Vectored Production

[frekk]

This is another idea I had with regards to transportation.

Anyone ever play Warlords 2? Remember vectoring?

Basically, the idea is simple. You have a screen (in this case, the Transport Minister, but possibly it could also be done from within the City Screen as well) where you can select a city, and then select a destination city. Routes are shown by lines, and departure and arrival cities are coloured differently (so you know which ends of the vectors are which).

All production from a city that is vectoring automatically arrives at the target city. Presumably, this wouldn't be possible for any city not connected by road or a harbour or airport; sort of like resources work now.

The computer automatically calculates the time it takes for the unit to get there, and vectoring units don't show up on the map at all, until they appear at the destination.

Possibly certain techs, as well as the movement rates of the units themselves, could factor into determining the time it takes to arrive.

This way, no more "mass crawl" effect. Long distance movement is abstracted.

Using vectors would be optional (you could still move on roads and such) but to discourage micromanagement, it would be a bit faster to vector.

Also, if you clicked on a destination point, you could then move the destination point to another city so you wouldn't have to reroute all your vectors but you could just pick them all up at once and define a new city as the rally point with two clicks.

[Jon Shafer]

How is this different from normal gotos and rally points?

The only differences I can see is that there's a screen to track everything that's going on (something that can easily be added to gotos and rally points as they exist now), and that using this system results in more movement. But why add the extra movement for using the system that could so easily be adapted to what already exists?

The only real difference I see is that units don't appear on the map, but I don't see why that's such a problem.

[Modo44]

You don't want to hide units on automatic movement. They might be going through, or near, battlefields and should not be able to do so without problems. And you'd have trouble calculating the impact of this automatic movement on other "normal" movement. Also, a transport might be redirected while en route - that's what wars can do.

If you don't like the animations, turn them off - there's an option. Personally I have turned off showing my automate movements. Now they are pretty much invisible (units show up in places where their movement points are used up, but not while they are moving).

The good idea would be to have a screen for showing and controlling the automatic gotos. Currently they are a mess.

[frekk]

The other option is to rework rally points altogether.

Currently you can set them by city, or one continental rally point.

What I'd like to see maybe is customizable rally points.

You can still set individual rally points for cities, but let's say you replace the continental rally point with up to 10 numbered rally points.

Each rally point could be defined to have set parameters, for instance, it could be told to rally all new units, rally only new attack units, rally all new naval units, rally all units on Sentry, and so on. Also, you could have an option to "Rally all units now", which would summon all units which are not fortified.

[Modo44]

For anything more complicated than a continental rally point, I need some easier way to do it. Clicking on each city on a huge map is simply not an option for me. Having a separate screen for this would be really nice.

As for other options in rally points, this is difficult. Games differ and players differ. The more complicated you make the system, the less people will use it (or even bother to understand the options), because they simply might not need specialized options. Simplicity, like in Warlords, is key here, IMO.