Paint Attack Usage

[quickstix]

So I notice paint attack has made its way into AI War. I've had a brief look at it and it looks pretty interesting.

However, I'm not exactly sure when I'd ever use it. Could I ask if anyone has any specific scenarios paint attack would be better over regular targeting, because I'm hard pressed to think of one.

Cheers.

[RCIX]

It's a very quick way to get units to focus-fire on targets in a specific instance when you want them to have normal behavior the rest of the time.

[keith.lamothe]

(car salesman mode)

Well, I'm glad you asked

(car salesman shot)

More seriously, here's one case, and one reason I really like it:

Your send your fleet through a wormhole to kill all the guard posts on a planet to cut down its reinforcement rate; previously you could:

1) shift-click a move path over each guard post
2) alt-shift-click an attack-move path over each guard post
3) shift-click each guard post (and optionally all the guarding units around it to make sure they're not there, if you're planning on building resource collectors)
4) put them in FRD and forget

But there were some problems:

1) they wouldn't stop, even if they didn't kill the guard post during the pass; also, many of your ships would wind up getting closer than necessary since they need to actually move to the move point
2) they would stop, so you know the guard post will die (if your fleet doesn't), but they'd also stop to engage stuff along the way and you may be on a schedule; also they'll still move to the actual waypoints, thus spending time and perhaps exposing themselves to unnecessary fire
3) this is difficult to do without zooming in and out a ton, particularly if you want to, for example, kill all the turrets there too
4) offensive FRD doesn't work so well

But now you can:
5) queue up a paint attack order with a rectangle around each guard post's cluster

So they will
- make sure the targets die
- only move close enough to have a good hit rate, not close unnecessarily, and not actually move to the waypoint, which can save a lot of time particularly with long range (and slow) ships, like missile frigates, zenith bombards, and snipers (who generally won't move at all in this case; if you're one of those folks who wipes guard posts with a full cap of each sniper mark this can be a big difference)
- not require a lot of clicks or a lot of zooming to issue the orders

[rubikscube]

so it patrols the target till all enemies die, then moves on. what's the original paint attack meaning

[keith.lamothe]

Well, it doesn't patrol, it just queues up the targets in the rectangle and kills them.  If anything else gets in the way your ships will happily shoot them (assuming none of the specified targets are in range), but it won't stop for them.  Also, it doesn't get any closer to the targets than necessary to get a good shot; many of the other options involve moving all the way to where the targets are positioned, regardless of firing ship range (this is particularly notable for snipers or really long-range ships).

[quickstix]

Using it to efficiently automate guard post killing sounds exactly like what I've been figuring out how to do for ages.

Paint Attack is hereby awesome. Thanks guys!

[orzelek]

The guard post killing is what I used it for.

Only difference from presented scenario was that everything was out of supply - bu it needed destroying anyway
(And that my starships started to eat themselves but thats fixed)

[x4000]

This looks like... bum bum bum... a topic for the wiki!

[keith.lamothe]

Yea, the context menu in general will need a significant entry in both controls.txt and the wiki, I've just been waiting for the functionality of the individual items, the lists of items, the structure of the menus, etc to stabilize a bit.  Currently it's getting multiple changes per day

[x4000]

I gotcha, makes sense.

[wyvern83]

Alt-shift for attack move, I've been meaning to find out what key combo that was.

Paint attack sounds awesome, I greatly look forward to using it. (and seeing your context menu wiki for even more cool options, its hard to keep track of all of the key binds so being able to find them in one place will be very nice.)

[keith.lamothe]

Alt-shift for attack move, I've been meaning to find out what key combo that was.

Alt+right-click.  What? Can't keep it straight?

Glad you like the idea of Paint Attack It's pretty situational in its usefulness, but it can save you a ton of clicking in those cases, and generally perform better than pre-existing options.

Edit: on a side note, you can achieve vanilla (i.e. non-arc, non-paint-attack) group move, formation move, attack move, and free-roaming-defender-move through the "Special Move" item on the context menu, in case you don't remember the key combinations for those or would rather not deal with them.

[wyvern83]

Gotcha.

I was fine with a number of the earlier binds, like FRD for example, but I only saw attack move mentioned once or twice and forgot where I saw it. Also the bind I remembered didn't work so I never saw the yellow outline telling me they were in attack-move mode and the attack-move behavior wasn't evident from what they did either.

As for the newer stuff I haven't played in maybe a week so I've even touched a lot the newer commands. The context menu should make it much more approachable, I have the beta wiki bookmarked so I can look up the context menu bind again before I start up again. Once I'm familiar with it, it shouldn't be a problem.

[keith.lamothe]

Yea, I don't think I knew what attack move did (compared to normal move or FRD) until a couple weeks ago; it's much more useful than move for cleaning stuff out, but has some disadvantages if all you want is to kill the stuff, not patrol over it.