Healers count as [idle] workers

[zoot]

Why does the 'Find idle workers' button sometimes select healers? They can neither construct or gather anything, to my knowledge?

Edited September 6, 2012 by zoot

[feneur]

How do you want to be able to select them? They don't fight after all, so they're not soldiers either. The best way would be if we would have a third key, but it does seem a bit overkill to have a button just for them :-/

[zoot]

Hmm. I don't see too much need for selecting a healer that may be on the other side of the map at all, to be honest. Healing is usually something you want done instantly and reliably, so you'll strive to have healers in neighbourhood of where they are needed and keep their locations in mind. Building and gathering is more "fire-and-forget" - you pick a worker, any worker, put him on the task, and let him take his time to get there and do his thing.

[historic_bruno]

Healers could be moving or actively healing, in which case they shouldn't appear as idle Though they do autoheal, that case is not so different than autoattacking of soldiers.

[Asterixfan]

Could you have a keyboard shortcut for this? I've been annoyed by this too. If you could hit O or some button it would send you to the healer

[Deiz]

Acceptable classes for 'idleworker' are ["Female", "Trade", "FishingBoat", "CitizenSoldier", "Healer"], while 'idlewarrior' is ["Hero", "Champion", "CitizenSoldier", "Siege", "Warship"].

So really, 'idleworker' is kind of a catch-all for non-military units. I think it'd be better to have idleworker restricted to builders and gatherers, with a third key for the rest, i.e. traders and healers, at present.

I also don't find much utility in the current 'clobber selection with one idle unit' behaviour. I think I'll add proper hotkey support to the function, e.g. shift will add the found idle unit to the selection, alt will add all matching idle units.

[feneur]

shift will add the found idle unit to the selection, alt will add all matching idle units.

Shift --> perfect, have been wanting that Alt - what do you mean by matching? It would be really great if you e.g. could easily select all idle units standing around a specific resource dropoff point or something, but that seems like it could be difficult to implement I wouldn't want to e.g. select all idle archers or something though as they might be on different ends of the map, but I doubt that's what you're thinking of (I don't fully understand what you mean by clobber though, a quick google search didn't do much to enlighten me, but then 1 AM might not be the best time to learn new words )

[Deiz]

Shift --> perfect, have been wanting that Alt - what do you mean by matching? It would be really great if you e.g. could easily select all idle units standing around a specific resource dropoff point or something, but that seems like it could be difficult to implement I wouldn't want to e.g. select all idle archers or something though as they might be on different ends of the map, but I doubt that's what you're thinking of (I don't fully understand what you mean by clobber though, a quick google search didn't do much to enlighten me, but then 1 AM might not be the best time to learn new words )

Clobber as in overwriting the old data, rather than to appending to it. Alt would do what you mentioned: It would select every idle unit that had one of the specified classes.

It's really just a shortcut, as holding shift and the relevant idle selection key would eventually accomplish the same thing as alt-select (Alt being the hotkey for off-screen selection, e.g. alt + double click will select all units of a given type on the map).

[feneur]

Ah, now that you remind me of that case it does make sense indeed Still not sure it's generally useful, but on the other hand, I'm not sure the alt+double click is generally useful either, and I've found that to have it's specific uses So better to have functionality that you'll rarely use than not to have it at all (At least as long as it doesn't complicate implementation unnecessarily, but I doubt this will )