Ship Movement

posted on August 5th, 2012, 2:50 am

I don't know if this has been brought up at all or recently anyways, but i had stopped playing flops for a while and played a couple games recently and this has bugged me since i started playing.
When your ships clump together it causes some really bad movement or none at all which often gets ships killed when your trying to retreat them (more often happens with larger fleets).

So i was wondering if this was gonna stay as is or if it was gonna be fixed somehow.

If your not looking to change how it works i was wondering if one could implement the idea of, when you click r to send a ship to repair it would automatically remove that ship from say group 1 so then you could click 1 and move your ships in a direction to help move that ship through, or something of that sort.
I suggest this because In most cases if I'm sending a ship to repair i keep pressing forward anyway and can regroup that ship or another ship to said group later with much ease compared to loosing that ship that exploded because it somehow got tractor beamed by a friendly who wouldn't let me through.

posted on August 5th, 2012, 9:48 am

firstly, movement bugs are something that the devs are working on. exactly how much progress they've had i don't know, but i'm sure they want to fix them all, these things just take time, as these bugs are from stock a2.

second, try use priority repair (shift r), a unit with an active p-repair order will ignore all further orders, whether given directly to the unit or to its group. the only way to get control back from a ship with p-repair on is to issue a second p-repair order, to cancel the first.

sadly, when a ship is replaced via a replaceweapon, it forgets even p-repair, and goes back to ai control.

posted on August 6th, 2012, 2:23 am

When i started this thread i had no idea that this had ever been brought up before and i do understand that ridding of bugs does take awhile expecially since these guys arent working on this 24-8. Which is why i brought it up to see if it was being looked into and to get others input.

I thank you Myles Ill keep the priority repair in mind that will help alot.
On a side note ive never actually played stock A2 so i dont know anything at all about it. and i didnt start fleetops until after the 3.0 patches started coming out

posted on August 6th, 2012, 3:17 am

While there certainly are movement bugs in the engine, this isn't exactly one of them - at least, depending on the perspective that you take. This is more a pathing function that could be considered a feature or a bug depending on the perspective

When ships are clumped together, that means they are physics blocking each other - that's why moving, spread out fleets tend to have an advantage over tightly packed fleets, and why players will pack ships up next to a yard's entrance to prevent movement into it. That's also why if you have 5 (or some other very large number) fleets all on top of each other, ships have difficulty moving. You're packing tons of units into a small space, so you have to generate some spacing to get the ships out. That's the basis of physics blocking tactics in online multiplayer .

Basically the solution is to manually move your fleet - get the desired ship and its fleet to move and spread out, then issue your repair order to the singlet ship as it is moving, and have the fleet turn around. As Myles pointed out, using priority repair is definitely the way to move the rest of your fleet without having to worry about the singlet. That's one of the tactical downsides of bunching up ships in a tight ball.

posted on August 6th, 2012, 4:07 am

Well i have a problem with them clumping on their own not that i clump them and i could see where you could use it to your advantage but its always hurt me.
But yes what Myles suggested will fix my problem

posted on August 6th, 2012, 6:35 pm

To follow up from what Myles said about priority repair -- there are a couple of ways in which it can cancel itself. First, it can be cancelled if the ship levels up on the way to the yard; also, when the ship is queued for the yard there's a moment or two before it enters when a movement order will take it out of the queue. The first can't be helped, the second you have to either time your movement orders to that group well or remove the ship from the control group.

While you won't see it much against humans, ships in a large control group will ignore green movement priority and move in response to an attack on an allied vessel. Nothing you can do about that except keep your control groups below 9 (maybe 16) ships.