Combat Controls/Behavior⁹

Ive spent 100s of hours building villages in FF. Ive played multiple villages every update since like 9.0. They all reach 2500-4000 pop, on hardest difficulty. I say all this to say, Im not a scrub at this game. I enjoy it very much and I look forward to modding. But certain aspects of combat frustrate me to no end.

I would like to suggest a few things for combat controls. The past updates have done loads to improve combat and controls, but there is still much to be desired. It still feels extremely clunky, partucularly archers, but I feel like Ive pinpointed a few things that frustrate me every raid.

  • There needs to be a mechanism to make villagers run from raiders. I do not want to spend 5 minutes dragging a box over villagers and scrolling across the map to make them run far away. It sucks every single time. Especially when you consider the already clunky system that wont let you separate military from villagers. It is beyond tedious.

  • Archers should be able to target enemies from further away, and they should target enemies that are in a radius around their combat flag.
    Currently, I find that 2 things happen. 1, the combat flag is just too far away from the fight and the archers dont attack. Or 2, archers will stand by their combat flag and not attack, even when things are seemingly in range.

  • On the off chance I get archers to do what theyre supposed to, it always ends the same way. Archers will chase enemies that run away. And they will keep chasing them, even if it leads them through a raider army and to the other side of the map. Archers should retarget enemies within a radius of their combat flag, instead of pursuing enemies across the map.

  • The same applies to melee units. They will break formation and chase enemies when they should return to formation or retarget another enemy instead.

  • I think the radius for defensive stance should be smaller, so melee units dont chase as much.
  • This chasing issue is even more annoying when walls/gates are involved. If the gate is closed, nothing should go in or out. Friendly units should not break formation and run out of the city gates to attack an entire army.

-Switching focus to combat controls, I feel like the most recent update was a step back in some regards. Clicking on the company(?) banner at the bottom should let me move the combat flag. I dont want to have to find the barracks or the flag to move the flag.
I also think that selecting the soldier that carries the flag should allow me to move the combat flag.
Or maybe, theres a 5th button on the combat controls for “Move Flag”. Or Ctrl+Clicking the banner will move the flag. Something.

-Im throwing a random suggestion in here because why not. The amount of smokers and firewood splitters I need to build at 4000 population is crazy. I have fields of smokers and log splitters. I understand most people arent pushing 4000 so maybe its not pressing for Dev team. But an option to upgrade smoker/logsplitters would be nice. More so smokers but still both.

I could come up with some other small things but those are my big ones. Thanks for reading. Feel free to correct me on anything or add your 2 cents.

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The TC bell really ought to make everyone who can’t garrison the building shelter in place somewhere. It’s one of the big frustrations past … actually something as small as 20 people. If I just need some archers, I can box-select a few people around it and manually order them in!

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