Menu
Feedback: Tab Cycling GRIEVOUSLY NEEDS WORK
Agemmon
You NEED to give players an option to use UNIT TYPE TAB CYCLING instead of individual unit tab cycling. Never have I had such a difficult time controlling units in a large-scale / high-supply cap RTS – you're making it DIFFICULT for players to control their units.
In Dawn of War III, if I have a control group consisting of Gorgutz, 3 Nobz and 6 Boyz, I have to press tab FIVE TIMES to get to one of the Boyz. Each tab hit will cycle through the unit cards in the control group ONE BY ONE. Why is it like this? Why did you think this was a good idea? I've heard the argument that it's better for individual unit control, but people who want to select an individual unit in a RTS will do so as they always have: by clicking on the unit or clicking it's command card, so such reasoning makes no sense at all.
Take a look at these Warcraft III screenshots to see how unit type tab cycling functions:
I only have to press tab 3 times IN TOTAL to cycle through that control group fully, because the tab cycling of Warcraft III and StarCraft II DO NOT inefficiently cycle through individual units one at a time. In both of these games, all units in the control group are selected when you press your assigned hotkey, but the first unit (usually the most complex unit or hero) will show their command card. Pressing tab one time will shift to select ALL of the next units that come up and show their command card (the 7 Footmen). Pressing tab a second time switches to the next group of unit types in the control group (the 2 Knights). Pressing tab a third time will go back to the first unit (the lone unit / Arthas Menethil).
Please, don't make the game difficult for us to play. I would NEVER play StarCraft II or Warcraft III if they had the individual unit tab cycling system and ability cast mechanics that you have in Dawn of War III because those games would then be hard to play for all of the wrong reasons.
Comments
Agemmon
Sincerely,
A high-end Zerg Platinum rank StarCraft II player that would probably be Silver if StarCraft II had individual unit tab cycling like Dawn of War III.
Ekko_Tek
Yes, it would be good to have at least the option to switch between these types of tab cycling.
Agemmon
Good excerpt to place here from: https://community.dawnofwar.com/discussion/10270/unit-cycling#latest
Agemmon
I just don't see how development and the lead designers think that their tab cycling and ability cast systems serve RTS games well. Blizzard stopped using individual unit tab cycling after SC1 and WC2. An option for unit type tab cycling would be an amazing quality of life feature for the game.
Development needs to understand that individual unit tab cycling hinders players' ability to micro and macro-manage. The examples mentioned in the previous post concerning a micro situation with a control group of 4 Tac Marines in DoW3 with its individual unit tab cycling and the macro (and micro actually, because of all of the numerous abilities) with the three control groups in WC3 are nothing but evident of a poorly designed unit control system that hinders players' ability to efficiently control their armies, micro and macro-intensively. I just can't think of any reason why someone would even bother tab cycling through units with this inefficient and slow system.
Regardless of whether you have a control group of 8 Tac Marines or 4 Tac Marines; and want to select the last Tac Marine in the control group, players ONLY have two options with individual unit tab cycling: press the tab key 4 times (or 8 times) to select the last Tac Marine or JUST CLICK ON IT. How many players are going to be smashing the tab key 4+ times instead of simply clicking on the last Tac Marine here? I assure you, very little. It's too slow, sloppy and clunky. For those of us that like to put multiple unit types in one control group, individual unit tab cycling is even worse. Can you imagine trying to quickly macro and micro a control group consisting of 8 Tac Marines with the grenade doctrine from Solaria, 6 Scouts with grenades and 4 Devastators? You just can't do it efficiently. You will HAVE to have control groups consisting of ONLY ONE unit type if you want to have any hope of efficiently controlling your units. The problem then becomes having 8+ control groups across 8 different keys.
Gosu
Super good post. Relic should take this suggest. Relic plz.
Marktheshark
Agreed. This is especially a massive issue late-game.
ParanoidKami
An option would be nice for those who need it. I have no intention of wanting it changed. It's easier for me to chain ASM jumps this way.
Connatic
Perhaps because a game like this has more skill shot style abilities? When you spamming abilities and tabbing in Starcraft 2, it doesn't really matter to much what unit the ability is coming from. But for this game, if you have a bunch of Tacs in a group and one or two of them have a flamer, it matters which one you have selected so you know where it will shoot from.
I mean I understand in general if you have like one or two control groups with a massive army, but there might be some logical reasoning behind it, and not just dev ignorance.
KanKrusha
Weird, hadn't even thought of this as an issue because I only have control groups of single units because they have the same abilities.
I do same with total war where I have my spears, swords and ranged in separate groups. I had to learn to put spears and hoplites in seperate groups because of abilities too.
I would like to be able to double tab to focus camera on Amy tab selected single squad. I am sure this worked in DOW2.
KanKrusha
Addit: because edit not working on my phone
If you put 12 units on a single Ctrl group they will blob and then they will all die together. Except You are overcoming this by selecting the blob and then microing individual units with tab. Surely less work to have multiple control groups?
Or control-left click selects all units of a type on screen
HohesHaus
I agree to OP as well. Why did they do this? Answer is simple: Relic came from CoH and DoW2. There you had little unit numbers, and every unit was precious. So you HAD to tab them individually. Now the units have less abilities and are spendable. So the WC3 cycle method or a option for that, would be good.
Agemmon
Is it really, though? I would disagree.
Say you have a control group of 6 ASMS. You have to press tab, issue the ability and issue a target 6 times. You shouldn't have to press tab 6 times. However, this has more to do with ability cast mechanics than it does with tab cycling. In Warcraft III, StarCraft II and Dawn of War II (if you have individual casting toggled on) issuing an ability with 6 of the same units selected will have the closest active unit cast the ability. If the closest unit is stunned and cannot use the ability, the next closest active unit uses the ability. If no unit is within range, the closest unit will walk within range and cast the ability.
You may say that you feel like you have more individual control over your ASM jumps, but when you start to have 6 or more ASMs, you're pressing tab far too much when you shouldn't have to. Factor this in with tons of other control groups you my have. Bottom line: individual unit tab cycling is too slow and hinders both micro and macro. However; as you said, having both tab cycle options availible would be nothing but a good thing for RTS players who prefer different types of unit control settings.
Agemmon
If you have several units spread across multiple control groups in Dawn of War III with its individual unit tab cycling, you're not going to be able to quickly manage your units. Most of them will all die in a large fight without having done much because you wont be able to get your units to fire off their abilities as quickly as you could with SC2 and WC3s tab cycling and ability cast mechanics.
In the early game, I have all of my units on separate control groups. The only time I feel the need to start putting units into control groups consisting of multiple units is when I have more than 7-ish units. The main problem arises when I have an army something like this: Gorgutz, the Wierdboy, Morkanaut, 9 Boyz, 3 Nobz, 6 Shoota Boyz, 3 Deffgun Lootas, 3 Tankbustas, 2 Trukks and 2 Tanks. I'll have Gorgutz on CTRL group 1, Weirdboy on 2, Morkanaut on 3, 9 Boyz and 3 Nobz on 4, 6 Shoota Boyz and 3 Deffgun Lootas on 5, Tankbustas on 6, Trukks on 7 and the Tanks on 8. Are you going to tell me that you're going to be able to efficiently micro all of those units efficiently with individual unit tab cycling? If I want to use the Nobz abilities, I have to press my second control group key and then press tab about 9 times to get to one of the Nobz. Alternatively, I can shift click one of the Nobz on the field. If this were WC3 or SC2, I would only have to press my second control group key, press tab once, then start using my Nobz abilities like that. You can't tell me that that's not efficient. You would not be able to play WC3 or SC2 without grouped unit tab cycling.
Agemmon
Furthermore, ability casting mechanics are extremely inconsistent. If you have all Tacs with flamers selected, pressing the flamer hotkey or clicking, then targeting, will cause ALL Tacs w/ flamers to use it at the same location. This is the same with ASM jumps. Grenades, however, will not all fire off at the same time at the same location even if you have, say, 6 Dire Avengers or 6 Shoota Boyz selected. It's inconsistent and sloppy.
WC3 and SC2 merely has the optimal unit for the ability cast use the ability first. Dawn of War II has a feature where you can either have all selected squads of the same type use the ability at the same time with one cast, or only have one unit at a time use the ability. I think it's not unreasonable to suggest, especially for an RTS game in 2017, an option for players to use the superior grouped unit type tab cycling system and have a toggled option like in Dawn of War II for ability cast mechanics IN ADDITION to a hotkey that can be held down to invert or toggle the opposite effect ~ meaning that holding down ALT or something while casting the jump ability will cause all selected ASMs to jump to the same location, for example.
Agemmon
So, I just want to try to understand what you're saying here. How does individual unit tab cycling help you with selecting a specific unit to use an ability and thus know where it will shoot from? Using your Tac Flamer example, here is a control group consisting of 6 Tacs, 3 of which have flamers: https://ibb.co/nuOTY5
Now, judging from the unit card below, how does individual unit tab cycling help you select the specific Tac w/ a Flamer so you can use it's ability? You can't know this until you press tab: https://ibb.co/gyvaD5
Alright, so one of the Tacs with a flamer was selected. Was it the specific one you wanted? There's a 66%-ish chance that it wasn't. So how about we press tab again?: https://ibb.co/d3kLfk
Finally, you can accurately predict which Tac w/ a flamer will be selected next ~ if you remembered the specific Tacs that were selected with your previous two tab hits: https://ibb.co/gtMRLk
With all of that wasted time, why not just click on the specific Tac w/ a flamer if you want a specific Tac to cast the ability from a specific position and / or angle. Do you understand what I'm saying now? Individual unit tab cycling does not help you here. It makes things harder and causes you to waste time.
KanKrusha
Thanks for the explanation, makes sense now.
Connatic
Of course, I understand where you're coming from, I was just talking about how Starcraft 2 does it specifically. If it does it the Starcraft 2 way, it would count all Tacs as "one unit" for the tab targeting, and show the abilities available in the card. It SC2 you just spam the abilities you want and you won't see it go on cooldown until all of the units energy or cooldowns are used up.. It will just go the the next unit with the ability available. How would that work with certain directional based Skill shots like a flamer? How would you pick the exact flamer you wanted if you had a large tac blob, with flamers on either end. It will just so Tacs with with an overall Unit Tab Cycling.
Cursed
could you have tab to select through the type of unit as the OP is suggesting, and then maybe Ctrl+tab to cycle through individual units?
so you could have a group of 8 units of 4 different types (2 tacs, 2 asm, 2 scouts, 2 dreads).
pressing tab would go from all the tacs selected, to all the asm, to all the scouts to all the dreads.
pressing Ctrl+tab would instead go through the group of 8 units, 1 at a time, but would keep them grouped by type (so ctrl+tab would go tac->tac-> asm->asm etc)
make sense?
KanKrusha
Good suggestion cursed. OP is asking for more than just the tab cycling though. He wants ability usage changed as well which is hos motivation for asking for improved tab cycling.
Also, I think he managed to exceed the pop cap limit, must have had depleted squads to have that many
I am not seeing such big armies and I wonder if you get that big maybe you are past efficient micro anyway. Not that he and cursed haven't made good suggestions.
Dullahan
Squad based gameplay versus non-squad based. The behaviour works in WC3 or SC2 because individual units using their abilities at the same time is fine behaviour. In DoW3 it's extremely inefficient to throw multiple grenades at the same spot and what have you.
My suggestion is to group similar squads to the same hotkeys instead of only using one army hotkey.
Agemmon
Units don't use their abilities at the same time in WC3 or SC2. In Dawn of War II (for certain) and Warcraft III (I think), you can toggle on a setting for all selected squads of the same type to issue a shared ability at a target location. Otherwise, all ability mechanics work as they do for grenade-like abilities in Dawn of War III ~ one cast per issued order. Respectfully, I don't think you fully understand how inconsistent ability cast mechanics are across different unit types.
Regarding your suggestion, this doesn't help with efficient army control in the late game once armies begin to swell. If you're building a very diverse army and keeping unit groups unit-type specific, you're going to have upwards of 8 control groups. This also presents a problem for those that are uncomfortable using the F1 - F3 keys for Elite units. Efficient late game unit control in Dawn of War III is atrocious because of the individual unit tab cycling and inconsistent "everybody cast" or "just one of you cast" ability mechanics.
I don't care who you or anyone else is, late game is going to be an inefficient attack-move blobfest because you simply can't fire off all of your units' abilities in time ~ even with small squads. As I've said above, I'm a platinum ranked Zerg player in SC2 (which is nothing special, but still in the 80th percentile), I was ranked fairly high on the ladder of Warcraft III and I had a quite high ELO in Dawn of War II. I mean, if anything, I like to at least think I'm capable of recognizing good control schemes and quality of life options in RTS games by now.
It's great that the Dawn of War III devs decided not to build their game around e-sports and become either boring or a chore to play, but Relic also left out a lot of amazing quality of life control features that most RTS e-sport games have had. Sure, StarCraft I doesn't have grouped unit type tab cycling (so I've been told), but it was likely a technological limitation in accordance with a cap on the number of units you can have selected. Since Warcraft III, Blizzard hasn't used individual unit tab cycling with good reason. Squad units vs. individual units means nothing as well. You can think of one squad as one unit when comparing.
Skemooo
may if they can let you hold a key like shift while your cycling to switch between indiviual and group cycling..
ATXReset
I would really like to see unit type tab cycling implemented as well
Zhiver
Yes, to at least have the option for unit type tab cycling would be nice
Agemmon
I knew they wouldn't do it.
Seems like almost nothing changed from the beta phases to release.
Cursed
Back to what I was suggesting.
If you pressed tab, you'd cycle through the types of units you have selected in the group. If you selected the ASM and then used their jump ability, all of them would jump.
Is suggest that if you used the CTRL+tab idea I was talking about and selected ASM, only the actual squad you have selected would jump. Then you could quickly CTRL+tab through the rest of the asm and use each of their jumps individially, with the hotkey or clicking the ability.
Does that make sense? It doors in my head at least but maybe I need to explain it better