Patrol command needs a unit cap

The servers only lag with patrol commands, unless you have thousands of idle units.

But dox and other small/cheap units lag the server so much from independent pathfinding, that it becomes unbearable to play at 1/20 the normal speed.

Patrol needs a unit cap. If a selected group is more than X amount of units, then the patrol command should not be available.

I personally refuse to use it since it lags the game for me and everyone else. But today I witnessed an hour and a half long game, but the timer only said 35 minutes since someone decided to spam all dox and patrol them around every planet.

Lobby option or bust.

Lobbies need a lot of things

Including a complete re-do.

IMB4
"this can be modded"-The devs

Well, when I own whole planet and spam dox on area patrol, when I see that dox are in every possible spot on my planet, I select them all and click stop. Because why have them move, they are already covering everything. Of course, if it wouldn't lag server, I wouldn't stop, but that's the most I can do, because I still got the desire to cover whole planet with my units..

Maybe whole planet area patrol could have a time limit? Like, you could set in in lobby, so everyone could see that in this match, your units will stop patrolling planets after 5 minutes. And there could be an optional limit for patrolling units as well. Say, no more than 200 of your units can patrol one planet at the time.

Seriously, there is no need to patrol 24/7 when you own it. You just want to cover it with units, the don't have to move all the time. But this does not apply to air, since it needs time to take off.

I think this is a symptom of multi-planet gameplay. Without easy ways to manage them simultaneously, you end up fighting the UI quite a bit. Sure you have PIP, but without mods, you have only one window and it only shows half of a planet. Plus, it can be quite a resource drain when you have higher settings enabled. So to be sure that you have no enemy footholds starting up, you have to flip through the planets at a frenetic speed and/or monitor the system for possible astreii, unit cannon units, or orbital engineers.

The planet selection screen (for example) should be redone to be more informative, it should show (if you have radar coverage) if there are enemy/ally units present on a planet, metal spots (I don't know if official has it, I have a mod that shows it), etc. The alerts need to show for your units under attack and your buildings under attack. I don't need to see the twenty enemy factories I just destroyed in the alerts screen. I frequently get the audio saying I'm under attack without any notification WHERE it is occurring.

This should be accounted for in the balance, so that spamming lots of units isnt the best option late game.

For example, booms are the best unit to use for both defense and offense for invasions (pre UC)

It should be hard to defend multiple planets or an entire planet by yourself. It shouldn't be frustrating, but it should be hard. Large scale multiplanet games should primarily be a team oriented exercise.

Or play the game with people who aren't shitheads!

Edit: Has the profanity filter been removed for this festive and jolly time of year?

Right. But what we have right now are UI problems that make patrol spam a necessity for a human player because we can't easily see these other battlefields at a glance or know where we are being attacked to intelligently respond to threats unless we have camera points mapped out in advance and are flipping through them constantly. There has got to be an easier way than this.

Patrol spam is certainly not necassary, heck I'd even say it's a bad tactic. It'll spread your units way too thin to be picks off by turrets, artillery, etc...

people do it when they have a planet to themselves.

I think it's just that you put it as one word.

I bet it could be optimized by adding a limit beyyond which the behavior is changed. If you try to patrol _100 dox, it could instead patrol 50 groups of 2. Maybe the pathing system could work better with them traveling in packs, but I don't know much about how it works.

The most likely solution is what @burntcustard said.

Well I've followed the policy of paroling a set number of bombers planet wide. Usually once I have control of a planet I'll build a couple of air factories, full area patrol and queue up say 20 bombrs in each. 40 bombers is plenty to prevent a gate on a moon, maybe 60 or 100 total if the planet is larger. I think a big part of the issue is people leave full planet wide patrol factories on continuous when it isn't necessary.

The patrol command shouldn't be artificially nerfed because of a pathfinding weight on the server from numbers.

Just making a better suggestion here, if each unit independently on patrol causes a much higher load, but mass armies going to the same move command doesn't, then why not make "area patrol with massive quantities of units" give no more than 10 move commands? Any more than 10 units get the commands as a group. Once 10 move commands already exist, the units go idle until less than 10 move commands exist in that patrol, in which case they get a move command and other idle units share it with the one it was given to.

That is a bit of work compared to capping it, but there are plenty of ways to limit max move orders with minimal coding work and still make it function as a mass patrol order. Because units spreading to occupy an area is just that necesary a command.

I have never noticed a difference between giving many move orders to a group of units or only one to that same group. Why would there be a difference, you still have to make sure that the whole group can move through small gaps.