Suggested Option: Alternative army setup display.

[Ballbarian]

First let me say that I have always liked the stacked/mass display of the units in the army setup screen. I have also always become distressed over trying to work with the stacked/mass display of the units in the army setup screen. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/Sick.gif

http://www.dom3minions.com/~semirand/creepycellar/overrun.JPG

In the above image, as you can see, I have neglected my horde of Pan, and somewhere in that mass of Maenads are about 23 White Centaurs. The number of units in the garrison box was over 1300, but I have been distributing the masses to try and get the Centaurs displayed. At this point, I am not even sure that they are still there. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/tongue.gif I have also lost the ability to double click on a unit and have all like units selected. The only alternatives are shift+click and the all (a) key. Which is fine in this situation, but not when there is a hefty mix of different unit types scattered throughout and I only want one type.


What I would absolutely love to see is an option in the filters menu (or under display options) to check a box and switch to an icon, or summary view of the province garrisons. In theory, the same mechanics for unit selection would be applied with double click grabbing all like units, single click selecting a single unit, click & shift+click selecting all of a range of units, "a" selecting all units.

Following is a rough example:

http://www.dom3minions.com/~semirand/creepycellar/suggested.JPG


That's the idea anyway. How easy it would be to implement in the current code... well, I have no idea.
JK, please feel free to give me hope (or promptly squash it so that I can look for something else to wait for. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif)

[thejeff]

How have you lost the ability to double click?

I've never seen that problem.

I do agree that some summary option would be nice. Especially for those nations with autosummons.

[Meglobob]

thejeff said:
How have you lost the ability to double click?




I have had this, it seems to happen when you have huge armies in a province/army/garrison.

[Manuk]

How have you lost the ability to double click?


double click on where??
he wants to select the centaurs.

[Ballbarian]

The loss of double click to select all like units in a garrison is a problem that I have encountered since Dom2 for sure and if I remember right, in DomPPP as well. It only occurs when I have really large garrisons, and is irritating, but nothing that I can't live with.

(This morning, I managed to shuttle enough Maenads out of the main garrison box to get my White Centaurs to show up. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif)

[SafeKeeper]

Splendid idea, really, but I don't know if the engine allows it. Then again, I know nothing of the engine, so don't take me too seriously.

[Archonsod]

It's even worse when your playing someone like LA Ermor, it quickly gets pretty hard to distinguish between LD Praetorians, Velites and Legionarres, let alone select them.

[Taqwus]

I've been asking for something like this for a while.

Yes, it would be most helpful when you have a variety of troop types mixed in; right now, I suspect that they're sorted by their individual unr's.

One might want a way to split stacks by number of stars and 'has an affliction', to merge stacks, or to pull down an arbitrary number from one stack into a new one.

For that matter, I'd still like to be able to see how the army would look on the actual battlefield -- overlapping squads can result in some pretty weird deployments.

[Edi]

There now follows a basic course on stack management:
Double click on a unit to select all units of same type from current stack.
Click on one unit in stack, press 'w' and all wounded units will be selected. These can then be assigned into their own squad
Click on one unit in stack, press 'e' to select all units in same stack with 2 or more stars of experience.
That should help the army sorting business quite a bit. Assuming of course you don't have too many troops in province for doubleclick to work.

Edi

[Meglobob]

Edi said:
There now follows a basic course on stack management:
Double click on a unit to select all units of same type from current stack.
Click on one unit in stack, press 'w' and all wounded units will be selected. These can then be assigned into their own squad
Click on one unit in stack, press 'e' to select all units in same stack with 2 or more stars of experience.
That should help the army sorting business quite a bit. Assuming of course you don't have too many troops in province for doubleclick to work.

Edi



Myself and Ballbarian know this Edi and all works fine until you get towards a 1,000 mixed units. Then double click refuses to work, it seems like a delay effect, when I first came across it I thought my mouse had broke.

[Gandalf Parker]

Double Click might have an upper limit but I suspect that its not far from the upper limit of what you can assign to a commander anyway. Do we really need doubleclick to pick up more than 255 of something so you can assign them to one unit? (I dont know if thats the limit)

[Edi]

Meglobob, last I checked, your name wasn't Taqwus. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

He was asking the question on sorting stuff. He's also right about the units being sorted by individual ID.

Edi

[Taqwus]

Oh, on the wounded/exp thing I was referring to the hypothetical state where stacks where implemented. It's all fine and dandy to say 'here are X gazillion units of the same type represented by an icon + number', but in such a case it may still be useful to be able to break it down by xp/affliction status. That way, the wounded and greenhorns can, er, prove their valor on the front line, if that's what's needed.

[Edi]

Ah, okay. My mistake then.

[Cor]

I have also run into the double click problem, I just got a newer beefer PC and I run into much less, So i wonder if its a hardware limitation?

Anyway, this feature would be the coolest thing since sliced bread.

[Edi]

Sliced bread is severely overrated.

Seriously, it has probably something to do with system memory and processor capacity limitations. I'm running a top end Core 2 Duo system with nearly the latest kit as of last September and turn resolution can take a frighteningly long time in e.g. 8 nation Cradle games. Haven't had problems with the masses of units, but my old machine (a Y2K vintage Celeron 500 system that burned out in July) would have simply collapsed under this sort of load. It'd be nice to know the hardware specs of the people who are experiencing this bug issue, it could help narrow it down.

[Ballbarian]

Well... My focus wasn't so much on the double click, but:
WinXP
1.3ghz AMD
512mb Ram
NVIDIA GeForce FX 5700LE w/ 256mb DDR graphics card

Running very lean & mean for such low specs. Actually, I get better performance with my low end optimized machine than we do with the 2&3ghz machines at work (but the users have a bad habit of running every piece of crud background process that they can find on the net, or install off of their HP printer cd. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/tongue.gif)

UPDATE:
Just did a quick test and the bottleneck appears to be tied to the CPU. The dom3 process idles around 43% on the main screen (large map with lots of armies), then upon entering the Army Setup screen, it leaps to 99% and I lose double click in dom3.

[Sombre]

This idea is excellent and it would probably help people a lot if it were implemented. It doesn't seem like it would be ridiculously hard to do either.

Should we have a thread where we can store all the best suggestions - the ones the community agrees are possible for the devs (or reasonable, within a patch) and are helpful?

People could then weigh in on what the most important change suggested is and maybe the devs would have a better idea of what their fans would like. The devs could also respond telling us if a suggestion is too far fetched or hard to implement.

[Loren]

Gandalf Parker said:
Double Click might have an upper limit but I suspect that its not far from the upper limit of what you can assign to a commander anyway. Do we really need doubleclick to pick up more than 255 of something so you can assign them to one unit? (I dont know if thats the limit)



There's no such limit. I've picked up over 500 units with doubleclick.

The problem isn't with what you can pick up, it's with what you're picking it up from. If there are too many units in the garrison you can't doubleclick it, period.


I think I know what's going on here. The more units you have in the garrison the closer together they are. I think the doubleclick failure is due to the units getting closer together--if they're packed too tight it won't work. Note that this explains the poster who found the limit went up when he got better hardware--he probably was running in a higher video mode.

It's a pain with any race that has freespawn.

[Ballbarian]

I will repeat:


Just did a quick test and the bottleneck appears to be tied to the <font color="red">CPU</font>. The dom3 process idles around 43% on the main screen (large map with lots of armies), then upon entering the Army Setup screen, it leaps to 99% and I lose double click in dom3.



http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/tongue.gif

It is possible that increasing video memory/processing could take some of the stress off of the CPU, but I still firmly believe that the loss of double click is a result of overloading the CPU.

[Gandalf Parker]

That kindof sucks. One of the benefits to pbem is supposed to be that it supports really big games on low-end machines and connections. Its supposed to be one of the trade-offs for not getting to control battles. I wonder if one of the command switches you can put on the icon to run the game might make that better.