[interface][engine] moving more units at once

[Silux]

I often wish i could select more than one unit and move them all together, or make them to go to a fixed destination without going back and forth to select each unit.
There could be also a generic command like "advance toward the enemy" and the AI moves your units toward enemy units.

This could make also testing of campaigns easier.

[Captain_Wrathbow]

While I can sympathize with the notion of this being a useful feature, particularly on large maps, I believe it would prove rather difficult to implement. Different unit types have differing movement speeds, as well as movement costs on certain terrains. For this reason, I think that you would rarely be able to move a very large "clump" of units together at once, for the same distance, even if this were implemented.

[Sapient]

I would suggest to make all the important moves first-- the ones that you really care about-- and then droid the side and immediately undroid it so that control will return to you on the next turn.

[tekelili]

for me this would be a usefull feature. I have thought severeal times how could develope it myself. One of my primitives solutions, was that after use moveto on an unit, the destininy is stored and when you right-click on other unit, an option "go to last moveto destiny" was showed. Would be nice be able to select several units at once to do this, but I am just a WML noob, my next step would be add an aoption of "apply this to x Hexes radius". This dont keeps "army formation", but still helps more that currently lack of options to move large amount of units acroos long "friendly territory" distances with no enemy units expected.

[Silux]

I was thinking of implementing it right in the core engine of the game, or in lua, because moving more units at once could be really expensive.

The units could be moved by the game one at time, or one step each until all are at destination.

The biggest issue in moving more unit at once is that they probably won't have the same movetype and move points, so moving in tight formation means moving at the speed of the slowest unit.

Giving temporarily use to AI of your troops just to move your units and then regain control of them, is really straightforward to implement; making only some units to be "droided" a little less, because there's lack of a control which lets the user to select more units at once.
It could be nice to have a command to select more unit at once in the main interface, because selecting units through the right click menu its a bit boring.

[JaMiT]

How much would it help if, say, you could specify that a unit is to follow another, and at the beginning (or end?) of your turn, that unit would move as far as it could toward the unit being followed? Sort of like the existing "go to" functionality, but with a unit as the destination instead of a fixed hex.

[Silux]

Pairing units to another could be really useful!
Maybe user could have an option to make adjacent units to follow the unit currently selected.This should be easy to do with current WML.