YANK YANK YANK Point of View

[bearcat33]

Is there a fix, mod or cheat that will forever BANISH the function of the game that YANKS your point of view away to another part of the map during your turn?

Suppose you make an attack with one part of your stack. That attack is animated, then YAAAANKKK.....you are suddenly looking at another of your units on the other side of the map.

I want to stay in ONE AREA and FINISH ALL MY BUSINESS THERE without having to scroll back and scroll back from being YANKED.

I would like to know EXACTLY what the designers intended as a BENEFIT to the humans playing the game to put this YANK function in....how does this make the game FUN?

Suppose you are in a restaurant having a nice meal. You take one bite, and then you go to
have more. A waiter runs over, sucker-punches you in the back of the head, and puts your plate
twelve feet away on another table......you have to get up, walk over, retrieve your plate, go sit back down,
take another bite....and SLAM! another sucker punch in the back of the head, and your plate is now all the way
across the room.........

 

[timerover51]

I know of no way to fix the problem, but what normally happens to me with that is after about 3 or 4 times of my going back to where I want to be, the game quits moving me away, and I can finish what I am doing.

 

[bearcat33]

I know of no way to fix the problem, but what normally happens to me with that is after about 3 or 4 times of my going back to where I want to be, the game quits moving me away, and I can finish what I am doing.

Ok. How many hundreds, thousand or even millions of hours of people's lives
have probably been frustrated by this crappy design? Who designed it this way, and why? Where do they live? Has anyone killed their dog or burned their house down?

 

[CommandoBob]

I would like to know EXACTLY what the designers intended as a BENEFIT to the humans playing the game to put this YANK function in....how does this make the game FUN?

Can you come up with a better way to highlight/emphasize/indicate what unit needs your attention?

Granted, I don't like this feature either, but it does have a purpose. If the game doesn't force you took at each moveable unit, then some will be overlooked by the human player. We will get focused on one area and forget about another one. And we are lazy and won't look at each area of the map each turn.

There isn't any one thing you can do that will make this less frustrating. Moving units in a stack will somehow clump that stack into the same area of the unit rotation list. Moving units into a stack won't work; they have to be moved as a group. Workers showcase this best. Send some workers to a tile to do something, but stagger the workers used (like the 1st, 5th and 10th worker that becomes active that turn). When that thing is done, leave them in that tile but give them another task. Each will become active at different times. Once the second task is done, move them as a stack to another tile. They will all be active consecutively. And as long as they are kept in the same stack, that will continue for the rest of the game.

Understanding how this unit rotation list is mildly helpful. The game assigns each unit an ID and it goes from one ID to the next. It appears that the order of the IDs change; that is, the unit that was last to be 'it' on turn 100 becomes the first 'it' on turn 101. This is just a perception I have; I don't know of any testing done on this.

Sometimes, with many units in play, the game will sort through just a portion of the unit rotation list. To get out of that loop, select a unit that is being overlooked and activate it.

 

[bearcat33]

Can you come up with a better way to highlight/emphasize/indicate what unit needs your attention?

Granted, I don't like this feature either, but it does have a purpose. If the game doesn't force you took at each moveable unit, then some will be overlooked by the human player. We will get focused on one area and forget about another one. And we are lazy and won't look at each area of the map each turn.

There isn't any one thing you can do that will make this less frustrating. Moving units in a stack will somehow clump that stack into the same area of the unit rotation list. Moving units into a stack won't work; they have to be moved as a group. Workers showcase this best. Send some workers to a tile to do something, but stagger the workers used (like the 1st, 5th and 10th worker that becomes active that turn). When that thing is done, leave them in that tile but give them another task. Each will become active at different times. Once the second task is done, move them as a stack to another tile. They will all be active consecutively. And as long as they are kept in the same stack, that will continue for the rest of the game.

Understanding how this unit rotation list is mildly helpful. The game assigns each unit an ID and it goes from one ID to the next. It appears that the order of the IDs change; that is, the unit that was last to be 'it' on turn 100 becomes the first 'it' on turn 101. This is just a perception I have; I don't know of any testing done on this.

Sometimes, with many units in play, the game will sort through just a portion of the unit rotation list. To get out of that loop, select a unit that is being overlooked and activate it.

Yes, I can come up with a better way. Divide the map into ZONES. A zone consists of what you can see without scrolling the map. Take an action in that zone, and the view stays LOCKED in that zone until you are finished giving commands to all units in that zone and have clicked the "Next Zone" button, or have simply manually scrolled away to another area.

 

[Raliuven]

I have been putting in some time on Rome Total War lately and I actually miss the fact that the game doesn't drag me to each unit that still have movement left. How many times did I forget to move a ship, diplomat or spy? Maybe there is some way to do that . . . which of course is not the point of this forum . . . but the point is that I like that Civ draws your attention to these things.

I do much like CommandoBob - once you realize what is happening, either deactive the unit (fortify) it wants to jump to (and then hope you remember what you need it to do later) or just break into the sequence. In the case of a stack of workers, I've found that by selecting the worker with an action remaining that is as close to the top as possible will often help, but is by no means certain to break the loop.

I think that this function may also be a matter of AI programming - the AI needs a way to know what units need to move or do something. The rotation list has some logic to it - artillery usually comes first as do some navel units (non-transports I think) probably because they have artillery-like bombardment. Then it just runs through the list which is why the sequence of attacks/movements by the AI may not always make sense (to a human).

It also seems to me that it may be connected to movement points - watching a ship escort and transport move it is one square at a time until they use up their movement points. I believe that spear/settler pairs move the same way though they are often seen in terrain that makes it hard to tell.

 

[Fiddlin Nero]

If I'm in a war I always start a turn getting things organized to avoid the jumping around. I do most of my warring after railroad so I tend to have a stacking zone someplace within my cultural boarders for safety. Even without railroad you can fortify things and deal them one area at a time. I always save multi-leg convoys for after this organizing stage. Just don't forget that lone vulnerable unit off in some corner. Also be wary of all the ways you can end your turn.

 

[MysteryX]

I would think the game could have been programmed with an option by which the next available unit is not highlighted after the current one is out of movement. The inactive unit just remains highlighted until the user actually selects another unit, either with a point-and-click or with a key that would cycle through remaining active units. There could be additional keys to cycle through a stack or cycle through remaining active units of a same type as the current one.

But these features don't exist. And the "yanking" effect is probably the single most annoying aspect of a mostly good game, to me.

 

[tR1cKy]

alas, no, there isn't. live with it

btw, i agree in full with both you and the poster above, this is maybe the most annoying "feature" of the game.

your suggestions of using zones makes perfect sense, but the programmers were simply too lazy to implement it. as a professional programmer myself, i can tell you that all the active units have to be placed in an array, and every element has an index, and what appears to have been done is a cycling routine that simply starts from position zero to the end of the array, not caring at all where that unit is located and such.

 

[darski]

I tend to dislike this factor in Civ III the most. The good news is that it teaches patience - which is something I need. (yeah, sure, right! )

My major problem with this tactic is that the comp can forget units and settlers seem to be at the back of the list for assignments.

 

[bigFRANK]

Yep Im sure I loose several worker turns in many late game cycles down to this, the jumping about I deal with by using the (W) button (tells the unit to wait untill later in the cycle), but quite often I find I have lost the focus of my attention.

 

[Elephantium]

I have been putting in some time on Rome Total War lately and I actually miss the fact that the game doesn't drag me to each unit that still have movement left. How many times did I forget to move a ship, diplomat or spy? Maybe there is some way to do that . . . which of course is not the point of this forum . . .

You can sort of simulate this in RTW by going to the "all units" screen - it'll show you a colored bar indicating how much movement each general has left. It's a bit clunky, but it works reasonably well for me.