It’d be very helpful to be able to have the option to patrol units and have them ignore buildings. That way, when entering battle, they only hit other units, not everything in their path. It would be a separate type of patrol to the current one, which would remain in the game.
Or it could even be a toggle button that changes the default behavior of units.
As in - you could toggle all units to automatically ignore buildings.
That will actually break game mechanism, considering some tactics involve using building/ram/other high hp units ahead of the weaker ranged ones intentionally. It is part of the micro intended to be used in the game.
I would really like this feature and it wouldn’t break anything, especially not if you can toggle the behavior. There are many scenarios where you don’t want units to attack buildings like houses if they happen to be in their path, for example with raiding units, some campaigns, in the Battle Royale game mode, etc.
Rams would still be targeted. Like kinquest said, it would ignore things like houses. And if they want to push the BR game mode on the front page, then ignoring buildings would be remarkably useful when patrolling units.
For making BR nicer to play, I understand the suggestion, but in that case there should be a special qualifier on that mode specifically. It shouldn’t be too difficult to make you require a right click to hit an enemy building in BR, but in regular games, having buildings around (especially on water maps) is an important part of micro wars.
Thing is, I think this is already partially in the game in that units (except rams) ignore farms if there’s villagers around to kill. It’d be the same concept, except expanded.
And I understand that, I do, but having military buildings around in a normal game does play into micro, and I totally agree that having a qualifier on BR would be good, but it should only be BR, and if that can’t be done, I don’t think I’d be behind it.
Can you explain why you want a unit to attack an enemy building instead of an enemy unit in a micro war?
Some scenarios where the non-building patrol feature would be useful:
I rarely want non-siege units to attack buildings instead of units when they are patrolling.
After reading some of the replies, I wonder if we have the same idea of what the feature would do.
You generally wouldn’t. That’s the point.
You can spam buildings (even houses will do) on coastlines in water fights, the intention being the units that are out of range of your ships will attack the houses instead of seeking a path to the engagement, which hurts your opponent.
Generally speaking, you don’t want your units to attack buildings unless you are specifically targeting them for removal (TC snipes, treb / bbc micro to destroy production / defenses, rams in general) and the fact that the units will attack them when not told to specifically ignore them is the defender’s advantage. What has been suggested in the thread (and what you are outlining clearly here) is a buff to the attacker in every case. I don’t think that’s wise.
The defender should have a sizable advantage while fighting in their own territory, and it makes more than enough sense that invading units will be caught up in the surroundings while those local simply won’t. I don’t see this change being good in that regard, except in Battle Royale where everyone is invading and it’s just extra micro or risk wasting military time on patrolling into a military building that you’d capture if you just moved five inches further forward. That’s a totally different scenario which is why I’ve made the distinction.
You want these things to work better without considering why they don’t work better and that consideration is far more important.
OK, thanks, now I understand what you mean. So we agree the current patrol mode doesn’t lead to optimal/desired attack behavior for the patrolling units and you want the defender to intentionally use/exploit the inefficiency.
I personally think the game should facilitate what the player intends to do (in this case, the attacker want to patrol without wasting time on buildings). I agree the defender should have an advantage defending their territory, but I’m not sure if this is the right way.
It’s meta for abusing micro limitations to force fights. Rams are the prime example of this limitation being abused to take fights. Sure, that’s a unit, but it sets the precedent that the inefficiency of micro and the excess of situations where micro could be used creates the conditions for the heavily micro-able units to be balanced. In those situations (at least in normal games) it’s the main incentive to have a well balanced, mixed army composition so as to limit the amount of inefficiency you’ll impose on yourself during micro.
Battle Royale is a face smashing competition. The rules are different and there I see no reason why we couldn’t have this specific aspect toned down given how you really shouldn’t be attempting to destroy buildings too often and they can be taken accidentally.
Putting houses or buildings in the way in order to get patrolling units to attack them is not something I’ve seen any streamer, youtuber, or player I’ve played against do. I will take your word for it that you see this in your games, but what you’re describing, to me, is the most fringe of cases. I don’t believe arguing against a feature because of fringe cases is a sound argument.
However, since BR is just a fun face smash, it could be tested there to see how the player base responds. If people like it, they could take a poll to see if there’s a desire to have it in normal games.
It’s mostly water maps, with Galleon v Galleon. Rams and houses will dot your coastline to pull aggro from the main galleon mass, and give you an effective numbers advantage even when outnumbered.
If it can only be applied to land units, that would also be fine.