Combat animations in PTW

[betheballdanny]

In order to speed things up, we've had everyone turn off unit movement animations in their preferences. But, I've noticed that when combat occurs, you still see the attacking unit move into the defending unit’s square and the units trade hits.

So, it’s like this…
Move veteran swordsman to attack veteran spearman.
The swordsman moves (not animated) into the spearman’s square.
Attacking unit inflicts damage.
Defending unit inflicts damage.
Attacking unit inflicts damage.
Attacking unit inflicts damage.
Defending unit inflicts damage.
Defending unit inflicts damage.
Attacking unit inflicts damage.
Attacking unit takes the square and has 1-2 hit points left (depending on if he became elite).

One battle can take about 10 seconds. That’s a big bulk of a turn. (Oh yeah. We’re playing simultaneous moves, and everyone has green pings.) This is a much bigger issue if you move a unit in a stack to attack. You have to sit there and wait for that unit to finish its attack before moving the next unit. Of course, you could move the whole stack to attack.

I was wondering if there’s a way to make it work like this…

Move veteran swordsman to attack veteran spearman.
The swordsman moves (not animated) into the spearman’s square.
7 “swipes” not displayed, but are calculated.
Attacking unit takes the square and has 1-2 hit points left (depending on if he became elite).

This would appear to look like a Civ1 battle, and would speed up the game considerably.

Has anyone else noticed this? Any suggestions?

 

[betheballdanny]

Along these lines, I've noticed that if a stack is attaking you, you cannot attack that stack until it's done with it's "move". This is even though one of the units is attacking while others are waiting to attack. Is this a bug or intentional?

 

[Cartouche Bee]

This is due to poor implementation. Each phase of the battle has to be synced with each other computer. However, since the random generators are synced, so to speak, all the intermediate results are exactly the same, so the intermediate program syncing of machines just slows the game down. I think the battle should proceed at the local computers speed, then a resync with all the computers after each battle between two units. You can save alot of resync's with this process.

At least you got your animations turned off, that helps on cutting out a whole other layer of syncing redundancy.

[Edit] I think they should have a scenario with the animation preferences turned off and call it the MP scenario.