Suggested function; reactive pause

[Psychedelic Warlord]

When moving in high speed mode enemies can sometimes seem to come out of nowhere, which means a quick fumble in order to pause to decide on either flight or fight.

I think the addition of an option to automatically pause the game (or lower the speed to normal) when enemies reach combat range of your party would simplify the game slightly, (a similar feature I believe was found in the original Dungeon Siege, and in SW: KOTOR) and I feel it would become progressively more useful as parties get larger and more cumbersome.

It would also give you the freedom to walk your characters to the next point in the distance while you attend to something else, without fear of sudden massive bandit attack.

Discuss?

[txfirefighter]

I like the idea of it pausing the game. But why not both? Say you can select the pause function in game to allow you to go afk for a while. But it also allows you to have the game just slow down to regular speed while you stay seated...

[Blxz]

What about ambushing?

Although, you have a point. At the moment its not REALLY needed. But if this game were to develop along the lines chris has aimed for then a wide world with a base and wandering forces, etc would need to be watched over and the current interface doesn't allow that.

So a pause could be useful in that situation, or something different could be used.


Just to let you know though, you realise that you can just tap 'SPACEBAR' to pause the game in a hurry? Thats about as reactive as you can get when you see bandits for the time being.

[txfirefighter]

i think his idea was if you go away from the computer. im thinking have it as a toggle switch to where you can activate it when you need it but the default is always off.

[Psychedelic Warlord]

i think his idea was if you go away from the computer. im thinking have it as a toggle switch to where you can activate it when you need it but the default is always off.

That was sort of the idea, it'd just be generally handy to be able to toggle autopause/speed drop upon entering combat

[gusmil]

I guess this could be neat if one were to add an ahead planned route for your squad to take which makes them move along the route you planned on a mini map or w/e it might been planned from.
Then I could totally have use of this, as once endurance gets added x4 with walking can take still some long time if it a city very far away.
good thing to be added as an option.

[Psychedelic Warlord]

I guess this could be neat if one were to add an ahead planned route for your squad to take which makes them move along the route you planned on a mini map or w/e it might been planned from.
Then I could totally have use of this, as once endurance gets added x4 with walking can take still some long time if it a city very far away.
good thing to be added as an option.

That's also quite a good idea, would gel quite nicely with my suggestion to make travel in general pretty hassle free, especially when dealing with whole armies.
A series of behaviour toggles would be good too, to determine wether after an encounter the party stops to heal up, continues on its way or both.

[gusmil]

I guess this could be neat if one were to add an ahead planned route for your squad to take which makes them move along the route you planned on a mini map or w/e it might been planned from.
Then I could totally have use of this, as once endurance gets added x4 with walking can take still some long time if it a city very far away.
good thing to be added as an option.

That's also quite a good idea, would gel quite nicely with my suggestion to make travel in general pretty hassle free, especially when dealing with whole armies.
A series of behaviour toggles would be good too, to determine wether after an encounter the party stops to heal up, continues on its way or both.

... One thing strikes me right now after reading your post that once I get bigger sums of troops and building gets implented. That im most likely going to let have a base of some sort constructed and im going to have serval groups spread out doing following out thier orders; trade, guard, patrol, sellswords and raid parties which going to put each other groups very far away from each other so watching all at same time going to be impossible without this pause function... Like playing a turn based stratgey game without getting to see what your computer does when invading your land, so suddely you lose serval mines and towns because there was no ahead warning.

Example:

You have 2 caravans, one warparty and one town.
You focus on the warparty for 20 mins to teach an fort of renegades a lesson and once you done then you take a look over at your base and it now turns out it been rampaged by bandits and it turns out you lost the battle, which going to be a bit sour and same thing happened to one of your caravans all cuz they never stoped trying to outwalk the enemy.

Yes this function is going to very vital further into a playthrough and without adding it it going to make the game hard to next to impossible late game to play.

[gusmil]

The post I made before wont affect people who going just to have one big army and move it around as one unit.

[Psychedelic Warlord]

I think leaving an AI controlled Garrison of troops at each settlement to defend them from attack should be sufficient to repel anything but a determined attacker (ala Mount & Blade).

Furthermore, perhaps if we have more than one large group of troops under our direct control at a time the game might become too complicated for its own good.

I think that if the player controlled faction naturally produces defence forces for settlements and patrols for bandits (like Ai factions) it would alleiviate a lot of the stress of having to defend widely dispersed territories, and naturally the numbers, recruitment frequency and equipment should be specifiable by the player.

[Zephyr8965]

I honestly think something similar to the old Baldur's Gate games would work perfectly here. You create a list of situations such as:

Enemy spotted
Ally below 30% health
Enemy killed
Etc

Then you have an option in the menu for each of them you can set to on or off. When on, that situation will pause the game. Then, you can even have a customization to the automatic pausing to tailor it to your preference.