I'm talking about "Overzealous Scavengers".
They are those folks who walk all the way across any map, with rivers or not, cliffs or not, defenses or not - anything that blocks everything but at least one tile of passage. They will even find their way through mazes just because one of their units have been attacked - every single one but those absolutely blocked (can be done with structures).
This simply ruins the possibility of having multiple scav bases, like we have on campaign, which is a pity because it's much nicer to have scattered scav forces instead of a huge pile of them - allows rush prevention and values scouting even more, if they are all over the map in small quantities.
I mean, the way they currently are, you just have to attack one of them, and then watch their trajectories, wiping them with flamers (they are too busy going help their comrades), and it is very annoying to have two hundred scavengers and fifty buggies down on a corner, also.
Thinking about that during a short time, I've came up with a nice idea, that shouldn't be too hard to implement, I believe. This would be the addition of an "Aid Radius".
This is simply a radius (in tiles) that limits the range of the "zeal" of the scavs. Within this set radius, they would aid other units, just like they do, but they wouldn't move outside of this radius to aid other units. Personally, I think that, to simplify the calculations, this radius could function not from the unit, but from a more resonably important target - scav base structures. Every unit within a set radius from every scav-owned base structure will run to the structure to defend it, if it is attcked.
This radius could be something reasonable, like, let's say, some 24 tile radius. This way, in a 256x256 map, the theoretical maximum number of completely independent scav bases would be (256x256):(πx24)^2 = 11.5, which would give us, considering a practical usage of 70% of the space, a total of 8 feasible independent scav bases (if the map maker concentrate on this and gives due attention to bas spacing).
Of course I'm simply speculating values, and there's also the fact that if you place a base in the edges of the map, their "ais area" would be halved, and if on the corners, would be only a quarter of the value I've used in my "(πx24)^2". perhaps the radius could be even smaller, I think. 256x256 maps are huge, having a maximum of 8 bases wouldn't be that great
The fact is that, the current way things are, we can't even have 2 separate bases with units inside, that they are going to concentrate wherever you attack them, never returning to their original places.
Therefore, I kindly ask that the devs think about it, and give me an evaluation of the idea (in terms of feasibility/if we could see that in the near future/it's a goodxbad idea)
That would very well allow/disallow a whole dimension I'm trying to implement in The Lost River, and would certainly help every single map maker that wants to use scavs in their creations.
Thanks from this very moment for your attention,
~Olrox
