Wouldn't Having Your Men Fight Efficiently be Great?

[Rumahu]

Imagine a sword fight in kenshi right now... You'd most likely see half a dozen or so of your squaddies all fighting one guy. While this is fine, they ALL SHOULDN'T ALL BE ATTACKING HIM FROM THE FRONT. Seriously, I'm sitting there watching them in combat, and it's annoying me whenever i see six of my guys clipping on each other just to get a swing at the poor bastard they're jumping.

I know the game is still in its earlier stages, however some sort of formation system would make combat so much better because it would..flow better? Work at a faster pace? I don't know about you guys, but i feel like having, at least for now, some sort of basic enemy attack formation/system. It's basically inefficient to sit there and watch my units stand in line to attack somebody. Not to mention if there's some sort of AoE damage associated with his weapon, then they all take damage they didn't need to.

Obviously you can order your units to walk around behind whoever they're attacking, but even then they slowly get back into a line - so it's quite a pain.

So, Here's my idea:

Let's say that that formation first off occurs naturally - you don't have to order it, it's just coded in the game. Imagine warcraft III's gold mine, and you're playing as the undead. Imagine that your squaddies in kenshi are those acolytes, and that the guy they're beating on is the gold mine.. so it would look like this:


[Formation for surrounding enemy units, enemy unit is the mine, squaddies are the acolytes]

So, you'd have let's say you have 4/5 slots filled with squadmembers on one target, leaving one "spot" open for another to join in the fight.

Of course in some scenarios, this setup wouldn't be ordeal.. however if there was some sort of radial trigger system that detected the number of aggressive opponents in an area, and how many swordsmen you have that aren't exactly fighting... then it would at least work. (3 enemy units detected, 15 "idle" swordsmen.. Relocate them and fill them into slots spaced out to be groups of 5.)

Now, this is of course something that you'd start with, or at least implement. Actually keeping such a system for a combat AI would be... primitive. However, this would definitely be an improvement over what we have right now.

Criticize it however you want, but honestly something like this would make the game a hell of a lot better paced, or at least we wouldn't have to actually wait for combat to end, but instead be entertained watching it.

Is this possible to implement soon? It's not really that important, as research and the like is a lot more interesting, but i feel like this wouldn't be too terribly difficult to code/wouldn't be too time consuming.

Just my two cents .
Feedback, ideas? Concerns? Additions?

[iSuck345]

I actually find it rather stupid to see all of my squaddies focus on ONE enemy only, thinking that they lacked a brain

[Tolwrath]

Hmm.. I find myself wondering if this will still be an issue when ranged weapons are implemented.

[Percavil]

what bugs me abit is when u got like 5 guys against 1 bandit and most of them are just standing around not attacking. kinda reminds me of dynasty warriors on easy mode when u got loads of soldiers not attacking you.
no they aren't on defense mode
or maybe their skills are not high enough yet

im not to worried about this though, as long as my soldiers get the job done

[Rumahu]

Well this idea really only applies in cases where you have a lot of men, and only a couple of enemies remaining - near the end of combat. And yes, it is very annoying to see 10 of your guys fighting one of 5 enemy units, and the rest of your men are in a 1v1 duel to the death.

[Meynolt]

The problem largely lies in the maximum number of attack slots. It is currently set to '3' in version 0.40.2. You can increase it to '4' if you want, but going above this causes crashes for me.

[Deezler3274]

I like this idea. I've been playing a lot of Mount and Blade: Warband and I would love to see Kenshi implement the idea of a field commander (This would be the player, obviously) who can organize troops into formations. This would help later on in the game when you have 15+ characters fighting bandits and it looks like a mosh pit.

[Rumahu]

I like this idea. I've been playing a lot of Mount and Blade: Warband and I would love to see Kenshi implement the idea of a field commander (This would be the player, obviously) who can organize troops into formations. This would help later on in the game when you have 15+ characters fighting bandits and it looks like a mosh pit.

Exactly! M&B is a great game (can't wait for bannerlord), and i completely agree with what you have said.

[Harpuea]

You can prevent your men from staring at 1 enemies by increasing the attack slot to 4. 4 Works well because when your 4 men finishes their attack, the others who were watching commences their attack. So, in effect no same character is hogging the fight all the time. I crashes at attack slot 5 and above though.

If you don't want to do it yourself, I already did a global constant mod as a part of another mod, so check it out.

http://www.lofigames.com/phpBB3/viewtop ... =11&t=2635