Paint attack

[RCIX]

As you (may) know, sc2 has this new Paint attack feature where you can just brush over units and then they are all targeted for attacking by the selected group. It's really nice because then you can get them to attack something and know exactly what they're going to attack, but you don't particularly care about the order in which stuff is attacked. I thought it would be nice to at least discuss the feasibility of adding something like this to AI war, and it's usefulness

[keith.lamothe]

I've been planning to implement that for right-click-and-drag, though if someone has a better idea I'm listening.

[Doddler]

The paint attack would be really nice, attack move works decently but it has uh, issues with long ranged units.  Melee units in particular go nuts.  A paint would be so nice to be able to specify roughly where to attack and such.  I use the paint attack a lot in supcom2 and it's really nice.  Although, I have a feeling it might be troublesome to handle with very large numbers of ships?  I mean, 2000 ships, you paint targets over 2000 enemy ships, that's like... 4 million attack orders to queue up, I have a feeling my computer would feel unhappy about the prospect.

[Draco18s]

What we really need is a starcraft-like shift-righclick targeting cue.  10 marines on 10 marines is a coin flip on who wins.  But if one player shift-attacks each of the enemy units in order then he wins and still owns 10 (50% damage) marines.  The reason is that it takes 10 marine's shots to kill a marine.  The one side fires at random, but the micro-manager's units all fire on a single target, killing it instantly.  Now its 9 marines on 10.  The enemies fire again, dealing some spread out damage, the micro'd units fire and kill a second unit.  Repeat.

Or...we could smarten up the focus fire control node, which separates by ship type.  So all your bombers will target the same thing, but your fighters, frigates, [special], starships will target something else (and all fire on the same target based on the unit's targeting preference).

[FrostyThePyro]

actuly draco that would be dumbing down the focuse fire node.  A bomber does reduced damage vs fighters, so if they focuse by type they will (using their own target priority settings) tend to target things they can do more damage to.

[Draco18s]

actuly draco that would be dumbing down the focuse fire node.  A bomber does reduced damage vs fighters, so if they focuse by type they will (using their own target priority settings) tend to target things they can do more damage to.

I fail to comprehend your point.

My point was that a typed focus fire would mean that all bombers would fire on a single frigate, while all frigates would fire on a single fighter, and all fighters would fire on a single bomber at the same time without player intervention.

[keith.lamothe]

The current focus fire node implementation is generally supposed to make that happen, but it adjusts for a bunch of factors like overkill and hit chance due to range, etc.

The whole point was to minimize the total area of the enemy's "attack power over time" graph, if you get what I mean, just like the age-old 10 marines vs. 10 marines problem.

[Fiskbit]

What we really need is a starcraft-like shift-righclick targeting cue.  10 marines on 10 marines is a coin flip on who wins.  But if one player shift-attacks each of the enemy units in order then he wins and still owns 10 (50% damage) marines.  The reason is that it takes 10 marine's shots to kill a marine.  The one side fires at random, but the micro-manager's units all fire on a single target, killing it instantly.  Now its 9 marines on 10.  The enemies fire again, dealing some spread out damage, the micro'd units fire and kill a second unit.  Repeat.

Or...we could smarten up the focus fire control node, which separates by ship type.  So all your bombers will target the same thing, but your fighters, frigates, [special], starships will target something else (and all fire on the same target based on the unit's targeting preference).

Perhaps I'm misinterpreting, but it sounds like you're asking for a shift+rc queue? The game is pretty robust regarding command queues at this point, so you can queue up all sorts of orders by holding shift. If the current implementation is lacking something please let us know.

[RCIX]

Yes, paint attack

Used when i want my units to (in a specific instance) focus-fire and clean up a set of units, but i don't care in what order they do it.

[Draco18s]

Perhaps I'm misinterpreting, but it sounds like you're asking for a shift+rc queue? The game is pretty robust regarding command queues at this point, so you can queue up all sorts of orders by holding shift. If the current implementation is lacking something please let us know.

I've tried that and haven't seen it work.

One I know doesn't work is shift-rc'ing on transports, so if I have 800 ships I can just click-click-click-click on four transports and they'll fill one until its full, then the next one.  As is, I either have to select 200 ships at once or I have to wait until the transport over-fills.

[keith.lamothe]

Shift-rc attack queuing really should be working, I don't know why it wouldn't.

Shift-rc transport queuing is another thing because semantically you're telling all 800 ships to all load into the first transport, then all load into the second transport, etc.  When the first order fails for a unit it just kinda sits around confused.  I do plan to change it so that failure to load into a transport results in "failing over" to other nearby transports with room, so you wouldn't have to use shift click or anything like that.