Please add to your log:
Have Stand Ground option for boats. You can call it “Blockade”. Boats are kited off course if you park them along a trade route or just outside range of a dock or castle. Basically would work just like the stand ground feature.
Thank you for considering!
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Well, wow, apparently you devs already did this in the PUP. 
…
However, I still strongly recommend changing the name of the action. The functionality is perfect, but it technically is kind of hard for a boat to “stand ground” on water. 
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“Blockade” is my recommendation because that is what navies always did when doing the equivalent of standing ground. A blockage is like a siege on water you might say.
Alternatively, “Drop Anchor” works too!
… Now you just need to add “Guard” action from AoE2.
Blockade is not a good option, that’s much more specific.
Drop anchor makes way more sense, still I’d leave it stand ground to keep it consistent with all other units since it isn’t doing anything different for ships.
I would also like the stances such as AoE2 has. It would also greatly improve the behavior of the current stand ground which doesn’t work as a stance, but has to be a command issued after moving.
I would like to put my ships on patrol for my trade ships, but not have them chase an enemy ship that got in range back to the enemy docks. It defeats the purpose of patrol if you ask me. But stand-ground mode for ships is at least a good alternative for now.
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Interesting idea. Perhaps too complicated. But a hybrid of “stand ground” and “guard”. First of all, they need to get “guard” move ability in here so you could have boats guard the trade ships. But I am not sure actually, even in AoE2, exactly how guard works with respect to “standing ground” versus “pursuing” (which I will use as the term for the default mode of military). i.e. Would a guarding ship chase a boat and stop guarding or would it continue the guarding action after the enemy is gone? I presume it would be like standing ground, but moving along with the target of the guard. Regardless, patrol is of no use in this situation.
Perhaps they could have another hybrid move that is like is not guard, but a hybrid of patrol and stand guard where it goes back and forth “patrolling” but will try to get back to patrolling when the enemy is gone. Perhaps this should really be the default behavior of patrol.
Basically, the next major addition should be “guard”, and we can see how it works in practice.
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don’t make it complicated.
Just use Hold-Position.
Can work for both ground/air/land.
Don’t forget there is a level of designing the game and UI to be understandable for the general populace.
Drop anchor makes perfect sense for those familiar with boats and english language.
But for many it can be completely alien and hard to understand. Same comes to blockade.
Hold Position would be a far more universally understood term.
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thing with how guard works is this, unit will only attack enemy unit when its really close then chase that unit till it dies, then come back to the unit its guarding, also using guard command on unit itself makes it engage about a frame or 2 faster, not super useful but interesting regardless
this is all based on AOE2’s guard command testing
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