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If this feature do provides an alternative to alt of shift spam clicks for targeting ranged units, it is not the only problem it solves. Alt and especially shift clicking with small selection (8 units for ex) would likely still be often more optimized. This, instead provides a solution to frustrating scenario where you need to make hundreds of clicks just to avoid catastrophic outcomes: Hero dance, is often asymmetrical micro for the player doing it, because defender needs to make tones of clicks very very fast just to avoid 0 damage dealing of your entire army. With box targeting, you can react to it with a single command instead (you might need to repeat it every few secs, but it's not as spammy). Overkills, when foes are placed in a way where your entire army will shoot at a single unit, there was no way to prevent it but making a full sniping cycle. With box targeting you can avoid this, just by hovering units you intended to shoot at, and not the single most closest enemy. Pathing, a lot of times, using attack move leads to weird army behavior where half of your units just move away the intended direction to chase a meaningless unit, like a cav, a female, a unit that just spawned out of a barrack in the back of the enemy base you are attacking.... Box Targeting allow you to define where do units need to go and fight instead. Basically all cases where you feel like your units get side-tracked for arbitrary reasons, you have a feature to avoid these situation. @ffm2 @roscany, I don't think this feature is adding complexity, to the contrary: It's a single command that solve multiple micro issues that previously required to learn to detect them, a lot of tricks to mitigate them, or responses when they occur. It also make perfect sens to use the existing "Force attack" hotkey, so it's not even adding a new one. This input is begging to be added, it's 5 line of codes in input.js (a few more for visual and audio effects)

Nice work, @Atrik! As @chrstgtr mentioned above, this seems like a good alternative to overcome the sniping problem we've discussed in other threads. Futhermore, I think that combining this feature with the other two features @real_tabasco_sauce is working on can generate a more organic unit attacking behavior while preventing excesive click spam. This is good . Thanks for working on it. I'm looking forward to test this tonight

I added the sounds @guerringuerrin, but for the cursor maybe @real_tabasco_sauce can help because when I try it, it impact unrelated stuff... It feels very good to handle. To test it : BoxTargeting.zip It will allow "Force Attack" Hotkey (F by default) + Selection Box to make your selection attack units hovered! I've reset the poll and assigned old votes to "no". Hoping to help this topic mature with this demo.

After a quick test, I think it wouldn't be hard to create a CHEAT (Controllable Hover Entities Area Targeting) selection box targeting feature. The goal here would be to be able to use box selection while holding a hotkey to order selection to target specified enemy units. This would look like this: Select your army Hold down targeting hotkey Box select hover enemy units Then your selected units would be assigned to target all units found in the box selection. This would nicely mitigate aggressive pathing where for example : Half of your army get baited into splitting instead of attacking enemy army because a single unit happens to be behind your army Your entire army projectiles are thrown to a single enemy (overkill or hero dancing) Allow to assign ranged units to fire at back-line units, easier then with ALT hotkey Overall making micro-management funnier then having to make 300 click to avoid hero dance, yet making hero dancing still very good, but just easier to counter micro it. Micromanagement will obviously still be intensive, just you remove the part of spam clicking ALT, and replace it with a better fitted feature for targeting and spreading fire. I'd like to give one more illustration of how micro-management would look like with this. When playing xbows units, if you are retreating, but at some point, turn back to fire a volley, all units will shoot at the single most closest enemy. You CANNOT be fast enough with ALT clicks to spread shots, resulting in massive overkill. With this box targeting, you could make the volley spread on more enemies units following your units. In my opinion that this would be far greater approach to have a user-controllable feature then having solutions like : randomized targeting by @real_tabasco_sauce Or autonomous re-targeting by @real_tabasco_sauce.

Probably, but I guess what I'm trying to convey more broadly is that using hotkeys shouldn't be necessary to stay "good" at this game. And by that I guess I mean perform military actions. I don't use them, but I'm all for using hotkeys/control groups to select units, buildings, training units/techs when building are selected, building different types of buildings, changing formations, etc. but using them to impact fights to this degree feels like overkill (ha!). A lot of players better than me use hotkeys to do these things, and all the power to them! They're better than me, but I can still hang. I'm not even really a fan of attack-move, but I do use it. I'd rather players pay closer attention to where their units are walking. I guess that is a hotkey I do use? I can see its benefit during big fights, but I don't really find it buggy like @Atrik suggests. I can stay at a pretty similar level to those who are in this conversation right now without using hotkeys, but this box-target thing seems like a different type of hotkey entirely. Is there another hotkey that does anything relatively similar that is already in place beyond attack move?

I think it's the same as Force Attack standard hotkey. you can check at hotkeys section which one you have asigned for and remap it if you want to

Another 4v4 game : I believe Ricci is here as well, altho not from first person

The mod is now available for download at https://github.com/0ad-matters/kush-extreme/releases

Hey everyone! I'm bored on vacation so I thought I'd chime in. I'm all for advancing the game, but this seems like an extra step people need to enact in order to be good at the game (13-1500). I don't use hotkeys; I do see their benefit, but much like using a mouse instead of a trackpad, I'm fine with my current play, lol. I don't like my hobbies to feel like work, and this would feel like work for me to learn, but that's prob a me-problem. When I "snipe" I shift click units that I'm targeting with small groups and I think this serves me pretty decent in the moments where I have the time to target specific units. When I don't have time, it's usually because I'm under duress for x, y, and z, which I think is an important part of the game. It feels pretty rewarding when I do have the time, as my opening has gone the way I intended. (I know the ALT key does something, but I could never figure out how to use it, lol) You all know the mechanics of the game better than I do, but this feels like fixing something that isn't broken to me. @chrstgtr mentioned "something needs to be done about sniping," but I don't see sniping as often as previous versions of the game. I think it peaked during Said's Maurya phase, but melee was buffed to counter it. I think melee could still benefit from a buff, or alternatively the cost of basic range units could be increased. This would likely lead to smaller army sizes and fewer ranged units in battles, which I think would reduce the prevalence of sniping. Observationally, I think its a non-issue. But again, I'm pretty dumb so I've probably missed the main point entirely lol.

I have the impression that Atrik might be a bit annoyed by the discussions in other threads about creating a cheat mod. I suggest calling this feature AIMBOT (AIM Box Optimized Targeting), which might (not really) help avoiding such claims for this feature.

Check out historical patch (yes its kinda a different game) but it addresses a lot of the comments here and more! We are also looking for more feedback/input for future changes. https://github.com/Emacz2/Historical-patch

The problem is that the formations are useless without the bonuses that have not been implemented.

I suggest a shield wall formation: The shield wall formation would be diferent from phalanx formation. The shield wall formation would give a bonus against projectile damage, the phalanx formation would give a bonus against melee damage. Many players use and abuse ranged infantery, witch exterminates melee infantery. The shield wall formation will make the melee infantery more viable, in a historical period marked by the use of strong infantery, and will make it easy to invade enemy territory without losing more than half of your army in the process.

I added a little more description to the README To use this mod, just select Kushites as the civ, there is no need to change the bot settings. Most of the Kush units will have a higher HP. This mod is primarily when you want to fight a more difficult AI than the default "Very Hard" AI. Another benefit is that you can play a game with fewer units on the map because you can replace two or three AI opponents with one Kushite opponent.

@Seleucidswas this very much work? but in your mod description(Posted February 13) is Racism!