Ranged cavalry should be at the back of formations

[Atrik]

Formations currently order units in this order : <SortingClasses>Hero Champion Cavalry Melee Ranged</SortingClasses>
Where Cavalry get to be often in front of Infantry melee, even when they are ranged units, like archers or javelin cavs (but not always, they seems to sometimes get behind as "Ranged" too).
I'm pretty sure most players of any levels, would prefer to have ranged cavalry behind melee infantry. And even costly units like hero and champion, not on the first line.
I'm sure someone could reference some historical battles where leaders (heros) were on the frontline but there is probably as much of them where they weren't.

https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/src/branch/release-a27/binaries/data/mods/public/simulation/templates/template_formation.xml @Emacz

[Emacz]

5 hours ago, Atrik said:

Formations currently order units in this order : <SortingClasses>Hero Champion Cavalry Melee Ranged</SortingClasses>
Where Cavalry get to be often in front of Infantry melee, even when they are ranged units, like archers or javelin cavs (but not always, they seems to sometimes get behind as "Ranged" too).
I'm pretty sure most players of any levels, would prefer to have ranged cavalry behind melee infantry. And even costly units like hero and champion, not on the first line.
I'm sure someone could reference some historical battles where leaders (heros) were on the frontline but there is probably as much of them where they weren't.

https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/src/branch/release-a27/binaries/data/mods/public/simulation/templates/template_formation.xml @Emacz

what am i supposed to do with that?

 

[Acero]

This bug has been bothering me for a long time, and yesterday another player mentioned it, so i post it here in case it has not been reported before, or is not yet in the devs radar.

When playing both cavarly and infantry sometimes you want to treat them as one single army. One of the obvious ways to arrange your troops before engaging in a battle is to put melee troops in front and ranged in the back, so that the more tanky units protect your ranged. And one of the most efficient ways to achieve this is to put your army in a formation. Compared to a manual approach to achieve this goal, using a formation reduces clicks and at the same time engages the "running" speed of your troops so that it takes considerably less time to reach their final positions. Every player above rank 1500 probably knows this and takes advantage of formations.

The problem arrises when your army has ranged cavalry in the mix, as the cav is put in front of the formation every time, which in my opinion makes absolutely no sense and invalidates the usefulness of the formation in this case. The solution I use is to put cav in a different control group and micro it independently ofc, but as I said, one would expect to have a sensible formation option available with or without cavs in the mix.

The fact that precisely cavalry of all ranged units is put in front is even worse than if it was ranged infantry, because the enemy will probably have spears or pikes in front of his army, which has a counter of 2.5x or 3x against cavalry! So you are sending your precious and expensive ranged cavalry directly to a silly and miserable death. 

Another problem is that players with less experience will probably engage the formation without understanding the implications, trusting that 0AD is doing something logical for them, and they will waste their cav while probably not even realizing why they are loosing the battles.

At the very least, ranged cav should not be considered at all in such formations, but the optimal situation is to fix the formations so that all ranged units are put in the back of the melee units. And ideally the more range the unit has, the more in the back it should be placed. So skirms in front of slings in front of archers. This way units will have to move and bump into eachother the least when the battle begins.

I dont know if the fix is a simple xml template change or something more complicated. In the former case, maybe a comunity mod would be all we need to fix this long lasting problem.

@real_tabasco_sauce

 

[Acero]

Sorry, did not notice that @Atrikalready posted about this exact same issue yesterday. Feel free to merge the topics.

 

Edited Saturday at 21:05 by Acero

[Stan`]

Merged.

[real_tabasco_sauce]

1 hour ago, Acero said:

I dont know if the fix is a simple xml template change or something more complicated. In the former case, maybe a comunity mod would be all we need to fix this long lasting problem.

@real_tabasco_sauce

I think it could be done in a mod. However, after seeing how the com mod split the community in a26, I think a different approach should be taken. If bugs are fixed in the community mod, then it becomes the better version of the game to play, leading to pressure for each addition to be a guaranteed improvement and decreasing the experimental potential of the community mod. I'll lay out my proposition for the community mod in that discussion.

My understanding is that its too late to fix stuff like this for a27, but it absolutely can be fixed for release 28.