Target Priority Switch (for commanders)

Hey,
there is one thing that has bothered me about SupCom quite a bit. That was commander combat micro. I would really hate to see the same mistake to be made in PA, so let me explain what that mistake was for SupCom:

In SupCom you could not tell your commander to attack a certain range of units of your choice. You had to manually pick your targets. This is unnecessary micro and even hinders you from effectively maneuvering your com, as he will stop walking every time you assign a target.

Example:

Player 1 has got 20 tanks and his commander engaging Plaser 2's commander. Player 2's commander is low on health and needs a hp boost by veterancy. Player 2 is retreating towards his base. He does not want to stop walking. His commander engages the enemy commander. Though he wants to kill some t1 to get vetarency. Therefore he needs to manually assign t1 targets to his commander, which in turn leads to his commander stop walking. This sucks quite a bit.

Therefore it would be really great to have a button that makes the commander attack units with the lowest health first in PA, so this mistake does not get repeated.

(I know there won't be veterancy in PA, but the general problem remains)

Yes, this comes up on the FAF forums from time to time. Some Spring games over correct for this by adding separate commands, e.g. select attack target, deselect attack target.

This may be unclear but let me try to articulate another possible solution. Instead of additional command types, target priorities could be integrated into traditional UI such that Attack-Walking (select+alt+right click) and then Shift+Attacking (...+shift+a+right click target) prioritizes selected targets if they are within range without altering the initial move command Don't want to spam-click (...+right click target) for multiple target priorities? Give an Attack-Walk (select+alt+right click) followed by a Shift+Area-Attack (...+shift+a+right click+mouse drag) command. Then your com will priority target all units that were in that area.

If you want to normally Attack-Walk and then Shift+Attack you can still use the regular move command (select+right click) and Shift+Attack (...+shift+a+right click target). The commander still automatically attacks with regular move commands. You could decide whether the commander attempts to fire from max range (like supcom alt+right click) or moves directly to its goal with separate Fight/Return Fire stances.

I probably explained that poorly but if it did make sense, would that be what you're looking for?

No, but this would be great too.

I thought of something more simple (thus less powerful in some regards compared to your approach (but also more powerful in others)). So for example:


target selection routine 1 (can be used for retreating, as described in the example of my first post):
You simply define how much health the units have, that your commander will engage, that are already in range + don't require more than x degree of torso rotation.
You got one button. Pressing it once sets the amount of remaining health on the units to say 100 hp (completely arbitrary numbers ftw). Pressing it twice to 500, thrice to 1000... Maybe you can even define these values in your options or at least your userconfig or stuff.
These number get passed to an algorithm that determines the next optimal target.

You're right that is different. What you're asking for is more akin to unit AI than unit UI . I assume the idea would be to engage units with less health first to more rapidly diminish incoming fire. That can be achieved by having the game calculate what units are most efficient to target based on HP and DPS, damaged units would be naturally higher priority.

There's very few circumstances where you wouldn't want to diminish incoming fire as rapidly as possible so this feature would either have to be inconsistently exclusive to the commander or available to all units. If it's on all units this gets a bit more complicated to employ but would still be doable. Essentially units would need to constantly scan the area around themselves for damaged units and then assess which is the best to attack first. It's not a bad idea and combined with some anti-overkill AI would render focus-fire micro obsolete. I haven't seen this employed in other games so I can't say how difficult it would be to implement. I also realize I took some liberties here and took your idea to its logical conclusion.

If you're interest in more types of Unit AI features there's a thread on the topic here:
viewtopic.php?f=61&t=46037

I wrote a fairly buggy mod for FA that let told my currently selected tanks to shoot at the class of unit I just an attack order to.

When it worked, it was great. One right click and my army would shoot all their power while I drove the tanks around in circles. Another right click and my army would shoot all the engineers while driving about.

I love this kind of stuff.