yeah and in that situation the unit portrait that you see is the unit that is affected when you click on a formation, I am not sure what you mean when you say you don’t know which unit is represented by the unit icon, you know by the big unit portrait
We are talking about a selection of several unit types in the same group where you can select up to 95 units in one group.
Such group can have 5 different artillery types.
When you click on the Bombard icon, only one of the 5 type of artillery will switch to Bombard, and the other 4 types will remain in Limber.
On the other hand, if you use ALT-B, all 5 artillery unit types will change to Bombard.
Hot keys and Unit Mode Icons MUST work the same way for the sake of consistency.
This is a well known programming rule.
2 ways for doing the same thing, where both ways produce the same results.
yeah again we are talking about the same thing and again you can cycle through the unit portrait to click on the formation you want for that unit that is represented by the portrait only
Why? they have different functionalities that are useful in different situations, if you do that you are removing a feature of the game.
And they are not doing the same thing, our convo has demonstrated that, they have different functions and therefore has different purposes.
My suggestion/solution will not remove a feature from the game, it will keep all existing features and add a new one.
Everything will work the exact same way it does now.
On the right of the unit portrait there are 3 columns for unit modes, and below that there is another smaller column for certain functions such as “delete unit”.
Currently the unit mode (the 3 upper columns) is used only for the unit on the portrait, so you have to tab between each unit to change the unit mode for that unit.
I am suggesting to allow to consolidate all the unit in the group via a special icon (the last button of the forth column can be used for that) so each unit mode column will represent a different unit class (e.g. infantry).
This way the 3 unit mode columns will control all the units in the entire group.
The last button of the forth column can be used to switch back and forth between controlling unit mode for only one unit in the group or all units at once.
I think as EaglemutOP points out, you will run into problems with units that have other actions and abilties outside of unit formations (all the explorers, daimyos, etc) which already uses up all the space
by columns you mean rows right
there is also a strange thing about the game and formations that there are overlaps between the formations and the classes and in ways that will break the system pretty quickly
there are broadly 5 classes of formation types (range infantry, melee infantry, melee cav, range cav and artillery) and the formations overlap for some of them (since formations are modes shared across the units)
melee mode is shared across of them, the moment you try to consolidate this, you will either have the icon appearing several time for each unit type (which either means your consolidation can have max of 3 unit types) or you have one centrally and then you are fucked if clicking on the icon changes the formation for all the units.
stagger mode only exist for ranged infantry and ranged cavalry
then there are the weirder stuff like abilities big button for caro and nizams and also stealth mode. which only a minority of units have but across all unit types
feels like way too much stuff for something that can bypassed with tabbing and hotkeys
i dont mind if you make that a game setting, having that change mid game potentially is pretty unstable experience wise
Yes, I mean “Row”, I got lost in translation, lol.
True, we have 5 classes, and only 3 rows, therefore, it will have to be infantry, cavalry, and artillery.
So, range infantry and melee infantry will be consolidated into the same row.
There is one extra unused column in each row which will allow for that.
Special abilities will not be shown.
This consolidation will be a nice feature for casual players such as myself that are not fast enough to switch tabs between 10 different units in a group of 95 units.
We also won’t have to learn all the hot keys for unit modes for each unit type.
All the unit modes for all units in a group will be then accessible in one place.
I don’t expect the developers to add that option, but it will be nice to have.