SelectionBox Targeting

[TheCJ]

1 hour ago, WiseKind said:

save you from needing to check back on those units later, or from needing to shift-click on potentially dozens of trees.

Clicking on twelve trees is not that hard. And if you want to build a wall through an entire forest, maybe you should reconsider.

1 hour ago, WiseKind said:

Another example is at the start of the game, for berry gathering, you could use box-select to order your women to gather the starting berries, then queue the order to build farms once those berries have run out. That would save you from needing to shift-click on each and every bush.

Thats 6 clicks. Not very many for the start of the game where nothing is happening.

Also this would mostly just be a bad decision, since paying 100wood at the start of the game to queue up building a farm after they will be done with the berries minutes later is not a very good economic decision.

Same goes for basically every other situation, if the selection box targeting was added for economy aswell.

I guess thats also what @Atrik was alluding to when he compared the military benefit of this targeting method to "manual sniping", just that selection box targeting would be even less useful economically (as far as I can see).

 

That being said, I dont really care if selection box targeting gets added, neither for military nor economy, as I can just choose to not use it if I dont like it.

Thus I endorse adding this to a potential a27 community mod or a28 release.

[Seleucids]

9 hours ago, TheCJ said:

Thus I endorse adding this to a potential a27 community mod or a28 release.

Oh no pls don't add it to A28

You can mod in whatever way you want, but adding to the base game is a different story. Firstly who will make the patch and whether the patch will be approved is another story. Secondly this feature, if activated accidentally, can be disastrous. Tests have shown that my own micro is better than this selectionbox targeting even though I would have to click hundreds of times.

[Deicide4u]

Maybe it's better to improve attack-move? Make your units prioritize other enemy units if sufficient number of units is already engaged on the nearest target. This prioritization would only activate while the units are ordered to attack move. Units on offensive and defensive stance will by default behave as they do now.

Situation would be as follows:
1) Your army is approaching the enemy army on attack move command.
2) First 4-5 units see the nearest enemy and go after it.
3) Second 4-5 units see that the nearest enemy is already engaged by 5 units, so they choose a different target.
4) Repeat for the rest of your army.

The number of units that will go after the nearest unit can be changed in the settings. Siege units won't have this logic, as they are primarily used to target specific buildings. We can also exempt buildings from it, as most of the time you don't want to attack buildings with your units.

If the above logic proves to be good, we can change the default targeting, too.

Edited Wednesday at 11:51 by Deicide4u

[TheCJ]

3 hours ago, Seleucids said:

Secondly this feature, if activated accidentally

If you dont intend to use it, just remove the hotkey? I was under the impression they would add an option for that?

3 hours ago, Deicide4u said:

Maybe it's better to improve attack-move?

This kind of is a proposed improvement to attack-move.

Although your proposal is also interesting.

[Barcodes]

On 22/03/2025 at 6:54 PM, chrstgtr said:

Something has to be done about sniping, and I think something like this should be integrated into vanilla. This seems like a good thing to test in the community mod. 

There was a thread a while back where we discuss different possible area attack options--what I think you are describing is how I would probably prefer it. 

still mad because of my archer cav ?

[real_tabasco_sauce]

6 hours ago, Deicide4u said:

The number of units that will go after the nearest unit can be changed in the settings. Siege units won't have this logic, as they are primarily used to target specific buildings. We can also exempt buildings from it, as most of the time you don't want to attack buildings with your units.

If the above logic proves to be good, we can change the default targeting, too.

I've got a fairly elegant solution for this, but there is an oos when cross-playing between windows and linux.

https://gitea.wildfiregames.com/0ad/0ad/pulls/6960

The video is an older, slightly bugged version, but its enough to get the idea.

[Atrik]

11 hours ago, Deicide4u said:

Maybe it's better to improve attack-move? Make your units prioritize other enemy units if sufficient number of units is already engaged on the nearest target. This prioritization would only activate while the units are ordered to attack move. Units on offensive and defensive stance will by default behave as they do now.

Situation would be as follows:
1) Your army is approaching the enemy army on attack move command.
2) First 4-5 units see the nearest enemy and go after it.
3) Second 4-5 units see that the nearest enemy is already engaged by 5 units, so they choose a different target.
4) Repeat for the rest of your army.

To me it's obvious that it is better to allow players to have easier control over units behavior rather then hardcoding some mitigation logic. The latter might even lead to un-intuitive pathing which the game already have a good deal of.