Add defending nation in battle calc
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A minor nicety; in the battle calculator, it'd be nice if there was a way to add additional defending nations to the screen. The context came up in playing the old LotR map (though it would also apply to the newer one and some others), wherein each nations has a different set of units, and some nations would have no equivalent for testing.
When one is calcing, one often wants to see how things will work if additional units are moved into defend before your next turn; in particular how many reinforcements can a certain territory get before a planned attack and whether it will be enough to save them.For a more concrete example: In the old Lotr Map, some province is occupied by a few mordor units and no other units. You want to see if the defense will be sufficient when some Harad elephants come in later. Those elephants have 2 hit points, and 2 defense, which no other unit in the game has. The battle calc screen for that province won't show Harad units, so you have to use some workaround in order to calc the battle correctly.
There are quite a few ways to workaround the problem (in particular using other provinces where all involved nations are present, or just editing in extra units from all nations so calc will show them), it's just some extra nuisance to do so. So if it's easy to do, it'd be nice to have the option. But it's not a big deal. If there's already a way to do this, then it's not obvious enough and/or I'm blind.
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@zlefin You can already do this by using "ctrl+D" or add defenders button and targeting a territory with the addition defenders you want to add.
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I never noticed those buttons before. This game often has a problem with features that a lot of people don't realize exist. We should probably find a way to put in a 'tip of the day' program to help people be aware of these things.
When was it added? has it been there for like a decade? I had done a search through the feature lists and didn't see anything on the topic.It took a bit of trial and error to figure out how they work, but it was passably clear. There should probably be some indent or something, that makes it clear that using the ctrl-a ctrl-d commands are only useable when the battle calc screen is open. Rather than them being used on the main screen as the 'find territory' and 'battle calc' buttons are.
I'd have expected that something that only works while within the battlecalc screen, would be present ON the battle calc screen rather than elsewhere.
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@zlefin Its a relatively new feature that I added I think last year. I agree it could use some usability improvements to make it both easier to find and easier to use.
ctrl+A in particular is very, very useful and something that can save users a ton of time when simulating potential battles.
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@zlefin butterw doing some related work here:
Might be worth a mention
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- The battle calculator (CTRL+B) is a useful tool, but it isn't very obvious how you use it.
- As far as I understand it, the battle calculator needs to be open for CTRL-A, CTRL-D to work. Hence these hotkeys should appear in the battle calculator UI rather than taking up space in the Territory tab.
- A Help > Tips page could be added using a similar format to MoveHelpMenu.
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@butterw As I already said in the past, instead of Ctrl+A and Ctrl+D, I suggest having Ctrl+X and Ctrl+Alt+X, where X is any natural number. The number defines that only the units having that mobility value or more are added as long as they can attack ("fire"), respectively, as offenders or as defenders (so, Ctrl+0 would act the same as Ctrl+A).
The main advantage is that, when adding offenders, you use Ctrl+1 for adjacent zones, Ctrl+2 for zones which are not adjacent but are adjacent to an adjacent zone, and so on.
When adding defenders, you will probably almost always use Ctrl+Alt+0.
Of course, the feature can be limited upwards to the number 9.
