Casualty Auto Selection - Engine Preference To Disable

[redrum]

@general_zod So this could be added... but are you sure you'd even use it? Imagine if for every time someone gets a hit, you'd have to select your casualties with no default provided (most players take the default probably like 99% of the time). I think you would realize that its much more painful then you think to select your casualties from scratch especially for large battles and that you'd rather once in a while accidentally accept the default casualties when you intended to change them.

I think better features would be providing some configuration settings like "try to keep at least one land unit" and also just improving default casualty selection to handle more scenarios like AA attacks and negative support attachments.

[General_Zod]

@redrum That sort of configuration of some of the common, potentially problematic scenarios sounds very nice. If I had ability to configure it, I probably would opt to keep it activated most of the time.

[CrazyG]

A weird behavior related to this occurs on the House of Habsburg map because the castles give enemy units -1 dice roll.

It will give the -1 to muskets before pikemen, which is fine. However, this causes the engine to want to lose a 0 attack musket before a 2 attack pikemen, even though a musket is better than a pikemen in every possible way (and if you lose the musket, a pike will just become the 0 attack unit)

[prastle]

@crazyg @General_Zod @redrum well the other scenario that always occurs is the engine selecting a ground unit with air left over when taking a capital! Or other land. Since the capital in many maps gives all the cash this is silly.

[General_Zod]

@crazyg I also noticed it wants to remove cannons a lot if my memory serves correctly.

[CrazyG]

@prastle
I think this part is understandable because the concept is complex enough to justify a human changing their move. The battlecalc also has a one click option to accomodate this

The big issue I see with the HoH behavior is I think it affects the battlecalculator.

[prastle]

@general_zod It would also be nice if the space bar was finally fixed But I haven't tested latest gui closely. As we all know it sucks while chatting to hit the space bar.

[prastle]

@crazyg ya this all kinda came to a head again from this game

https://forums.triplea-game.org/post/8738

[General_Zod]

@crazyg I haven't confirmed it, but I think the bc might not understand cannons and the lack of true hp for them. I suspect this because it counts the cannon as a hp in the "hp totals" for each side. Or maybe that is simply a separate display error.

[General_Zod]

@prastle Both of your points ^^ are very good.

1. Capital scenario should, needs "one land unit must survive" configuration for auto select. If we creating a list of scenarios for configurations, then this is a good one.

2. Spacebar should not accept actions. Or some mechanism needed to keep your cursor in chat box until you actually move it out yourself, so it would prevent the infamous spacebar misclicks.

[prastle]

@general_zod well they added the spacebar to the new gui but lately it hasn't worked. I haven't checked .9639 yet

[prastle]

@general_zod off topic but I still reserve the right to vote PR 10 000 as The next stable

[redrum]

@General_Zod Yeah, I think coming up with a list of things that would be good to be able to configure like "one land unit must survive" is probably a better feature request that players would use.

@CrazyG Yeah, generally enemy support attachments are not handled properly by either the battle calc or default casualty selection. This is a known limitation and is fairly difficult to fix though I would like to eventually do so.

@prastle There is already an option to disable spacebar confirming casualties...

@General_Zod The battle calc HP display does seem to count infrastructure units but I don't believe this causes issues with actual calcs though I'm not positive.

[prastle]

@redrum yes I know but it hasn't functioned correctly on the few times i tested i will test again tonight with 9639

[redrum]

@prastle I wasn't aware that is the case and if so you should submit a github bug issue

I just tested it and seems to work. When the casualty selection window pops up, I have to manually click the "Ok" button and spacebar won't do it.

[prastle]

@redrum cool
then its fixed

[prastle]

@prastle as long as hitting space while chatting doesn't confirm the casualty

[Cernel]

@redrum When I proposed it years ago I had mostly in mind maps like Feudal Japan Warlords, in which it is extremely annoying having to undo the autoselect each time, before selecting.
The concept of rather improving the autoselect to cover all is a good point, theorically, but, as you see, at the distance of many years AA are still not covered (not saying they should have had, since there are many more important things to do); so, I think, especially in a volunteer based project, an opt out option, to fall back, has a good value.
Anyways, I'm not playing much of those games lately, so I'm not strong, and I agree that for most people this opt-out would have no value.
But, again, it may have a value because of that problem of spacebar selecting casualties while you are using it for chatting, but, again, that would be better if solved specifically.
But, yeah, if everything would be fully covered and nothing would have any problems (like the spacebar chatting / confirming mash up), then you would not want to have this option. Question is, will it always (or should I say ever) be?

[Cernel]

@redrum It works for me too, but I think it would be better if generally chatting would not confirm generally, since there are other things that spacebar still confirms, like politic and action proposals, but this is off topic. Mostly, I don't think that is really a solution, because it is kind of easy not spotting it, so you will still have people misclicking at random.

[General_Zod]

@redrum @prastle Problem is if you have it set to use spacebar. While chatting and not looking at game events. The cursor automatically tabs to somewhere on the game interface. This happens on nations turn start for sure, on game start and various notifications that need clicks, and there's a few other times that I don't recall atm. Anyways so while typing for chat, your actually accidently somewhere else on the game interface, clicking away. This includes on the menu as well as what ever various user actions are currently popping up.

There should be an additional mechanism to keep the cursor in the chat box during the various cases. So then it can truly be avoided.