Wish List: Routing

[Gandalf Parker]

I agree. It seems easily possible within the frame that the game already does.

[merlinme]

As examples of how not to do it, though, both Rome: Total War and Heroes of Might and Magic used to drive me slightly nuts the way they would recalculate the route without telling you, if they bumped into an enemy unit. Sometimes you want them to do something else; sometimes you want them to attack. What you almost never want to happen is for them to spend five turns moving on difficult terrain around the blocking army. Yes you can stop them if you realise, but I've quite often got them to continue movement without thinking about it, and wasted a turn or two. Or, to take another example, in Hearts of Iron 2, if a province changes hands, you'll actually end up attacking unexpectedly, and that's almost never what you want.

There is an equivalent problem in Dominions 3 when a province changes hands, which is why I raised it.

[Psientist]

All good points! I'm glad it sounds feasible, at least for the future.

I suppose this might be related because of the "stored future commands" thread that Gandalf brought up; but it would also be nice to buffer commander recruitment (more than one), and assign the "target province" in the buffer. It's probably too much to ask for to buffer commander AND unit recruitment, auto-assign units to commanders, and then set target provinces... it certainly would be nice though, as on a large map one could set up relatively remote fortresses to be "army factories" that send units to a nexus fortress in your domain that's near the battlefronts, that require little attention except to resources and funds. One can't escape micromanagement entirely, but every little bit helps.


For what it's worth, Civ: Call To Power *was* PBEM, because that's why I bought it. The relevance, I guess, is that to the devs it shows that various problems under discussion have been conquered before in analagous games.

[Gandalf Parker]

At this point in the games development (and I dont foresee a change) anything requiring a buffer could be a problem. The "buffer" would have to be written out to your file and then read back in each time the game processed a turn. People have wanted buffers for multiple turn planning on evreything from commander actions, to province actions, to research, to well.. just about everything in the game. We could end up with each turn maintaining an entire games actions in multiple snapshots running over 10 turns. And thats not even taking into the account the people who have requested history info such as previous moves, previous messages, etc. So it could be an entire games snapshop 10 prior and 10 ahead.

I think that was requested here has been worked out so that it could work with the games present way of tracking things. At least as far as we can understand the code of it. But that method doesnt quite stretch to real multi-turn tracking.