[Feature Request] More control over garrisoned units

[LetswaveaBook]

One thing which makes ideal play more difficult is that there is limited control over garrisoned units. If we garrison cavalry in the CC, we might want to ungarrison the ones that are fully recovered. Currently, if you have 10 cavalry garrisoned in the CC and want to send only a particular unit with full HP out, you run in 2 problems.

1. You don't know the HP of the unit that you ungarrison, so you can't judge if you need to send it out.

2. You can't change the unit that you send out.

I tested how ungarrisoning works and it is a first in, first out principle. The only thing you can do is ungarrisoning all your units and then click on each individual unit and put them back in. I know there is a wounded hotkey, but I would like to manage my units from within the CC/barracks.

[Gurken Khan]

Yes. I've suggested this before. Maybe it could be done by expandable list/toggling showing group/individual units.

[Ceres]

And how would you control to ungarrison only one specific type of cav, e.g. cav with archers (but keep cav with e.g. swords and pikes in the CC? (or stable/barn - sorry, don't know the correct English word right now)

Maybe the CC icon could get a toggle to ungarrison only healed units or not. (the amount of HP% for "healed" can already be set in the game settings)

Would you prefer individual settings per each single CC etc.? I assume so, as in other areas you might not care so much if they have let's say at least 80% health only, e.g. just for hunting undangerous animals.

Edited September 4, 2021 by Ceres

[LetswaveaBook]

What I was thinking about: Show how much HP the unit has that you ungarrison first. So you could decide if you want to ungarrison it.

Then if you do not want to ungarrison it, there should be something like ungarrison-and-regarrison hotkey. If a unit is regarrisoned, there is another unit that would be ungarrisoned first afterwards. Then you can decide if you want to ungarrison that unit or if you want to toggle to the next one.

1 hour ago, Ceres said:

Maybe the CC icon could get a toggle to ungarrison only healed units or not. (the amount of HP% for "healed" can already be set in the game settings)

A hotkey that only ungarrisoned healthy units would also be nice.

[Gurken Khan]

1 hour ago, Ceres said:

And how would you control to ungarrison only one specific type of cav, e.g. cav with archers (but keep cav with e.g. swords and pikes in the CC? (or stable/barn - sorry, don't know the correct English word right now)

If I could see individual units I would ungarrison them individually; still much better than the current situation. ('Stable')

[Ceres]

Hmm, but if you see the HP of individual units and want to decide unit by unit, it might take too much time. I was thinking about this game setting (top slider "Wounded unit health", here set to 33%):

For our purpose (ungarrisoning units with let's say at least 90%?), this setting is not ideal, but one could adjust it to e.g. 90%. On the other hand, players might not like this high % for units with less health being treated as wounded, so maybe one could calc (100-x)%. In the above example, the setting is kept at 33% (i.e.units with less than 33% health are selected by the hotkey) but units with more than (100-33)%=64% are treated as "ok enough to be ungarrisoned". Admittedly, I'm not sure if these calcs make sense. Alternatively, there could be a second slider in the above shown game setting specifically for a threshold to ungarrison units (from whatever) if above that threshold health. I assume that overriding this in-game should be no problem, i.e. even if all garrisoned units have less health than the user set up, he can ungarrison them if needed. Maybe units should be ungarrisoned by the order of their health, top health first, almost dead last .

[Gurken Khan]

15 minutes ago, Ceres said:

Hmm, but if you see the HP of individual units and want to decide unit by unit, it might take too much time.

I think if they all had their mini-healthbar you would see pretty quickly which units you want to ungarrison.

The current average health shown just doesn't help me much; if I have two women, two inf and two cav, they will have different healing times. Sure, I could guess, but...

[Ceres]

I agree that an average health status across all garrisoned units is less helpful when trying to quickly decide which ones to ungarrison. Maybe somw others would like to share their thoughts about this? @Stan`, any ideas?

[nani]

1 hour ago, LetswaveaBook said:

What I was thinking about: Show how much HP the unit has that you ungarrison first. So you could decide if you want to ungarrison it.

Then if you do not want to ungarrison it, there should be something like ungarrison-and-regarrison hotkey. If a unit is regarrisoned, there is another unit that would be ungarrisoned first afterwards. Then you can decide if you want to ungarrison that unit or if you want to toggle to the next one.

A hotkey that only ungarrisoned healthy units would also be nice.

nice idea

[MoLAoS]

Is there a reason we show units grouped in a garrison? I think it would be useful to show each individual unit with a health bar and even be able to click on them to see their full description as if they were deployed normally. Plenty of screen space to have a selected garrisoned unit plus the normal unit panel for the building.

[Stan`]

I suppose they are grouped to facilite unloading. You can get more info about the unit by right clicking on it I believe.

As for screenspace might depend on resolution which is still 1024x768 minimum.

[Ceres]

Where in this small space do you want to show individual info? Yes, by right-clicking would work, but then you have to go through all of them.

Or could we maybe have a narrow colour line on top of each group at the least, showing the group's overall health? Thus, we would at least see health per unit type:

I wonder how health of the 11 units could be shown individually, besides by right-clicking or - a bit faster? - hovering over them and then popping out the individuals. Maybe like this, i.e. when you right-click or hover, they pop out (quick & dirty - I'm no artist ):

But if you garrisoned 20 units, there would be no room for that many.

Edited September 4, 2021 by Ceres

[Gurken Khan]

7 minutes ago, Ceres said:

Where in this small space do you want to show individual info?

With a scroll bar.

[MoLAoS]

12 minutes ago, Ceres said:

Where in this small space do you want to show individual info? Yes, by right-clicking would work, but then you have to go through all of them.

Or could we maybe have a narrow colour line on top of each group at the least, showing the group's overall health? Thus, we would at least see health per unit type:

I wonder how health of the 11 units could be shown individually, besides by right-clicking or - a bit faster? - hovering over them and then popping out the individuals. Maybe like this, i.e. when you right-click or hover, they pop out (quick & dirty - I'm no artist ):

But if you garrisoned 20 units, there would be no room for that many.

 

4 minutes ago, Gurken Khan said:

With a scroll bar.

Additionally most buildings allow far less than 20 units inside. 5 in the towers yeah? Then you mouse over to get a tooltip for the individual units. I guess you might have to increase the size of the panel if you had 20 of the same unit or something. In your example for 8 or less or w/e you could have a line down 4 pixels to a big box and in the big box you could fit 8 of a single unit type as individuals. I say 8 cause your image has 2 rows and 4 columns left over. But obviously you can jusst change stuff to some other arbitrary number.

[Ceres]

I wonder how a scroolbar works with 20 garrisoned units and you are hectically looking for units that are healthy enough to send them out. But yes, it might work. This is about infographics and visualisation of data after all, I guess. On the other hand, why bother to see that individual health bars and then manually pick some and send them out? Instead you could set a threshold (before or in-game) that when clicking "Ungarrison healthy units only" only units with health above that threshold are ungarrisoned. When clicking on "Ungarrison all selected units" send all of them out. Would this be an option?

@LetswaveaBook Or is this far away from your thoughts?

Edited September 4, 2021 by Ceres

[MoLAoS]

Just now, Ceres said:

I wonder how a scroolbar works with 20 garrisoned units and you are hectically looking for units that are healthy enough to send them out. But yes, it might work. This is about infographics and visualisation of data after all, I guess. On the other hand, why bother to see that individual health bars and then manually pick some and send them out? Instead you could set a threshold (before or in-game) that when clicking "Ungarrison healthy units only" only units with health above that threshold are ungarrisoned. When clicking on "Ungarrison all selected units" send all of them out. Would this be an option?

But then you need to predict the preferences of various players. Healthy is so binary. Do we only want 85%? What if 10 units would have made a difference and you have 20 inside but only 4 are 85%+ and then another 6 are 65%+. So your 4 guys get wrecked by the 7 from the enemy. And you still can't differentiate then between 10% and 40%. Even if we had 2 categories like "Healthy" and "Above Half". I guess we could assume no difference between 50%- and 10%?

Maybe people are playing the game on their iPad so they have very limited screen space? Otherwise why not just show all the units.

[Ceres]

If it's no problem to show all units, that's the most complete info you could get and base your decisions on it, I agree. We don't need 6 times the icon of an e.g. archer. If there are 6, show the icon and below 6 lines indicating individuals' health. Would that work?

This is certainly too far away, but maybe some are interested in this: d3.js, e.g. heat map examples. You can beatifully visualise data with d3.

[Gurken Khan]

I don't actually care too much about the specifics now, as I feel anything showing more details than currently will be an improvement. If it were only groups of the same kind being shown, like women, inf1, inf2, cav1, cav2... that would be something.

When I garrison for healing I go for 100% health. If feces are hitting the fan it's different, ofc. But especially then I'd like some more info on who I send out.

Generally I think the GUI could make better use of the available space; one random example is playing with min resolution and in the stats, if you use xxxxx/yyyyy resources, it will break it into two lines but cutting the characters off, even when there's plenty of space horizontally and vertically.

[Old Roman]

Settlers IV had this feature, with individual HP bars for each  garrisoned unit.  In that game  with towers and castles it was more critical because when under attack 1 unit at a time answered the front door and fenced to the death with a single opponent.  The graphics were simple semi primitive but worked well. You could choose a wounded resident to send to a healer or replace him with a fresh soldier.

[MoLAoS]

Relevant to my topic in technical development, can we move garrisoned units Nydus canal style? Or even also portal network style. It would be a simple modification of source code if not but since I'm making a fantasy game on pyrogenesis it would be even more convenient if we could do tunnels and portals already or with JS modification.

[Ceres]

8 hours ago, Gurken Khan said:

Generally I think the GUI could make better use of the available space; one random example is playing with min resolution and in the stats, if you use xxxxx/yyyyy resources, it will break it into two lines but cutting the characters off, even when there's plenty of space horizontally and vertically.

Can you maybe please provide a screenshot about this? Thank you!

PS: I'm playing at 2560 x 1080 resolution and never experienced something like you described but could reproduce it in windowed mode, I guess.

Edited September 5, 2021 by Ceres

[LetswaveaBook]

13 hours ago, Ceres said:

Or is this far away from your thoughts?

I was thinking about two hotkeys, lets say they are on A and S. You have a number of units garrisoned. You can see how much HP the one has that is ungarrisoned first. If you want to ungarrison is, you press A. If you want to toggle to the next you press S.

12 hours ago, Gurken Khan said:

I don't actually care too much about the specifics now, as I feel anything showing more details than currently will be an improvement.

That was also the way I viewed it and maybe a ungarrison healthy only hotkey is as good or better.

[BreakfastBurrito_007]

@LetswaveaBookI like both these hotkey options, but I think I would use the easier “ungarrison all healthy” button most frequently. I imagine players who are very fast would like to use the “A+S” hotkeys for selecting cav for rushing.

I feel giving more control over these things is very important and allows for a greater “skill ceiling”.

 

[LienRag]

On 04/09/2021 at 10:48 PM, Gurken Khan said:

With a scroll bar.

Scroll bar would be a mess to find units not appearing on it by default.

Expandable view as was suggested (which may produce a scroll bar, as long as it's not on default) is a way better idea if it's technically possible.

[guerringuerrin]

Quote

On 04/09/2021 at 5:40 PM, Ceres said:

I wonder how health of the 11 units could be shown individually, besides by right-clicking or - a bit faster? - hovering over them and then popping out the individuals. Maybe like this, i.e. when you right-click or hover, they pop out (quick & dirty - I'm no artist ):

But if you garrisoned 20 units, there would be no room for that many.

 

I think this is a good start. I wouldn't do the hover/right click thing nor the scroll bar. There's no time to sit quietly in RTS. U need fast and synthethic information to make fast desitions
Just show the units this way (maybe type-unit in the first line, and then just the health bars in the lower lines as said before. The settings in the options menu could be used to apply this filter. And u could click the bar to ungarrison the group of "-%" or "+%" previously defined.
At least, hotkey implementation using actual "Wounded unit health" its a simple good start.
And I want to add, regarding your topic the fact that Control groups cannot be selected when garrisoned, I think it should be able to keep selecting them even if they are garrisoned. Maybe this option actually exists and i'm not aware

Edited September 28, 2021 by guerringuerrin