Group Guard (spread out guard commands and replace when target dies)

[vast flame]

Automatically replaces and distributes guard commands across units that share a group.

In practice, this comes in three parts:

• When a guarded unit dies, if it was in a group, any units that were guarding it are reassigned to guard another unit from that group.
• When a factory creates a unit, if the factory has a guard order to a unit in a group, the newly created unit is assigned to guard a unit from that group instead of only the original target.
• When a user guard order is issued targeting a grouped unit, the units given that order are assigned to guard units from that group instead of just the original target.

Some use cases for this widget are:

• Keeping mobile radar and jammer units around your group of artillery. With this widget, the radar/jammer units' guard commands will be spread out among the artillery units, and if any artillery units die, your guard orders won't dissappear - they'll just get reassigned.
• Distributing repair bots to important units. For example, if you want each of your titans or flagships to be guarded by rez bots/subs, set the factory waypoint on your t1 lab to one of the titans, and as units are created, their guard orders will be distributed among any units in that group of important units.

Many aspects of the widget can (and should) be configured through the settings page.

Notes:

• Since this manipulates commands, it might conflict with some other widgets that use the guard command.
• The widget does not keep track of what group a unit is assigned to guard - all state is derived from the actual command queues of the units. This means, among other things, that if every valid unit in a group dies, your guard order will be gone as well.
• Only guard commands for your own units are considered, since any other units cannot be in your groups.

https://gist.github.com/salinecitrine/0869c55905c2582163f2dd55522481cf (right click + "Save Link as..." on "Raw")

[tidal pilot]

This is really interesting! Would love to hear about anything you learn as you use it - what works/ what doesn't work etc.

[ocean flume]

Zer- COUGHS!

[copper meadow]

This looks so cool

[vast flame]

Thanks!

[vast flame]

Thanks 🙂 I'm also curious how it will end up being used. I haven't even had a chance to use it yet in a real game (only single player testing games so far)

[unreal moth]

This is amazing!
Guard has always been a micro grave...

Is there any chance to get a "area guard", too?

[uneven bear]

Very cool

[stray patio]

haha, we just discussed with the game design team that we would like that 🙂

[vast flame]

This should be practical at least as a separate "Area Guard" command. I'm trying to figure out if it's possible to add the drag area functionality that commands like attack have, but I don't see a way to do that yet.

[vast flame]

that's awesome 🙂 please let me know if there are any ideas or requests that would be useful here too!

[stray patio]

To be completely honest ultimately we would want this behaviour to be implemented in engine, but this is awesome anyway to have now since engine changes are probably far off

[unreal moth]

@vast flame

Something like two tables. One gets filled with the selected unit. One with the units in the area.

Then your existing code could get used to assign the guards.

As soon as you give a guard a command he will exit the table.

If the guards table is empty, the table with units in the area gets deleted.

[vast flame]

What I mean is that when you choose the attack command, you can click on one enemy, or drag over an area without switching which command you have selected. What I'd really like to do is make the guard command work the same way, in that there would be two modes - direct targeting and area targeting - within the same command.

[unreal moth]

This is what I meant as well. I just tried to describe one solution for the internal logic. But it might be completed nonsense. 🤣

But I have no idea how dragging a circle is coded.

[vast flame]

Ok, cool 🙂 I think your idea for the logic makes sense. The circle area dragging is, as far as I can tell, a flag that you set when defining the command. I've been reading the code for the scramble widget, and it seems like that's what it does. I don't really know any more than that yet though.

[vast flame]

Group Guard (spread out guard commands and replace when target dies)

[vast flame]

A cool thing I found you can do with this is that when you're doing a bombing run, you can have your fighters and scouts guard your bombers. Saves some micro at least. This also allows you to split up your bombers and keep some fighters/scouts with each.

[vast flame]

Version 2 Changelog

• Minor performance improvements and bugfixes

[indigo harness]

I would like to see this in the base game(as long as there are no bugs)! Guard commands in general are almost useless and this would go a long way to alleviate that.

[obsidian tree]

Two years on, think we could push this widget into the base game? I can deal with testing whether it still works nicely.