Petition to reinstate Guard, Persue and Hold orders!

Discuss the future of Warzone 2100 with us.

Should the Guard Position & Pursue Orders be brought back?

Yes
74
94%
No
5
6%
 
Total votes: 79

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Berserk Cyborg
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Re: Petition to reinstate Guard, Persue and Hold orders!

Post by Berserk Cyborg »

@Per, can you check commit a81b3cf552f207fa3087ae8644edcd79fb273442 since I think it broke eventAttacked. No script, be it skirmish or campaign, receives that event anymore.
Per
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Re: Petition to reinstate Guard, Persue and Hold orders!

Post by Per »

Berserk Cyborg wrote:@Per, can you check commit a81b3cf552f207fa3087ae8644edcd79fb273442 since I think it broke eventAttacked. No script, be it skirmish or campaign, receives that event anymore.
Oops. Fixed. Sorry.
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alfred007
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Re: Petition to reinstate Guard, Persue and Hold orders!

Post by alfred007 »

I updated to master 37a2a30 and tested the new primary hold order. Trucks and repair units are now holding their position. Also repair units are repairing themselves with hold order. The only thing that is still different to the old behavior are artillery units. With the current hold order they are moving in the direction of the sensor they are attached to as soon as the sensor has no more objects in fire reach. With the old hold order they hold their position.
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Re: Petition to reinstate Guard, Persue and Hold orders!

Post by Bethrezen »

Ok so updated to master
warzone2100-master-20171112-115039-37a2a30.exe (12-Nov-2017)

Tested the changes to hold and while these are better, and are a step in the right direction, the hold order is still exhibiting incorrect behaviour.

When I set hold on a unit if I tell that unit to move to a new location when the unit arrives instead of resuming hold like it should it goes back to guard this is not correct behaviour.

When I set a unit to hold and I tell it to attack something the unit moves into position and attacks as instructed however when the attack order is complete the unit goes back to guard instead of hold this is incorrect behaviour

When I set a unit to hold and I tell the unit to go and repair again the unit goes to the repair bay gets fixed and then moves to the rally point or if attached to a commander back to the commander however when the order is complete the unit goes back to guard instead of hold this is incorrect behaviour

Are we noticing a pattern yet? Hold keeps switching off without the player explicitly turning it off which is incorrect behaviour when I set the hold state on a unit and then order that unit to do something once the order is complete the unit should resume the hold state and not guard.
I updated to master 37a2a30 and tested the new primary hold order. Trucks and repair units are now holding their position. Also repair units are repairing themselves with hold order. The only thing that is still different to the old behavior are artillery units. With the current hold order they are moving in the direction of the sensor they are attached to as soon as the sensor has no more objects in fire reach. With the old hold order they hold their position.
this is another example of units set to hold incorrectly switching back to the guard state instead of resuming hold and the same thing happens with commanders.
Per
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Re: Petition to reinstate Guard, Persue and Hold orders!

Post by Per »

Bethrezen wrote:When I set hold on a unit if I tell that unit to move to a new location when the unit arrives instead of resuming hold like it should it goes back to guard this is not correct behaviour.

When I set a unit to hold and I tell it to attack something the unit moves into position and attacks as instructed however when the attack order is complete the unit goes back to guard instead of hold this is incorrect behaviour

When I set a unit to hold and I tell the unit to go and repair again the unit goes to the repair bay gets fixed and then moves to the rally point or if attached to a commander back to the commander however when the order is complete the unit goes back to guard instead of hold this is incorrect behaviour

Are we noticing a pattern yet? Hold keeps switching off without the player explicitly turning it off which is incorrect behaviour when I set the hold state on a unit and then order that unit to do something once the order is complete the unit should resume the hold state and not guard.
I updated to master 37a2a30 and tested the new primary hold order. Trucks and repair units are now holding their position. Also repair units are repairing themselves with hold order. The only thing that is still different to the old behavior are artillery units. With the current hold order they are moving in the direction of the sensor they are attached to as soon as the sensor has no more objects in fire reach. With the old hold order they hold their position.
this is another example of units set to hold incorrectly switching back to the guard state instead of resuming hold and the same thing happens with commanders.
This is exactly how it is supposed to work. The primary order hold is in effect until you issue a new order. This is also how hold works in other RTS games. To do what you want above, we could allow hold to be put into the order queue, if you hold in shift while issuing hold, the same it currently works for construction. Ideally all orders should be queueable. No real idea how much work it would be to implement this, though.

Now if you want your units to always hold for some reason, I suspect you are actually trying to work around some stupid unit behaviour, which we actually should fix in the game, for everyone, rather than give the elite few the tools to work around it on their own.
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Re: Petition to reinstate Guard, Persue and Hold orders!

Post by Bethrezen »

This is exactly how it is supposed to work. The primary order hold is in effect until you issue a new order. This is also how hold works in other RTS games. To do what you want above, we could allow hold to be put into the order queue, if you hold in shift while issuing hold, the same it currently works for construction. Ideally all orders should be queueable. No real idea how much work it would be to implement this, though.

Now if you want your units to always hold for some reason, I suspect you are actually trying to work around some stupid unit behaviour, which we actually should fix in the game, for everyone, rather than give the elite few the tools to work around it on their own.
I'm simply looking for the hold state to work as it did before ergo to only switch off when the player explicitly switches it off, if I set the hold state on units then the hold state should stay in effect until I switch it back to guard it should not be switching off automatically when i give a new order, all the current set up is doing is adding a lot of completely unnecessary micromanagement because I have to continually turn hold back on every time i give a new order, which is irritating to put it mildly, particularly on levels where i need really fine grained control over my units because the computer has a lot of defences and I only want my units to move forward when I tell them to, but currently that's not possible because every time I give units that are set to hold a new order the hold state is removed and my units continue to do exactly what i don't want them to do running face first into enemy fire.

To be honest i really don't see what was wrong with the way hold worked before that people felt that it needed to be changed i could understand if it actually worked better but it doesn't it works worse, so can we please get hold put back to the way it was before, if you want to port the hold states to JavaScript because its a better language then wz script that's fine but the functionality should remain the same.
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Re: Petition to reinstate Guard, Persue and Hold orders!

Post by Per »

alfred007 wrote:The only thing that is still different to the old behavior are artillery units. With the current hold order they are moving in the direction of the sensor they are attached to as soon as the sensor has no more objects in fire reach. With the old hold order they hold their position.
Are you trying to set 'hold' on the units attached to the sensor? This will not work, since they are frozen on the 'fire support' order until you detach them. (This whole design is a bit odd.) If in doubt about who has what orders, try entering cheat mode, and type 'showorders'. If units get a 'H' they in hold, if they get an 'F' they are in a firesupport order.

I couldn't reproduce the behaviour you described, though.
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Re: Petition to reinstate Guard, Persue and Hold orders!

Post by Per »

Bethrezen wrote:To be honest i really don't see what was wrong with the way hold worked before that people felt that it needed to be changed i could understand if it actually worked better but it doesn't it works worse, so can we please get hold put back to the way it was before, if you want to port the hold states to JavaScript because its a better language then wz script that's fine but the functionality should remain the same.
I has nothing to do with Javascript. It was me being too optimistic that we had a good replacement for the old hold and that UI support for it would be right around the corner. Things did not quite turn out that way. Note that this was done in 2012 (see 8fd88edcc2adf804dc5cf032076137f434fcf7b4), as I noticed that the old hold was quite buggy. The codebase has changed so much since then, it is not merely a matter of putting the old code back, and it is probably a lot of work to put it back and fix whatever was wrong with it. If anyone want to do that work, feel free. I'll take the patch, provided it works. But I'll spend the little time I have moving forward instead.

See, the reason I wanted it replaced in the first place, was because I had spent some time looking at new people play Warzone without guidance, to see how they figured things out. They didn't find secondary orders on their own. When pointed out, they did not understand how to use them. This were people familiar with RTS games. So my conclusion was that the secondary orders was just something that appealed to the small elite of players, and did nothing to fix the same problems for the vast majority of players. Other RTS games don't tend to use secondary orders, and I think this is one design where we're not different and beautiful but just plain wrong. (Now I'm sure all the usual haters want to take this as a cue to come out of the woodwork to say that I'm ruining the game, their childhood memories, and the world in general, but that's the kind of emotional arguments that has never moved me before and won't now either, so just don't bother.)
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Re: Petition to reinstate Guard, Persue and Hold orders!

Post by NoQ »

something that appealed to the small elite of players
In many years of not only competitive gaming but also filming the campaign speedrun i've never found these secondary orders useful. Especially pursue, which is an equivalent of suicide and i'd rather spend time implementing a secondary order that makes droids dance Polka or whatever. Hold is roughly useful in few cases, but much more rarely than in other games.

I believe that, on the contrary, these secondary orders were created to appeal to the vast majority of low-APM players, as the generic approach originally taken by Warzone 2100 to be a "strategy by design", in particular to reduce the impact of tactical micromanagement on the game. Other decisions of this sort included attaching to sensors and commanders, overkill compensation via projectile fly-through physics, and fire-on-move for most weapons. However, it's pretty obvious to me that even in presence of the modern (20 years later) micro-AI to make individual units perform these high-level orders, this goal is completely impossible to achieve, and manual micromanagement would still easily make your army twice as powerul.

So for now, i guess, these secondary orders are used by few people who managed to discover them despite the lack of UI and developed specific habits of using them. With a better UI, they would have been more discoverable.
I had spent some time looking at new people play Warzone without guidance, to see how they figured things out.
Wow. How did it go? Were there more curious observations?
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Re: Petition to reinstate Guard, Persue and Hold orders!

Post by Per »

NoQ wrote:
I had spent some time looking at new people play Warzone without guidance, to see how they figured things out.
Wow. How did it go? Were there more curious observations?
It is too long ago... but it was mostly related to UI, balancing and pacing. Some of the things have been fixed. We still have too many noob traps - most games make it easy to play mediocre, and hard to play well, while we make it very easy to play awful (hence the importance of never getting total noobs on your team, if you want to win). I don't know of any simple fixes for this, though.
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Re: Petition to reinstate Guard, Persue and Hold orders!

Post by Bethrezen »

The codebase has changed so much since then, it is not merely a matter of putting the old code back, and it is probably a lot of work to put it back and fix whatever was wrong with it. If anyone want to do that work, feel free. I'll take the patch, provided it works. But I'll spend the little time I have moving forward instead.
I'm curious why would you need to put the old wz code back because the current set up is already about 75% of the way there, all that's needed now is some sort of a visual indication of what the current state of the selected unit or units is, now for the sake of consistency I'd recommend just putting the hold and guard buttons back on the menu, the next thing that is need after that is for the hold command to not switch off automatically when the player gives the a unit or units that are set to hold an order.

I can't imagine that it would be that difficult or time consuming to adjust the current set up so that the hold state will persists until the player turns it off, either via the relevant short cut key (G for guard) or via the button in the interface.
In many years of not only competitive gaming but also filming the campaign speedrun i've never found these secondary orders useful. Especially pursue, which is an equivalent of suicide and i'd rather spend time implementing a secondary order that makes droids dance Polka or whatever. Hold is roughly useful in few cases, but much more rarely than in other games.
as for pursue like you its not something that i really used that much, while it does have its uses i suppose a better command would be something like seek and destroy where groups of units can be set to roam the map autonomously and then when 1 group gets eyes on a target all the other groups that are set to seek and destroy will swarm it, the best real world example of that would be the WW2 German u-boat wolf pack, similar idea.

Not so useful on campaign mode but could be useful on skirmish mode if you got the necessary resource to just spam produce cyborgs for example to harness your opponents.
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Re: New release planning (3.2.4)/ 3.3.0

Post by Berg »

Per wrote: But the most important question is - does short range accuracy actually add anything useful to the game?
Please retain range orders.
Also please bring back the unit orders already deleted code
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Re: New release planning (3.2.4)/ 3.3.0

Post by Lord_Kane »

Berg wrote:
Per wrote: But the most important question is - does short range accuracy actually add anything useful to the game?
Please retain range orders.
Also please bring back the unit orders already deleted code
I second this, please PLEASE bring back unit orders.
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Re: Petition to reinstate Guard, Persue and Hold orders!

Post by KlassKill »

Per wrote: See, the reason I wanted it replaced in the first place, was because I had spent some time looking at new people play Warzone without guidance, to see how they figured things out. They didn't find secondary orders on their own. When pointed out, they did not understand how to use them. This were people familiar with RTS games.
What new people are we talking about?
While the unit menu may have been hidden if they did not do the tutorial, once found it is pretty obvious what each button did. All games have a learning curve.

The thing you are missing in all this is that Warzone itself is a game about strategy. It is not meant to be an arcade game with dumbed down everything and that seems this is exactly what these new people you observed were looking for.

It is even less obvious now how to set unit orders and it is impossible to know what ANY unit state is set to, so how is that any better than what Warzone originally had, and worked as expected?
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Re: New release planning (3.2.4)/ 3.3.0

Post by KlassKill »

Lord_Kane wrote:
Berg wrote:
Per wrote: But the most important question is - does short range accuracy actually add anything useful to the game?
Please retain range orders.
Also please bring back the unit orders already deleted code
I second this, please PLEASE bring back unit orders.
guys, it has not happened in all this time viewtopic.php?f=6&t=12197 and it is worse now than it ever was before since now everything is hidden under some dumb hotkey and there is no way to tell what state the unit is in now.
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