[Suggestion/Request] 3 additional Attack Stances

Hi, I wanted to suggest a nice feature that could be interesting.
In Rise of Nations there are attack stances like on Age of Empires. Like Agressive, Defensive, etc. But it have 2 more that Age of Empires lacks: Raid and Raze.
Units whose stance is Raid will only attack (or prioritize) civilians units like merchants, caravans or citizens and units whose stance is Raze will only (or prioritize) attack buildings.
Another stance that could be added will be one that prioritize/lock on only units (ie no buildings)
This is useful because sometimes you want your cavalry archers attack-move(using R) a group of units that your melee units are fighting near but they instead decides it is more important to fire arrows at houses (becasuse they are in range). Or when sending cavalry archers to the enemy base you dont want them to start shooting at lumbercamps when you use attack-move through a region.
Or when your infantry start attacking buildings in the middle of a siege during an attack-move instead of keep going and attacking units.

I know that there is no space in the bottom left for additional buttons but I really liked this option on RoN.

7 Likes

Very good idea. I was thinking about something like this while playing the other day.

Another thing I thought about was a “low distance” defensive stance for melee units. Sometimes you are attacking early and want to leave a few M@Arms near enemy resources, but even in the defensive stance they just follow the villagers too much and sometimes end up eating TC arrows.

A second defensive stance with half the “chasing radius” would be nice, although maybe a bit redundant.

3 Likes

Great, even more automation suggestions.

It is not automation, it is an option for when you don’t want your units waste time on targets that they are not supposed to hit. I don’t want that when using attack-move my archers start firing arrows at houses instead of the pikemen that are just 1 tile away from their range limit. If I would want that, I would choose the stance “Attack Everything” instead of “Attack Units Only” (for example, using Mayans/Birmans/Sarracens). Or when you send your archers to help other forces but there is a lumbercamp on the way, yeah let’s reduce the lumbercamp to atoms using arrows.
Automation would be if I suggest that cavalry archers search actively for villagers, keep a distance from the TC, shoot and run; ran away from skirmishers and return to base when low on health.

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But what’s the point of micro’ing or even trying to out micro someone if units start to behave that clever? I think it will damage competitive games quite badly. What would otherwise take 2 or more actions (moving those archers closer and then patrolling them once they’ve passed that lumber camp) you want it just a be a simple toggle and click destination. A sure-way fire and forget while you focus elsewhere. And that’s just one example.

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I don’t consider it a clever behaviour. You still have to micromanage them. This only avoid undesirable behaviour. Like when the intelligent onagers feature was added in Conquerors, one could argue back then that onagers not attacking friendly units was making the units “clever”, reducing micro from the players and making them lazy, making onagers a less risky unit based on their behaviour or that people would start spamming o****** on every game. And here we are using that feature with no problems.

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Hey that’s a good suggestion, I never played RoN but I consider it’ll be useful to improve the strategy when you’re attacking. +1

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AI makig some very stupid decisions like archers attacking houses that will take years to destroy instead of the guy that’s right in front of them does not add to the game.
AI doesn’t need to be extremely clever, but it also doesn’t need to be extremely dumb.

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When they write that the onagers would avoid hurting friendly units, they meant it would roughly prioritize enemy units that aren’t too close. As anyone can see when playing with mangonels, they still are pretty enthusiast to shoot your own troops as long as the only target available are in the middle of your army. This change made them go from almost impossible to use to still super hard without micro.

On the flipside your “raid feature” would be completely dumb. You would just need to split your LC or CA group and just micro your main army while the overwhelmed enemy tries to fight 3 battles while you can focus on 1.

I don’t get why for you an autoscout that fails to find your starting sheeps removes all strategic depth to the game but units that do perfect raiding on their own is 100% required.

I didn’t say that it removes strategic depth, I just think that letting the AI take a lot of control out of your hands is ridiculous. Issuing and direct order such as: prioritize villagers over anything else gives much less control to the AI as saying: Move this unit for me and scout the whole map.

The difference in AI intervention between the two is very big. Auto scouting has a lot more AI intervention tha raid or raze mode.
It’s like comparing auto-scout to the “defensive” or “hold ground” stance, can you see now how weird that comparison is?

Nah it doesn’t work like this. With auto-scout, you give control to the AI, but it’s 100% guaranteed to be worse than even moderately skilled manual scouting. Only upside is that eventually it will scout everything. With auto-raiding, you can basically have your units do what you want as well as you would yourself, and it takes enough from your hand for it to be a plus, and since it’s just as good as what you would do (or even better since with manual you still need to move your mouse over the vills). So you can easily abuse it by making more raiding parties, and then your opponent will be overwhelmed.

Let’s compare: as far as I know, defensive, hold ground and passive stances limit what your units can do by themselves, ie. you need more micro to get them to attack. I can’t just send a group of raiders with these stances in the enemy base and get them to inflict optimal damage, unlike what raiding stance would.

It makes them not endlessly follow someone and getting themselves killed which is highly effective.

But you can use defensive/hold ground stance for optimal survival. How is that any different?
Pulling back suicidal attacking units also takes micro.

And in exchange: defensive make them run away like little wimps at the first occasion, stand ground forces you to micro them more, and passive even more.

Units left on these stances are super easy to outsmart, and all of these are way more passive than raiding. With raiding stance, your units don’t need for you to take time moving your mouse over your target, and as already stated, you can just overwhelm the enemy with multiples raiding parties with minimal effort on your part.

Yet it still automatically increases your survivablity tremendously.

The enemy can do the same to you. And an effort to make the AI not do very stupid things(like full attack stance) is not good effort.

Not really, unless there is a civ outta there that has no viable ranged unit I guess? It makes defending easier, but far from perfect. If you can overwhelm your opponent with units that camp in your base, then you’re the first ever.

Basically, you just spam units and send them in the enemy base without looking, and you want your opponent to have fun doing the same. Great. Also, if your enemy is say, Teuton, they will be even more disadvantaged than they would usually be in “raiding wars” since their slow army is both worse at defending and raiding. Usually such slow civs can overcome that disadvantage by doing a strong and slow push to divert the enemy’s attention from raiding, but with auto-raid that would no longer work.

That would be a good way to die. Cute simplification though.
You can also just leave your units there in hold ground stance without looking.

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You have a habit of chopping up people’s responses in a way completely misscharactizes what is being said.

Is this a device to ‘score’ points rather then engage with substance? To argue against the strawman in your head, rather then what is being said?

I don’t know, even “automatically” sending an army to their eco camp usually still gets a lot of villager kills.

Now that I’ve got the time to read it better
 this is weird.
I guess you confused me with someone else because I never said that.

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I guess (random filler cuz 20 characters limit)