Army reinforcement bug/missing feature - units are constructed by distant factories causing them to arrive late or die

from AshesoftheSingularity Forums

When you form an army and request units the buildings which construct them seem to be chosen randomly. This makes the reinforce army feature nearly useless if you have different armies in different parts of the map. Units will be constructed at a building directly behind one army and then proceed to move all the way across the map to reinforce one of the other armies in play. In traversing the map they will frequently be killed or arrive too late to be of help. 

I have stopped using the army reinforcement mechanic because of this. I work around it by setting rally points from nearby factories and then manually adding units to my armies as they are produced.

To solve this there needs to be a way to choose which factories will reinforce which armies. Perhaps when a factory is selected right clicking on an army will cause that factory to only reinforce that army. This would be simple, intuitive, and would not change the current mechanic if the user did not choose a specific army for a factory to rally to.

8,642 views 5 replies
Reply #1 from AshesoftheSingularity Forums Top

That, or they could just program the auto reinforcement mechanic to grab units from the nearest factories.

Reply #2 from AshesoftheSingularity Forums Top

Unfortunately I think it is a little more complicated. If I queue up 10 units and have 5 factories which factories count as "nearest"? You always want to build from as many factories as possible but it is hard to automatically determine what constitutes a factory that is "close enough" to produce units from. That is why I think it has to be a player choice.

The Political Machine 2024
Reply #3 from AshesoftheSingularity Forums Top

Measure distance, unit speed and current build queue time, calculate estimated time of arrival from each factory and send to the factory that will get the unit to the army fastest. Then watch your CPU cry in the corner.

Reply #4 from AshesoftheSingularity Forums Top

Just give each army a coordinate tracker and compare those coordinates to the factories.  Sort from shortest -> longest distance and prioritize from there.

Reply #5 from AshesoftheSingularity Forums Top

The current behaviour is extremely annoying. In the first campaign, the mission with the canyons requires micromanagement right now due to this bug.

The proper behaviour should be (for each separate reinforcement order):

1. For each facility, set time for units already in it's queue.

2. Calculate pathing distance to the army. Count distance inside friendly regions as normal, distance through neutrals as double and through enemy x4.

3. Convert distance to time by dividing by the new unit's speed.

4. Add travel time to (1).

4. Pick lowest total.

 

Bonus: Instead of distance from current army position in step (2), use the position of the army in time (1), if the army has waypoints.

Bonus 2: If the facility already has a proper order in the queue (not for another reinforcement), pick it (changing delay from (1)) and add the same order at the end of the queue (jump the queue! ).