Oh lamentations, where did it go!! I like that you need to micro to get good concaves, but PA is about being mechanically lazy to a degree, and i miss being lazy.
Has anyone confirmed that they didn't simply make it active always? Has anyone tried a shift right click drag?
It was rather clunky to use but a nice to have feature if it works correctly. I hope they only removed it to allow it to return once it is more polished. But I guess it's another submarine...
Thankfully, the underlying feature is still there, and it's trivial to mod. I made one that just turns it on by default. https://forums.uberent.com/threads/rel-enable-custom-formations.62269/
It was clearly overcomplex, too inconvenient to use for what it does. What is needed is simply drawing one line; units should take positions along that line evenly spaced. If there are more units, the formation would be deeper. No area selection, confirmation clicks or anything else needed.
Yeah, I was thinking on a similar level to totalwar games where you select your units then click and drag with little blips on the floor to show how they will be spaced.
Am i missing something? That's exactly how it worked. You drew a line, then set a direction, then clicked to confirm. It even showed you blips for units.
Hmm, when I tested it you had to draw some kind of an area, then move your mouse to fill some part of the area, and then click confirm. The filling never worked the way you wanted; to get some kind of a frontline you probably had to redraw something that fits the number of units better, to get it filled better, and then I decided it's not worth the effort and never touched it again. Maybe there were more iterations of it I never even noticed... (I don't remember if you had to do something to set direction as well. But that shouldn't be necessary. Just draw left from right get direction forward, right from left backward, likewise all rotations.)
I believe we should have this, but with contextual commands to complement it too. Shift + multiple click & drags should let you split units into multiple formations, for example. EDIT: Found an old image example for what I mean.
In this case elodea is miss interpreting you. I was playing around with it just before the patch hit. You draw a line, you move the mouse in the direction you want your units to face and then you right click. A total of 3 actions. The reason why it wasn't useful is that the formation spacing, depth and width were too rigid. At most you could draw a semicircle and have your army split into two blobs. Almost everything else resulted in a single block of unit no different from a normal right click. If you wanted to spread units along a line, you were better off doing it the manual way.
I think the line tool was largely fine. You are supposed to use attack move behaviour in combination to form concaves. You don't actually create artificial semi circles with it. If you did that, they would never fit enemy formations properly in order to justify the point of concaving in the first place. Line tool is to a) create formation widths longer than the default rb) Set formation directions when you have compositions like vanguard tank.
Well, if you just want straight lines, that would be even simpler. Just copy the exact system from Total War games, like someone said. Just one action instead of 3. The positive side is you could adjust the length freely before releasing the mouse button. But creating arcs can be useful too, on larger scale. And so would aevs suggestion. You could use that to easily split selected units into two groups with identical unit compositions. Still it can be simpler than it was. Just draw a line, direction is determined by draw direction, no confirmation needed.
Wow, I just checked it out and discovered that the current custom formation implementation is all that useful. It requires too many clicks and does not even let your units spread that well.
