Soulblighter 201 class ?

[iron]

... and if your dwarf is obviously doomed, but you still have a smidge of time, make him lay a sat, then control-click on the ground behind the attacking unit. With any luck, the dwarf's bottle will hit the attacker at point-blank range (which may or may not kill it), and the sat will blow as well, igniting any other sats the dorf is dropping and obliterating anything in the near vicinity.

The best way of learning to micro-manage units & all the associated tricks is to play co-op mode on the solo levels. That way you're given control of, say, a bunch of archers, or some zerks or a dwarf, and you have to work together almost instinctively with your team-mates while concentrating on using your unit(s) to best advantage. From there you could move on to multiplayer games vs humans rather than the AI, but they tend to lack the camaraderie of an intense co-op.

There used to be tons of co-ops played on mnet & paymyth, but on the few occasions I visit there now I hardly ever see one being hosted.

[Vindicator]

It would also be awfully nice to be able to make units switch formations without having to click somewhere. Oh well. Why pine for what you can't have.

I really like this idea he has put forth here.
It would be really nice and a great feature if your units could change formations while standing in the same location as the previous formation. This would look really cool and be very useful as a matter of fact.

Hey Magma developers, maybe add something like Shift+1-0 would make units change to that formation and you dont have to click the ground. I just tried this in game, and it wont conflict with anything else in game.

[iron]

Agreed, this would be a very cool and player-friendly feature to add. However, unfortunately Myth is not designed in such a ways as to make this at all easy to implement.

The problem is that Myth does not, at present, store the fact that groups of units are set to a formation. When you tell units to move somewhere in, say, a long line, it just plots the individual destinations and facings for all the selected units and they make their way there individually. The fact that they're set as a group to that formation and facing is lost. Were it stored, then yes potentially being able to, say, hit Shift-3 and have them automagically transform to a loose line based around their current centre could be added.

I guess its not impossible, indeed changes that were just as challenging, perhaps more so, have been tackled in the past. But neither is it trivial.

Edit: I'm speaking as a retired developer who is out of touch with our current codebase, so I could be totally wrong

[Melekor]

Each monster knows its final destination and facing, so the group destination and facing could be approximated by the average over all the selected monsters. I guess this should be quite accurate in most cases - one exception being the rabble formation because of its asymmetry.

[vinylrake]

then again, "rabble" is intended not to be a specific "formation" so unless someone has used fear to tighten up their rabble spacing to some boxy very un-rabbley formation i think anyone choosing "rabble" is basically telling their units "Spread out a bit and don't stand too close to each other" - they aren't going to be choosing that formation for precise positioning.

(obviously just my opinion)

[Vindicator]

I am sure it would be pretty complicated to implement, but what about something Bungie has promised before myth's release. How would this work in Theroy?

The idea of programmable formations..
To me this makes me imagine being able to do something like:
Place your warriors in the front line, then place archers behind them. With maybe J inbetween warriors and archers to heal. Then be able to "Lock" or program this formation like a preset, and the units would move in this formation and be able to turn to it as needed by selecting the preset programmed formation.

Now that I think about it, the only problem with the effectiveness of programmble formations would be the units move at differnt speeds. So there would have to be something in programmable formations that made Bersekers and whoever they are in a programmed formation with move at the same speeds. Since it would be silly to make archers or dwarfs move at the same higher speeds a zerk or trow might. A fix would be everybody in a programmed formation moves at the speed of the slowest unit. Berserks moving at the speed of a dwarf makes sense, but no way would making a dwarf speed up to berserk speeds make sense.

How would this work in Theroy? Magma devs any ideas? O and BTW I know myth has persistent formations currently. As they are implemented now they are 99% worthless in combat.

[iron]

Making all units move at the same speed as slowest units in a group ... interesting idea, but would fundamentally change how Myth behaves (I don't even want to consider the programming required given what I know of Myth's gameplay spaghetti code!)

This change would be separate from programmable formations, as right now you could group a few warriors and arcs in the 1 formation & if this feature existed you'd then expect them all to move at arc speed.

Going on your previous idea of changing formations while standing in the same location, this could also be done to refresh the current formation when a unit or two has died - the units would tighten up & get back into line properly, filling the gaps. I actually like this idea, as right now the only way to do this is to select the units, hit the formation number, then an irksome 3rd-step of click-dragging on the ground.

I don't know how that'd work with "programmable" formations though, as there's no set algorithm to use when determining unit positions as there is with, say, long line. If a unit or two died, the only way to "tighten up" the formation would be to issue individual movement orders & then create the custom formation again.

I tend to think that the majority of players would rather treat warriors, arcs and jmen as separate groups of units, especially when dancing them around in combat, so a programmable multi-unit-type formation feature would probably not be used much, if at all.

[Pyro]

This can already be done to computer controlled units using scripting (platoons), but not the part about matching unit speeds.

[iron]

While we're talking about formations, I recall in TFL that if you had a bunch of units set to a formation, for example archers in a loose line, you could select them and click on the ground to move them, and they'd keep the same facing & formation direction used in the previous movt command.

If your arcs are facing an enemy, you could use this to dodge them around with a single click, and no dragging needed to make them face the right way.

In Myth 2, a single click (without drag) will not only make the units face a new direction (directly away from the group's previous centre), it will align the formation at 90 degrees to this new facing. So your line of arcs that was facing the enemy is now edge-on and facing away to the side, in ideal position to be massacred

There's time & place for either method I guess, but Myth 2's behaviour really used to annoy me ... back when I had time to play.

[Vindicator]

The units reforming the formation if units in that formation die, the others in the formation then fill any gaps.

Would this be something not too difficult to add?
Myth has allways been the most formation intense RTS game ever created.
It would be cool to expand upon this and make Myth the thinking man's complex tactical formations wargame. People would not be required to use this in game, but it would be nice if it was there for those of us the love formation warfare.

[Eddaweaver]

Only a tiny minority of people who bought a copy of Myth ever played it online. Online players were mostly by default above average in ability. The ones left today have up to 14 years of practise. So don't feel too bad if you're finding it hard to make things work like clockwork

It is possible to click on the overhead map while holding down the Windows key to move units to that spot. I hope you know about double clicking on units to band select.

Have you customised the controls? Bungie's defaults can be hard to use so changing them to something that works better for you may help. Here is an example


The other control issue is the default camera speed is very slow. As you can see by the number of downloads many players are using a faster camera
http://tain.totalcodex.net/items/show/m ... -speed-kit

[vinylrake]

i never knew this plugin existed.

[A-Red]

In Myth 2, a single click (without drag) will not only make the units face a new direction (directly away from the group's previous centre), it will align the formation at 90 degrees to this new facing. So your line of arcs that was facing the enemy is now edge-on and facing away to the side, in ideal position to be massacred .

The sometimes convenient exception is if your selected units are in more than one formation, in which case Myth II will keep the global facing *and* relative positioning. You can use this to your advantage even if you only want to move a line of archers. Just set the whole bunch in a loose line, then pick one, set him to short line or whatever, and move him to almost exactly the spot he was already in. Then you can move them all around in the loose line and keep the same facing.

[Vindicator]

A-Red, I think what you are describing here is the way I figured out how to use "persistent" formations in myth 2. Make a formation of differnt units, tell them to face a direction, then select 1 of those units, and select a DIFFERENT formation number 1-0 then they are allready using, tell them to face a direction. Then you select them all and tell them to move to a location. They will keep the formation of whatever they were in before they were moved and reform in that formation at the destination that you clicked. I hope people can understand this.. Maybe I will make a youtube video that shows my click and facings on the screen so people can understand what I am saying here. I belive, this is the ONLY way to use persistant formations.

[Pyro]

Yeah, I think you said the same thing as he did with different words.

If you guys just wanted the group of units to face the same direction (e.g. East, West, etc) as their last location, you could simply use the left/right arrow keys to rotate the way they will end up even before they reach their destination.

Or if you really wanted those types of formations without mixing formations all the time, you could just use the pref to disable persistent formations. This way your units will always keep the formation they last had before the move order the same way TFL had it.