Hi I had two issues last night that drove me crazy! (I know it is Alpha) but: fist: my tanks had a collection of targets in their LoS but they insisted on attacking WALLS first! may be they were closer in range, but they had other good targets in range too. this is wrong. walls should be targeted manually and if automatically, it should be the lowest priority if there was no more units in their LoS. in TA, dragon teeth were not targeted automatically. second issue: my tanks would not respond to change my attack target designation. note, this was FFA game.
Were the walls drawing fire after you gave the attack command, or were they hitting the walls because they were in the way of the units and/or turrets? I think I had an issue like this and I just moved my units to an angle where they could attack the turrets. This is making the assumption that walls are designed to block shots even if you target things behind the walls.
Walls do actually draw fire, primarily because they are almost always closer to the tanks than the defenses. Units, unless explicitly given attack orders, will always fire on the closest enemy. So, if an Antblob is being bombarded by an enemy Antblob from their flank, and there are walls closer to them, your Antblob will fire at the enemy walls instead of the enemy Antblob. This also happens with Artillery, where instead of firing over the walls and hitting enemy defenses, they will fire at the walls because they are, 99% of the time, closer to the artillery. So yeah, a priority system is needed, but I would much rather see major bugs fixed and additions to missing content.
I am sure there was not anything behind the wall. so no it was not in the direction of another target, it was explicitly targeted automatically. thanks for confirming. this might not be a priority fix for now but it has to be at least posted as a bug if not already.
I've already talked with Sorian about this actually. I know that he said that it's completely possible but (as far as I can recall) it's not being worked on right now, and isn't high priority... yet.
Exactly, which means that walls should first be able to do this in an efficient manner before the AI becomes smarter, or else we'll be stuck with useless walls until the walls have been fixed.
I'm not entirely sure I follow your point here, sorry. :| You're saying it's OK that units are shooting at walls now because they're dumb, and should continue to do so when they become smarter? Because that honestly doesn't seem like an improvement. I gotta agree with veta though. It's like you're a tall guy fighting a short guy; you hold him at arm's length to keep him from reaching you. Use the walls to capitalize on the range and height advantage that turrets have, and hold the tanks just out of their attack range, but within yours.
This actually servers as a double purpose as well, not only does it keep them out of range if they choose to rub against the walls, but also gives you time to react if they stand back to try and break open a hole as well, and if then don't open a big enough hole it acts like a funnel and helps keep him from bringing about his full force at once. Mike
They eventually need a priority system so they will target other things than just the walls. The walls will still be useful because if you tell your units to target an enemy turret behind a wall the incoming fire will still hit the wall first because it is blocking the path of the projectile. But as soon as an enemy unit starts flanking your units would target them (unless you have given a manual command to attack something else).
No, that's not what I was trying to say. I'm saying it's OK that the units are shooting the walls now because they are dumb, but they should NOT continue to do so when they become smarter. What I was trying to get at was that walls are currently just not ready for smarter AI yet. If you want to build a wall covering point A to point B, you need to place like a few dozen wall sections in order to block everything off. In the future I hope that the placing one section at point A, and placing another section at point B, would automatically build the wall in between those two points, so you truly have a wall without any holes. After those holes can be plugged, the smarter AI is welcome to try and break through.
Blocks direct line of fire targets, so your units are forced to choose alternative targets (if any are applicable at the time.
The idea isn't to entirely block enemy movement. That's actually detrimental to the defender because it just tells the enemy "I have this specific location entirely locked down, with several hundred thousand units of mass invested in it. You probably shouldn't attack here." Then the attacker (assuming they aren't OCD or have a metal bar stuck through their skull), will just attack from another (most likely) completely undefended direction and steamroll the defender. The idea is with walls to make the approach *look* like it is feasible, but by the time the enemy has their attacking force actually firing, they've lost over half of their units and are continuing to take losses. I mean seriously, walls, Pelters and Lobbers are 3 things that should never be kept from one another.
