-assisted and not-commander-assisted units.

[Stratadrake]

You can assign commanders to number groups the same as any other unit. Unfortunately, this does not apply to their attached units - attach a unit to commander and it is automatically removed from any numbered groups (unlike with sensors and artillery, where the group number is preserved).

[NoQ]

The main problem is with using shortcut keys to select different sets of units (i mostly use Ctrl+Z), after that all selected units are deassigned from their commanders.

[Andrie]

I don't like a commander, in my opinion: they die to easy

[Merowingg]

That is why those are to be kept behind the units.. commander comands.. And also you make it python tracks to be more difficult to be destroyed, or even tiger. I think you do something bad here.. I hope you do not use commanders only in attacks, do you?

How to use commanders is shown while in game in campaign, after few first missions.