I’m overseeing a battle sluga that I’ve overseen before

[BvBPL]

Discussion of sluga split off from bug thread.

I don’t recall being unable to move sluga w/o being commanded when last played the Order. Is this a new modification or a personal one?

I don’t like the idea of being unable to move sluga w/o a commander. As it stands, I can build sluga in cities A and B while training a commander in city C. Having to move my commanders around to pickup stray sluga seems needlessly micromanagy to me. What’s more, I frequently deploy more sluga than I have commander slots to the front lines because I know some of my sluga will die in battle. If I needed a commander to move new sluga from my cities to the front line then I’d to build more commander units just to move around reinforcement units. Again, extra supply chain micromanagement.

An exception might be called for with the behemoth sluga because they are sort of unique.

While we are on the subject of sluga, it would be nice if they had some sort of guardsman-like ability to defend before their commanders. I’ve had occasions where my sluga have been damaged but their commander is unharmed and the computer automatically picked my commander as the defender during a counter-attack. With the commander dead after this attack, I’m left with a few useless units sitting there. It’d be cool if commanded sluga automatically defended instead of their commanders, maybe with an exception for units with marksman (assassins).

It is a reasonably recent change, yes. I did it mostly to cut down on the potential for stacking uncommanded sluga up, suiciding them one after another and replacing them with new ones (since they can be joined to the overseer and attack at once). That way, you could have however many you wanted in a stack, while only having one commander with them. Kind of goes against both the theme and the mechanics I was going for.

Giving Sluga units a Guardsman-esque ability would not at all be inappropriate, however, and I might consider making it possible to create sluga of some type in the field (though maybe a weaker type), provided you have Shapers or High Mages with your army.

One alternative would be to change the command system around so that joining a sluga w/ an overseer is an action for the overseer, not the sluga. Maybe this could be limited to once a turn (like a spell) or limited to a number of times per turn equal to the overseer’s unit limit. The latter would allow for three unit overseer to suicide three slugas against city walls and then linking three more to the same overseer, but not for cycling through sixty uncommanded slugas. If you wanted to expressly prevent one commander from attacking with twice the overseer’s unit limit in one turn, you could set it up so that any unit joining the overseer has its movement for that turn set to zero. Note that I would recommend setting the movement to zero rather than having it cost a movement as this would allow for units to be moved to a position before being assigned an overseer.

More broadly, setting it up so that the commander selects the commanded units, rather than the other way around, would also make great commanders more useful. As it stands, units default to joining the commander with the lowest level of the stack, which isn’t ideal in all situations.

I don’t know if you’ve played the Three Kingdoms mod for Civ IV, but that has a commander system that is much more elegant and user friendly than the current RifE system. It might be something you can use as a model, particularly as commanders become more important with the Order and the hamsters.

Then there’s a question if the exploit even needs fixing. So far as I know, the AI doesn’t abuse this exploit, meaning that it’s strictly a player issue. In a single player environment, abuse of this exploit is only on the player’s honor, just as use of the world builder is only on the player’s honor. In a multiplayer environment, other players would call shenanigans on an Order player using this exploit. Viewed in this way, you’re generating more tedious gameplay to resolve an issue that might not be worth it.

For what it’s worth, I think that the cycle through sixty sluga exploit isn’t all that great a strategy anyway. With that strategy you’ll end up with a few commanded sluga who are (presumably) damaged from attacking defending a stack of one commander (who might be picked as the primary defender anyway) and a bunch of uncommanded sluga. Without additional defenders, a counter attack could quickly devastate that stack and leave you with a ton of uncommanded sluga to get swallowed up by the enemy.

As an alternative, you might keep the “no command, no movement” system and allow war and battle sluga to join with worker sluga overseers so they can move. Maybe that’s already the case; I don’t know.

In any case, one of the cool things about the Order is that they can turn their captured enemies against themselves. Forcing additional resources to be put into extra overseers just to create a supply chain to move sluga around doesn’t say fun to me.

 

[Jheral]

Sorry about taking so long to answer - had surgery this last tuesday, and I've been a bit out of it since (painkillers and such).

Anyway, I could see limiting the number of Sluga able to join any given overseer each turn as a reasonable alternative; I don't quite know how to do it, specifically, but I'm sure I could figure something out.

As for the Three Kingdoms system, I don't really know that one, since I haven't played the mod. Could you describe it in more detail?

Finally, there will always be people who will be tempted to game the system if exploits like that exists, even knowing that it will make the game too easy (I tend to be one of them, a lot of the time). Better to just impose this kind of restrictions.

 

[BvBPL]

When you click on the Form Legion button on a General (ie Commander) unit in Three Kingdoms, it opens up an interface where you get a list of all units in the stack and can select what units you want your General to lead. This also shows the bonuses that the General would give to each unit as well as the promotions each individual unit has.

If you look at the first post in this thread and expand the “Introducing Legions” spoiler box, you can see a couple screenshots that show this interface. This first one shows all the available troops in a stack that could join the legion, the next shows the legion after the troops have been selected along with the bonus “promotions” that the leader assigned gave to the units, and the final one shows the pop up box you get when you choose direct a unit without a leader to join a legion.