Vxsote1

Join Date 12/2015

Unit selection, grouping, and armies - serious problems

So many things are going wrong with unit selection, grouping, and army formation that I don't even know how to tell the problems apart from each other. Before today's patch, I noticed a few things - but now it seems like a dozen.

If I have two groups, and in each group I have all of the units in an army, then later I select all of the units and try to reassign them to one group it doesn't work. some of the units change groups, but not all. Sometimes unis end up in two groups. If I disband the armies first, then regroup, it seems to work right.

Before the patch, sometimes all the units in a group would die, but the empty group would still appear on the HUD. But not always. I don't think I saw that yet today.

But now, I think I've seen cases where some units in an army in a group die, and all of the sudden the group is just gone. The units are still there, and rendered as if they were selected, but I think they're not actually selected. Groups are definitely vanishing, but I'm not completely sure why.

I just played a single player game, and a ranked 1v1, and it was a constant struggle to keep track of units because of groups disappearing. I also had major issues with hades bombers refusing to move. They just got stuck. Or weren't really selected. Or something. The commands were acknowledged, but nothing was happening. I felt like I had about 40% of the level of control over my units that I should have.

Also, once (a week or two ago) I hit a number hotkey to a group I had previously assigned, and the screen refocused onto my opponent's side of the map. Early game, I hadn't been anywhere near there yet. That was definitely a wtf moment.

Anyhow, please take a hard look at this, because it is very difficult to play right now.

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Ticktoc

Join Date 03/2015

+85

I have noticed more of these too. Sometimes half an army will just refuse to move while the other goes forward. This control issue stuff really has got to be nailed down.

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Hey when the bombers did not move was that against a bot?

I had this problem a few times with bombers, but it was against bots each time.

Yes, that refocus is frustrating.

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The bomber issue was against a bot I believe. I did some more single player last night, trying to get better at substrate, and I had martyrs also refusing to move. Tried breaking the army, selecting units one at a time, etc. Nothing worked. Sometimes they might shift around in place a little, but they refused to actually travel.

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Frogboy

Join Date 03/2001

+2415

Thanks for the report.

We were able to reproduce this. It didn't go into the latest Steam build but it shoudl show up in the next one.

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I've played a few matches with v0.94 and I can say that overall, the behavior with groups and armies is definitely improved. However, there are still some odd things happening.

Periodically, when I add units to an existing army that is in a group, that group will vanish (the group, not the units). This seems to be especially true when I add the new units by selecting them, then right clicking on a unit that is a member of the army.
It is still possible to have a unit be a member of two groups at once. It happens far less often, and I'm not sure how I did it, but I've seen it happen twice.
Behavior when all members of a group have died is inconsistent. Sometimes the group is no longer listed in the tree. Sometimes it is listed, but is empty. And once, it was still listed, and still showed unit icons (even though the units were all gone).

As far as units refusing to move, I haven't had that happen in 0.94, but one of my opponents last night told me that he was unable to get his "planes" to move. I'm not sure which particular unit type he was talking about.

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Agreed.... I feel like I can't even begin to play this game because unit selection and grouping is so busted. Here are problems I see:

1) shift-# doesn't add units to group (what?!?1?)

2) when a group has two types of structures (factory and armory), I only get the factory panel.... I don't see any way to switch to the armory subset (in starcraft this would be TAB) This makes managing production facilities and rally points a PITA.

3) when I click the "idle engineer" button it moves my camera.. which is seriously annoying, because the whole reason I was selecting an idle engineer is to do something where the camera was!

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1. Sounds like you're expecting Starcraft-like behaviour. I really dislike this; it's a matter of personal preference really, not an objective problem. I want shift-<number> to add the group to the sum total of selected groups, not actually add the already selected group to the shift'd group. The reason being I think it should be ctrl-<number> which creates a group, not shift. e.g. I have a ground army and some bombers in two groups. I want to select both of them to move somewhere, but still be able to control them separately. If I want to actually combine them into one group, then it's a simple matter of shift-selecting them and then ctrl-<number> to form the combined group. Perhaps shift-number could add the group to the sum total of selected groups, and shift-ctrl-number could combine the groups into the new number?

2. Definitely sounds like a problem.

3. Is, in my opinion, the correct behaviour; I want the camera to go to the idle worker so I know (more easily) which idle worker is being selected so I can chose the most suitable one for the task. I don't have a problem with remembering the location where I want the worker to go and do something. Perhaps this could be a configuration option, or the camera's behaviour can be altered by using a modifier key (e.g. F1 and ALT-F1).

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Quoting jeskeca,

reply 6

Agreed.... I feel like I can't even begin to play this game because unit selection and grouping is so busted. Here are problems I see:

1) shift-# doesn't add units to group (what?!?1?)

2) when a group has two types of structures (factory and armory), I only get the factory panel.... I don't see any way to switch to the armory subset (in starcraft this would be TAB) This makes managing production facilities and rally points a PITA.

3) when I click the "idle engineer" button it moves my camera.. which is seriously annoying, because the whole reason I was selecting an idle engineer is to do something where the camera was!

You can effectively get "shift+number" working by first selecting the control group (e.g. 1) and then shift clicking or box selecting units, and then pressing the "v" key to add them to the army. This also adds them to the control group. I agree though, that shift+number would be super intuitive, and was what I expected would work when I first started playing the game.

I do not believe it should be possible for a unit to be in two control groups at once *if* it is in army, because some really weird things happen when you end up in that situation. Like the entire army getting redirected because you told a few scouts to move and one of them happened to be in another army somewhere.

I also really dislike how you cannot create an army with a single unit (who says my sole archer can't consider himself to be an army!?) and you cannot reinforce to that unit using the reinforcement system. The AI can actually do this by the way, if you watch them play as an ally you can see them creating armies with single units, out of pure frigates, and reinforcing them from the start of the game.

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Yes, I'm aware you can select the group, then shift-box the units, then control-# the new full selection. I didn't realize you coulv use "v" instead to also add to the group-#.

Is there any way to produce from multiple types of production facilities that are on the same control-group #? When I group factories and armories on #3, I can only make factory units. -- Is there some alternate way to deal with production facilities that makes this unimportant?

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I use groups 7-0 for the different types of production buildings separately. It eats up a large number of the available control groups, which is one of the superficial reasons that I prefer substrate.

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Sometimes my selection gets foobar, where nothing is selected, and I can't select anything.. either by pressing numbers or by drag-selecting or by clicking. It's infuriating. It's like the game just stops listening to me. It'll draw the box of a drag select, it just won't actually select any units as a result. I wildly click and drag and press ESC, trying to get it out of whatever "stuck" state it is in..... It happens to me every few minutes when playing against the AI. There is no way I can play an online game like this.

What is going on here? Is this a bug, or is this some kind of weird modal?

Rarely, when this happens, circles surround all my units.

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Ticktoc

Join Date 03/2015

+85

Quoting jeskeca,

reply 11

Rarely, when this happens, circles surround all my units.

Hit Alt to get rid of that. Happens if you alt tab out.

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Do other people experience this input-lag, where the game stops listening to them for 10+ seconds?

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I do occasionally get into modes like you described where I can't seem to select units despite drawing a selection rectangle around them, although it seems pretty rare. More frequently, the game seems to fail to register a click after a hotkey, and then I can't select units until I complete or exit that operation somehow. It IS quite annoying when it happens.

I think that the explanations here https://forums.ashesofthesingularity.com/476839/page/1/#3630891 are relevant to some of my complaints in the OP. It's annoying to the point where control groups are nearly useless for units. There's little point in setting a control group when it's just going to vanish in a minute or two.

Some of the interaction between control groups and armies needs to be reworked, because right now it kinda sucks.

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