Units Disregard Orders When Attacked

[Android_]

This is very annoying. Units disregard orders when attacked. It is particularly frustrating when you're trying to save some of your injured units from certain death by pulling them back and they keep going back in because an arrow hits them or so. It's annoying in all other situations as well though, and it was not handled like that in the Age series either.

On a side note: Please also consider this topic in order to implement some urgent control issues... I think once you have settled all of the issues I mentioned there and in this thread, 0AD's land combat should already be able to compete with the Age series. And that's what you want for your Alphas I guess

[mrjeremister]

The units disregard orders- especially when being trailed is because who in their right sense would go right into the clasp of people trying to kill it?

- Like think, If you were (x) and was chasing you... and you want the unit to get to (z), (x) would want to take the farthest way from curving into as possible. However, I agree it is terribly annoying- but it's basically telling your troops to take another sword slash and lose another 50 health before you can come to safety.

-It can be reversed by a nice ambush, however. =) The people are so intent on following (x) that they don't notice that their being killed =)

[Android_]

it may be logical (in some cases) but it's no fun. in order to make player decisions matter => player orders should have absolute priority. just take a look at similar rts games.

[Chakakhan]

Thanks for the feedback.

The Unit AI (UnitAI.js) code is definitely a work in progress. It's a pretty complex problem and there is a lot of functionality in there. Also, lots of game play changes require this code to be changed to support the new functionality as well.

There is a constant balance between providing infrastructure functionality and improvements and the improvements to the more visible aspects that affect game play. It is impossible to finalize something like Unit AI without having all the game play infrastructure pieces in place (we don't). So we haven't spent too much time optimizing this component because it is subject to lots of future changes.

I don't think there is any specific work slated for Unit AI this alpha, but we are aware of the issues and we will be addressing them in the near future.

[Mythos_Ruler]

it may be logical (in some cases) but it's no fun. in order to make player decisions matter => player orders should have absolute priority. just take a look at similar rts games.

I think we all agree on this. The current behavior was put into place, I think, because units tended to ignore being attacked sometimes or something like that. We all agree that player commands should override most low-level behavior, including incidents like this. I too have become frustrated sometimes when units do what you describe. I've lost quite a few units because they don't follow my orders to retreat, etc.

[Chakakhan]

I think we all agree on this. The current behavior was put into place, I think, because units tended to ignore being attacked sometimes or something like that. We all agree that player commands should override most low-level behavior, including incidents like this. I too have become frustrated sometimes when units do what you describe. I've lost quite a few units because they don't follow my orders to retreat, etc.

In the current implementation AI commands can override user commands, so we need to have some indicator in the orders queue to indicate if a command is user issued or AI issued (may already be there, don't know). This would allow us to have user issued commands that won't get overridden by AI commands. So if you tell them to move to a point, they will do their best to get to that point and not stop and engage the enemy on the way.

It will also allow us to implement behaviors like attack move - move to this location but attack anything along your way. This is an example of a user issued command that can be overridden by an AI command.

This is on our TO DO list.

[Android_]

thanks for the info guys

[historic_bruno]

I'd like to see order priorities and user orders ought to have close to the highest priority, with the possible exception of promotions.