Scenario editor - more orders needed

[Paper Tiger]

I've been spending a lot of time working with the scenario editor almost since day 1 and I am still trying to figure out why we are restricted to 16 orders for the AI? I can understand why there's a limit of eight groups because the more groups you create, the slower the game runs.

But I really can't see any reason why we're restricted to 16 orders. I'm assuming that there is a very good one. Can anybody tell me why this is? Are there plans to give us more orders in the future?

Also, consider this a really important request- please, please, PLEASE, let us disable Plan 1 if necessary for playtesting purposes. When I'm playtesting a new AI plan, I often get Plan 1 even when it's set to 'use rarely'. I can't see any reason for not enabling this option since we already have it for all the other plans.

[MarkEzra]

Originally posted by Paper Tiger:

I can understand why there's a limit of eight groups because the more groups you create, the slower the game runs.

I almost always use the full eight groups which are NOT enough, by the way!... but I can't say I've noticed the game run slower for it. Not saying your wrong, just saying I've not noticed it.

[Other Means]

Steve had said they want to introduce event triggers etc, so maybe this is place-holder functionality until that comes along.

[Roter Stern]

Well, I'm guessing groups and orders are limited to 8 and 16 in order to limit the scenario file size and possibly memory usage... while it makes perfect sense to strive for efficiency when ever possible, I honestly don't know if expanding the limit to, say, 16 and 32 would really have a noticeable effect on the performance. After all, I'm pretty sure you'd be only looking at a few extra Kb, which is frankly not much for a 386, let alone a "recent" computer.

A quick tip for order debugging, whenever I want to be sure the AI is not using Plan-1 I edit it so that one of the groups setup zone is right on top of my own - at least then it's absolutely clear right from "turn 1" whether or not the AI ended up loading Plan-1.

[ February 20, 2008, 12:39 PM: Message edited by: The Louch ]

[Paper Tiger]

I'm all in favour of more groups too but I also trying to keep my request reasonable in the hope of a reply from BFC . An increase in the number of groups would absolutely HAVE to go with an increase in the number of orders. And increasing the number of groups would probably require a lot of work to implement. I don't understand the same could be true about increasing the number of orders though.

I, too, often use eight groups, especially when the AI is defending. But when you have eight groups, you can only give each group one order, or at least you can give them more at the expense of another group. That's fine for some situations but if I want to have the attacking AI to start mounted up, move to location 'B', dismount, attack location 'C' for 20 minutes and then stop, that's a minimum of three orders. And that's fairly basic. To make the AI do anything more sophisticated, you need to use more orders.

It doesn't look like anybody's aware why we are restricted to 16 orders.

[birdstrike]

May I add, it would be a nice feature to have the ability to rename AI groups. (like "Assault Group A", or "TF Defend Street" instead of the generic group1, group 2...)

This would help scenario designers while creating AI plans. Right now, it can get difficult to keep track of what unit is assigned to which AI group and what one was intending to do with that group, especially when working on old scenarios.