Hold your horses...

I often have a problem when I make a couple of tank factories close to my opponent (a forward base). Then I set the factories to produce a lot of tanks. My plan is to make a medium force to attack the opponents base. My problem is that often one or two units from the opponent maybe moves a little close to my forward base. And then all my units moves in for that one or two units. And it is a real challenge to keep my tanks from moving into the opponents base.

Solutions:
Yeah, offcourse I can put my base further away or set the factories waypoint further away. Or I can mark every tank produced with "do not attack unless attacked" but this is to much micro.

What I really want is to set the factory itself to "only attack if attacked".
Or even better "attack, but do not move". This way my tanks will remain at the forward base and hopefully grow to a big force.

So what do you folks think. Do we need a "do not move" order?

I think the technical term is to "hold ground" or something along those lines.

Good idea but in the meantime you can set the factory's waypoint a little closer to home.

Yes we definitely need a "hold ground" option

On second thought, let's call it the:



button.

Definitely need the ability to set those type of commands for spawning units directly from the factory

I'm super against the guard radius of units. Annoying when the units stream 1 by 1 into a blob and super annoying when your fabber gets in the sight of a dox and the dox comes to attack without an order. One is the ai not being smart enough and the other is too much automation for my liking.

There already is a hold ground command. Look at the bar at the right of our screen. Look at the lower bit. One of the buttoms has a drop down menu with a couple options, hold ground, explore or whatever, and default.

Ok, but maybe it should be possible to set this command to a factory. It is too much micro to give this order to every new unit produced.

This you could do way back in TA. I hadn't actually noticed yet, but it's pretty retarded you can't do this in PA yet.

I believe we have a "Return Fire" option among the "Fire at Will" and "Hold Fire" options on the right command bar. I'm not even sure if that's what you want.

I always want all my units to hold ground. Setting the option automatically sounds like a simple UI mod.

I agree with the OP. Basically, what we need is the ability to set the fire and movement options for units from the moment the factory produces them, without the need to click on those units. Instead of clicking on the units and setting those parameters, we need to do the same for the factory, and then everything produced by that factory will have those settings.
Texy

I believe you can, I remember setting factories to roam when the command was first implemented, experiment with the ui guys.

I'd like to see a deployable area, where you could set a circular area for factories to deploy into, units would move around freely to engange enemies or make room for other units but wouldn't move out of that area unless given a command to do so.

Sort of like an area patrol, just a little different. Additionally you could do the whole drag off planet to make the whole planet the designated area thing. (which would be the default setting, deploy out of factory and do whatever.)

also could do in FA

You don't want your units to hold their ground though do you, you want them to hold an area. I think units should have a location that they 'should be' which is separate from their current location. So if you send a unit to X then they will stay within 20 feet of X at all times but see any enemy off who comes within firing range, but as soon as they move outside of firing range when the unit is on the 20 feet boundary, the units comes back to X.

I believe this is the difference between maneuver and roam. Maneuver (what you describe) is the default behaviour.

nvm

I agree and disagree.

I don't like the current implementation. One or two units moving forward one at a time is bad, I agree. However, a group of Dox (range 80) sitting there unmoving while they get destroyed by tanks (range 100) without firing a shot is also a bad thing.

If it were a guard radius for an entire group, that may be a little better.

A 'retreat when damaged' movement function would be great.