formation movement trouble

[Cyborg]

Good afternoon. I looked this issue up on the wiki before I came here (flame protection).

I'm trying to do formation movements where I can create a fleet that has my fighters as the wingmen, my bombers in the middle and my missile frigates in the back. It lets me do this, but then there are some problems that occur directly afterwards.

The first is, the formation is unable to rotate. Meaning if I am working my way around clearing a planet, the formation falls apart quite quickly because I cannot turn around. So I thought I would use arc movement, use concentric circles to create my fleet of doom, but I don't think this is working yet. So, I'm having trouble with the micro and keeping things where I want them to be. I think that formation movement could help with a little work. What would be ideal:

Being able to form a group of units and maintain direction, with a designated squad leader. The squad leader could be chosen in the movement context window, available when formation movement is in effect.

In this way, I could hotkey each a group of spacecraft within my formation if I want them to break formation, but then select the group as a whole and click on directional formation movement and they would fall back into line. How cool would this be? It would be like professional space fleet tactical movement.

Worst-case scenario, can you put please arc movement back in so I could use the concentric circles (directionless I guess)?

When you have time, I know that Valley without wind comes first.

[Philo]

Sounds good to me at least.

[x4000]

Bear in mind that the current formation move is something that is pretty basic, and which was added at player request with the understanding that we weren't going to be trying to build a fully-fledged formation system that can be rotated, etc.  That's just out of scope of what we've been planning for the game with that sort of thing.

The arc move command is something that we do plan to reintroduce, and I think that's in mantis -- the best way to make sure that happens sooner than later is to find the existing issue in mantis with a quick search, and vote it up.  Stuff that comes up to the top of our votes list gets the most attention sooner; the main reason arc move hasn't made it back in yet is that people have upvoted a lot of other stuff above it so far.

[Cyborg]

Reinstate arc movement (plug):

http://www.arcengames.com/mantisbt/view.php?id=3413


Vote if you like formations!

[x4000]

Great!

[superking]

the RTS formation setter ever was implemented by TAspring- if you hold down the cursor and drag when giving an order, you paint a line. when you let go, the units are given orders to equidistant points along the line. through this incredible medium, you could write trolling messages to your opponent out of units, scatter them by drawing a huge circle or do anything else- and the best thing was there was no need to fiddle with menus or hotkeys- just hold right click and drag. beautiful.

[Cyborg]

Would you add your support, super King?