Original Post — Direct link

Dear Devs -

Love the game. Looking forward to its full potential.

A quick note about unit behavior. In SC2 (and virtually every RTS game), you can right click your units onto another unit as a follow/guard command. I often do this in SC2 with zerglings, to guard a queen while I attend to Macro elsewhere while they're out on the field spreading creep... Or using Hydras to follow and guard a broodlord attacking a base.

Currently, the follow command doesn't guard. It just follows. This causes the units to act stupidly when encountering the enemy. They just stand there and get attacked mindlessly following the unit without bothering to either defend it, or themselves. This has to be a bug/oversight. It's hard to see why this would be intentional.

I would love to see this fixed. I would love to be able to trust my units to properly engage when I'm sending them across the map, such as gaunts protecting a Hellborn, rather than just standing there taking damage for now good reason while I'm trying to macro and manage the many things happening at once.

Thanks for reading this!

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9 months ago - /u/Frost_monk - Direct link

For some context, I initially asked for the follow behavior that we have implemented in stormgate. The behavior we have mirrors that of wc3, which has the following two benefits:

  • It enables surrounds with the move command. The sc2 implementation doesn't allow for these types of surrounds
  • It enables "sneaky following". You can follow an enemy at a certain distance and not engage them. This will make more sense once our stealth system comes online, but in the context of other games, it essentially enables a stealthed unit with an attack such as a blademaster or a dark templar to follow a target without engaging them once they reach the follow distance. (You can't do this in sc2).

However, compared to the sc2 behavior, it has two downsides/tradeoffs:

  • Units won't guard when they follow, as you pointed out.
  • Rallied units that are rallied to a unit won't engage once they reach their target location. This is because rally orders are essentially follow orders. You can especially notice this in the early-game when it comes to creep interactions.

More recently, I've been leaning towards that the sc2 behavior is probably better for our game because:

  • Move-surrounds aren't really a thing in our game due to our current pathing and much lower TTK relative to wc3.
  • Sneaky following has dubious benefits, especially since stealth still isn't publically online yet.
  • The rally behavior we want in our game is probably the sc2 version because of the cadence at which we produce units. In order to optimally control your rallied units, you have to do two extra steps per unit, which isn't a big deal in wc3, a game with lower unit count, but when the rallied unit count gets higher, like in our game, the tax on the player grows.
9 months ago - /u/Frost_monk - Direct link

Originally posted by aaabbbbccc

Also hold position is broken and makes the units stop for 1 sec before attacking (im told it makes them play their idle animation) which is really frustrating.

This is fixed in the next build!