worker/barb movements in MP

heisenberg

Lost in Erebus
Joined
Sep 15, 2008
Messages
337
In my past few MP games, especially when the number of barbarians are now streaming in due to the new Barb AI, I, and my MP buddies, have often found that the barbs move pretty late in the turn, not always at the beginning.

We've learnt to move our units slightly later in the turn after this barbarian movement is done to avoid nasty surprises, but we've ran into an annoying issue.
Workers perform their assigned tasks and only stops when barbs arrive within 2 squares of them I believe.
The problem now is that quite often, the workers complete their assigned tasks (using up their movement points), before the barbarians move.
What happens is that barbarians would be able to attack the defenseless worker in the very next turn before the worker can run away.
This isn't an issue of us ignoring or forgetting about the presence of a barbarian unit--we're fully aware that its there, just that the worker is not able to move away because it has completed its assigned task.

Could I suggest that, if its actually possible, that the barbarian movement in simultaneous turns be moved slightly forward with respect to the time when the worker auto-checks its surroundings for barbarians then performs its assigned task?
That would mean that the worker would "see" the barb move near it and is able to move away in the same turn, before the barb attacks at the beginning of the next. :goodjob:
 
There are all kinds of little oddities with Simultaneous Turns... One of my favorite memories was of saving one of my cities by moving new forces into it while the battle animation of my last defender getting slaughtered was playing. Talk about last-minute reinforcements! (And talk about glad I didn't have short battle animations turned on...)

But yes, it does become a little harder to defend workers for exactly the reason you state. I tend to be extremely paranoid about barbs now, moving my workers away if the barbs come within two turns movement.
 
Barbarians are the last listed player, that is why they move late in the turn. It could be possible to move them up to being the first listed player maybe, or it might be possible to reverse the order that turns are processed.... but the chances of causing something unpredictable and wierd to go very wrong with such a change are pretty high.
 
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