Moving Through Multiple Provinces

[Gandalf Parker]

Careful attention to the movement abilities and terrain abilities of individual units can help. Grouping units under commanders who have the same move abilities. Often you can create armies which can move 2 or 3 provinces at a time if you dont just get in the habit of grouping everyone together in one army.

I do understand why its unlikely that we will get this fix.
The waypoint code that "has been around forever" has not been around long enough to easily merge with the code for THIS game. It would probably take a few days of very unfun labor to incorporate this.

[Meursy]

Ho ho licker!

I wouldn't pretend to know what everyone else does or does not know!

And who knows, maybe the developers do care at least a little bit about SP, somewhere down in the deep and mysterious seats of their beings!

(btw I am one of those people who has no idea how hard things are to code...and I second vfb on the negatives of implemented waypointed movement!)

[Kristoffer O]

> Seriously, I don't see the resistance to this, until a dev says its too hard to code. I won't pretend to know what it would take to add it, and I don't really think any of you should pretend that either.

I don't code much so I have no idea. I think there are a few obstacles.
1. It is more rewarding for us to work on a new game, which we do.
2. It is boring to make a change that is mainly UI. The results are unrewarding for us as devs
3. The change is big enough to introduce a new range of possibly severe bugs, meaning we would likely spend additional time (extremely boring time) and patches to find and squash bugs, while the MP community shouts 'exploit', 'my army disappeared', 'my game is ruined', etc. At this stage dom3 is working quite smoothly, without bugs. We are not particulary interested in introducing new ones. Therefore most new content is based on old mechanics or slight changes.

In short: we prefer a clunky, but working movement system, to spending unfun time to have an even longer unfun period of bugs, while we can't work on stuff we like and are good at.

It would probably be nice especially for the SP community, but the opportunity cost for our sake is unfortunately too high.

[thejeff]

Well, obviously the code should not detach troops to let a commander enter the water. That would be dumb.

And if licker's first suggestion is used, you would set your own path so starving in deserts would be your own fault.

[Meursy]

There you go! Some people here do know something about coding!

[licker]

Thank you Kristoffer.

I knew this already, but its nice to hear it again from time to time.

I'm not disappointed or surprised by your answer, its what you've said all along.

I don't see the real issues with bugs or other problems as some have been suggesting if this is implemented intelligently, however, I really don't understand it in terms of if you don't want to use it you won't have to, and if your forces get stuck you will find them anyway by hitting 'n', commanders cannot be issued an illegal movement command as it is, how this changes that I don't know, or see.

Think about it, set a move order to a distant province, and each turn the commander will issue a *legal* (obviously) movement order to get closer to that province. There might be some fudging on that, but already there is a kind of path finding for non flying move 3 units, this is just expanding that to more than move 3.

Each new turn the move order is checked against the saved destination province and if it fails (due to the province being enemy, or no longer having a clear path) then the unit default to defend like basically every other failed command defaults to. So at the end of your turn if you hit 'n' relilgiously, as imagine most serious people do, you find all your stray commanders without orders and can adjust as needed.

I don't know how this results in lots of bugs, or even anything remotely unintended. Unless its implemented badly, but well, I assume there is at least some QC process you all have...

[Kristoffer O]

> I knew this already, but its nice to hear it again from time to time.

> I'm not disappointed or surprised by your answer, its what you've said all along.

> I don't see the real issues with bugs or other problems as some have been suggesting if this is implemented intelligently, however, I really don't understand it in terms of if you don't want to use it you won't have to, and if your forces get stuck you will find them anyway by hitting 'n', commanders cannot be issued an illegal movement command as it is, how this changes that I don't know, or see.

> Think about it, set a move order to a distant province, and each turn the commander will issue a *legal* (obviously) movement order to get closer to that province. There might be some fudging on that, but already there is a kind of path finding for non flying move 3 units, this is just expanding that to more than move 3.

> Each new turn the move order is checked against the saved destination province and if it fails (due to the province being enemy, or no longer having a clear path) then the unit default to defend like basically every other failed command defaults to. So at the end of your turn if you hit 'n' relilgiously, as imagine most serious people do, you find all your stray commanders without orders and can adjust as needed.

> I don't know how this results in lots of bugs, or even anything remotely unintended. Unless its implemented badly, but well, I assume there is at least some QC process you all have...

It is more like residual orders I'm afraid of. If orders are not cleared properly there is a chance that orders get transfered from one dying commander to another etc. THis could result in strange movement on AI units or other players orders. Not sure how likely it is, but this is one type of bug I can imagine right now.

Other possible bugs might include strange movement behaviour of stealthy troops when waypoints switch ownership.

Other not movement related bugs might also be introduced. Since move is just another order the mechanic would involve an order after order mechanic. It is possible that the AI decided to use the system or that commanders got strange orders turns from now. I'm not sure if this is possible, but I guess it might happen.

QC is by far more boring than actual coding. THe less QC we do the better we feel. If we do too little QC we will release a buggy patch and players will feel as if we use them as testers. We will also be forced to release new bug-fix-patches with little meaningful content. If we test a lot we will feel sick.

[Gandalf Parker]

I do know enough about coding to agree that..
A) it would not be fun to code and insert at this point
B) it would have bugs which would take awhile to iron out
C) its not impossible but probably more trouble than its worth

Maybe in the early birth of Dom3 when it was first considered. But now that the devs have moved on to a new project this would definetly not fit into a fun and simple patch thing which might get tossed in during a break from their real jobs and other projects.

[Edi]

I'd also like to add that even fairly innocuous changes can result in big headaches. In patch 3.20, move order validation was improved. This means that sneaking out of sieges and force marching were eliminated.

What is not generally known is that it introduced a MAJOR bug that would have had everyone on the forum screaming bloody murder and it would have ruined or at least severely hindered all ongoing MP games on hosting. And the implemented change was FAR less than adding a waypoint system that allows sequential movement from one turn to another. Fortunately that one was caught and squashed, which is also the reason for so many versions in such a short order.

So just take Kristoffer's word for it when he says it's a no go. If he can imagine the kind of consequences he enumerated right off the bat, I don't want to know what kind of exotics it might introduce into the game. We still have the immortality weirdness that has not been hunted down, the F9 and D9 bless bugs plus some other stuff. Like Kristoffer, I prefer the current system even if it's not the smoothest possible, because it works without major problems.

[licker]

Fair enough, I will continue to request it for Dom4 then.

I am in the QC field myself, though not limited to software QC, which is it's own beast.

QC is only boring if you get it all right the first time

No problem you say, just walk as far as you can each turn. Give them 1 map move orders for the entire chain and then try to travel as far as possible along that chain as you can every turn. Very well, but what if that chain is getting broken by enemies taking a province that was once yours in the meantime?

Asked and answered... seriously with the tinyist amount of intelligence built into the system none of the so far proposed issues (other than the potential bugs, which are of a different nature) are even possible.

If the chain is broken the move order is canceled, and the commander is defaulted to defend. This works for monthly rituals, if there are not enough gems (or targets) the commander is reset to defend.