Simple unit movement

[lars]

I have a simple question: A group of women is able to move in an ordinary way (without any formation). Is there such a option for the other units, too?

It looks very strange to me that dozen of units run backwards just because some units are further away.

[Prodigal Son]

Yeah this issue has annoyed me as well, but I'm pretty sure it will be fixed in time.

[Lion.Kanzen]

Yeah, when that happens icause to me annoying especially in battle the units exposes to be killed for that movement to grouping movement.

[Drin]

Pathing is a huge issue in most, if not all, RTS games. As a non-coder I don't have any real solutions on the back end, but conceptually I wonder if something like this would work: units far in the back run to catch up, units in front keep moving at regular pace until they reach their destination, then pause and wait for back units to arrive. Prevents running backwards and clogging on choke points.

Alternately, perhaps units outside of a certain distance from the formation would automatically be excluded from the formation until they get closer and the formation can move without them.

[sanderd17]

This causes some cheating issues IMO, you can just send one unit to scout, and if everything is clear, you can let your army run to there. Or the other way around, let your scout run back to the base.

True, running is already a tricky strategy (units currently run to the centre of their positions). It's used by several good gamers currently. But by selecting the first unit to run to, it will even be more gamable.

For the original question, alpha123 once made a patch to let units move without formation. But it's not in game because formations would need proper fixing.

[Mythos_Ruler]

I think one (easy?) way to "fix" this would be to ensure units form up with their group, even when the group has stopped moving. Right now, when the main group has reached the destination, all those other units that have not yet caught up to the group stop moving too. I think running was supposed to help this by allowing units to get into formation quicker.

[Ykkrosh]

If I remember correctly, AoE3 and AoE Online had very similar pathfinders but differed in whether all the units would immediately stop moving once the invisible 'formation controller' thing reached the group's target, or whether each individual would carry on to their assigned spot in the formation. But I can't remember which was which, and I can't remember why I chose the one that I did

Running is not really about formations reaching the destination - it's needed for when the formation starts moving. If the invisible formation controller thing starts moving at the maximum speed of the units, then any unit that didn't start precisely in its assigned spot in the formation will never be able to catch up and reach its assigned spot while the formation is moving, no matter how long it continues moving. Similarly any unit that hits an unexpected obstacle (like another unit or a tree) will never be able to catch up again. It's necessary for either the units to move faster or the formation controller to move slower, at least until everyone has formed up.

Units probably don't need to run quite as fast as they do now, though - they could be slower while still getting into formation quickly enough. And units separated by long distances shouldn't be considered part of a single formation anyway (so that they don't have to run across half the map to form up) - I think AoM/AoE3/etc did some kind of cluster detection when you gave a move order, so each cluster of units would move as an independent formation, until they got close enough to each other to merge into one. That can be added as an extra layer on top of the basic pathfinder and hopefully wouldn't complicate the lower layers.