This game badly, badly needs a "keep together" command

[Libertarian]

It would be nice if a Firaxian could respond to this thread.

Indeed.

[HulluKarhu]

Count me in too..just won first game but..

I got fed up with having to move units one at a time on land.
At sea at least I could stick a few jets on a carrier.
I lost count of the number of times that I hit shft/return to make and immediate end to a long turn.
Thank heaven for Shft/A for my workers..I think they took art or knitting lessons at railway building school though.
By the way I won by diplomtic victory at the first vote..bit of a disappointed as it was only 1987 and I was about to just start to attempt a take over of Russia...so I was surprised that Russia voted for me I had two carriers sat just off their coast at the time and had just given Cathy the finger when she wanted my world maps. She said she was angry so I though war was on the cards within a few turns.
But Russian obviously did not want another winter war against us Finns.

[Alexander's Horse]

Ka bump.

[Dida]

by the late industrial age, I either quit the game or stop having war. Why? Because it is just too damn tedious having to move hundreds of units half way across the planet to attack the other guy. So what if he take 1 of my cites, I have 200 of them.
That's why the end game is more boring than ever.
I'm totally sick of moving each and every unit separately every turn. Come on, Let us have stacked movement.

[Marko Polo]

A practical simple suggestion to FIRAXIS

AH has it right, we ABSOLUTELY need tools to handle stacks.

A quote from \Civilization3\readme.txt:

"* Multiple Unit Activation: If you right-click on a stack of fortified/garrisoned/holding units, you may activate multiple units by SHIFT+Left-Clicking on each one. Close the window by just Left-Clicking on a listed unit."

This works ok. Here is my practical idea: what if player would press shift + CTRL when activating those units? That would tell the program that the player is about to give a command which applies to all those units. When the player releases the keys the pop-up screen would vanish and the player would be able to give "go to", "fortify" or maybe"disband" command to all those activated units. As a programmer myself I think that this shouldn't be too hard to implement. Just make a loop which executed the given command to all those activated units.

The above would have DRAMATIC boost in playability at the current late game tedium.

Even better would be a new "keep together" or "group" command. Just shift+ctrl -click the units as above and issue a new "group" command. It would make a "virtual group leader" unit (equivalent to army leader) which has the movement points according to the slowest member of that group. You could move then that group around and load/unload it to ship. However, before attacking with those units you should "ungroup" them first. Further, if someone attacks that group, the group would immediately automatically "ungroup" and defend themselves as individuals.

Of course, grouping workers to effective 2/4/8 teams would be extremely nice. Worker groups should of course be able to do everything that workers can without ungrouping.

Also, grouping settler + defensive unit and sending them to their destination square would be truly awesome!

I too really REALLY badly hope that someone at Firaxis would respond something to this thread. The need for this functionality is so huge. In fact, I was very disappointed that nothing like this wasn't included at patch. Still, given the fact that we all need so desperately this functionality and on the other hand it really isn't too hard to program I have high hopes that we actually see Firaxis doing this for us.

Thanks in advance, Firaxis!

[Capt Dizle]

Its a feature guys. Balances the AI vs the human. The AI can't conceive of stacked movement. To balance that we have the mind numbing job of moving units one by one.

Then we give up and quit thus granting to the Soren AI one more victory.

Just kidding. A little needle for Soren won't matter as I am surely "on the ignore list".

I support this proposal.

[ak]

Just right click and select Group. Move stack. Right click again and you still have the individual units listed for complete flexibility. The group would move at the speed of the slowest unit.

[SithUK]

I TOTALLY 100% SUPPORT STACKING - Why hasn't a Firaxian replied to this......?

Sith

[Marko Polo]

Re: a little bitty digression --just 4 a sec.

Originally posted by Redstar
"I just want some clarification.
AM i right in thinking you can no longer use multiple transports to ferry a group of units to a faraway land in just 1 turn?

In civ2 you would just have to land a transport on another transport and then click that transport...all 8 units would transfer and off you go again.

Now it seems like you must manually wake them up and drag them into next transport...so you only get 2 transport moves instead of unlimited per turn.

Am i mistaken in this?

(its no biggie, i'm just curious)

Yeah, you are right. "Shipchaining" technique in Civ2 doesn't work at Civ3. Further, you can't move units from transport to another when in sea. This is realistic of course.

However, you can load/unload your troops at CITIES in a transport infinitely. So, if you have "chain of cities" and a transport available in each of them conveniently to the enemy front you can still do the trick.

[Alexander's Horse]

Originally posted by jimmytrick
Its a feature guys. Balances the AI vs the human.

No it isn't - its a glaring oversight.

[faffy]

I support the idea. But I also would like to know what the technical difficulties are for stacked movement. Such an obvious thing can not be overlooked by the talented people of Firaxis. So there must be something against it that they decided not to include stacking of units. I can imagine the heated discussions among the programmers on this subject, but it seems that Sid or another reponsible person vetoed the stacked movement and now the whole company follows the "being silent" policy about it. Let's hope that with this thread we can convince them to include stacking or at least shed light on the reasons behind this decision.

Faffy

[Arkatreides]

I support as well!

I has been a long time since I actually finished a game instead of just retiring when it gets tedious.

[Bakunine]

S
U
P
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T

[Redstar]

ya u can

", you can't move units from transport to another when in sea. "

yes you can...but only 1ce per turn.

[m0nk33]

100% agreed.

At the heart of it, Civ3 is a great game, but the player spends alot of time doing/watching repetitive actions. I bet total time for a game could be cut by 25% if a few simple features were added.