Limit repair command

[felinis]

When selecting a group of units and giving them the "repair" order, limit the respondents to those units that actually need repair.

[Legend]

How would we do this? What if you want them to all go together? GUI option? checkbox?

[felinis]

After a battle, rubber-band 200 of your units on the battlefield. A pop-up list appears. Press 'R'. All of the units on the list that are not 100% strength proceed to the nearest repair base.

Or, rubber-band a group of units. Get the pop-up list-box. Move the cursor to a base and press 'R'. All of the units needing repair go, the rest ignore.

Giving them some initiative currently causes some to go in on their own, but many just sit there and wait for you to send them for repair.

[BigStone]

Press 'R'. All of the units on the list that are not 100% strength proceed to the nearest repair base.

I like this idea....
Only one thing i would see in this and that is that the player should be allowed to adjust the amount (%) of damage when going into repair.
I'm not interested in sending units away with just a 1% damage.

[Empier4552]

I agree. Perhaps we can set a global repair threshold for the key if its easier. IE in our Military panel set the repair option to 5% so when we band and hit R those units with 5% damage or more get sent back.

[Legend]

not a bad idea... however i'd like to point out that there are two requests being meshed together here... The use of a hotkey is not currently decided as a working option. We do wish to review hotkeys as mentioned in another recent thread but it's not something we have in practice yet.

As for repair, what about right click, repair, and then you get options for %...

1) select some units...
2) right click on a hex - select repair from the popout menu
3) a second submenu appears...

Repair
--------25% or more damage
--------50% or more damage
--------75% or more damage

As you can see, I'm just trying to explore all the ways that something can be accomplished.
Any thoughts?

[tkobo]

I like and agree with most said here.

Just as said,keep the damaged %s in the range Legend mentioned.To me id hate to have even a 20% damaged unit withdraw to reppair if fighting was still ongoing.

I probably wouldnt even send a 25% damaged unit to reppair, but the ability to select within a 25% to 75% range would be very nice.

[Paolo]

I like the idea, too!
But just a question: Legend, when you say "25% or more damage", you mean "all units which still have 25% or less of their strength" or "all units which have lost 25% or more of their strength"? If it is possible, I prefer the first meaning.

[Il Duce]

...Any thoughts as to how the repairs would be allocated to bases? It is not unusual to see a base near a previous conflict become overwhelmed - that is, become a roadblock, when many units are deposited on it for repair. If you automate dispatch for repair, you will need to provide some routing capability to detemine how you will load which bases with the incoming.

[Legend]

Paolo - not sure... but probably we would look at damage not strength remaining. (if we even do this at all)

Il Duce - we will look at where units go when ordered to repair from two or more angles... AI rules - what goes where, when and how... and GUI options... should we add more controls to shift units from base to base.

any specifics on what you would like to see?

[Il Duce]

I haven't got a clue.

I usually micromanage repair rotations, and it would be difficult to quantify the decision tree as an AI model. Certainly at a given base, assuming you dumped a load of say ten to twenty units on it, repairing infantry and armor MIGHT take preference over repairing arty and AT units - but then, that might not be the right choice - what you really want repaired is engineers and supply trux. When I rotate for repairs, sometimes I simply 'reserve' units, and focus on rebuilding a small 'brigade' of selected mixed forces [there's that formation stuff again], and leave the rest for repair later.

Then again, prior to a major operation, when possible, I usually quiesce [or build] a few outposts specifically to handle repairs [and this includes disabling other bases that are 'inland' of all conflict areas, to control overheads]. So in this regard, I know in advance where the wounded will go.

I also find it useful to pause all new unit builds [if any are operating at the time incoming wounded arrive], but this can be dodgy because it is probably the case that I have a pending queue as well and I have to pause all of that too, usually throwing off the delivery order, etc, etc. It would be nice if suspending new builds [without disrupting the active build list and pending queue] were 'automatic' in favor of repairing incoming damaged units. I am pretty sure that this would remove an observed spike of demand for Mgoods and Igoods, and all that goes with that demand spike.


[some time later...]

It might be interesting to consider a 'triage engine' which would do a couple of things. First off, it would make some intelligent assessment of available base capacity, conditioned [for instance] on size and proximity [, and if it were really cool, it might factor in such things as Igood/Mgood resources to determine how many slots could be allocated as repair slots, and possibly reconfigure current new unit builds to free up resources].

Second off, it would have been collecting some statistics about unit type utilizations in recent operations to establish repair priorities [triage] within the repair slot capacity it had calculated - that is, it would have drawn some conclusions about a unit mix that needs to be returned to the field on an immediate-, short-, and longer-term basis. Having done that, it would simply distribute units below some 'readiness threshhold' across the available slots for repair [or 'deferred-repair,' a sort of reserve state]. Is this too ambitious? It's what I try to achieve in micromanagement mode...

Now it would be really cool if it could also send identical replacements [drawn from a standby pool? or popped from reserves?] to replace those units that it was recalling for repair.

And I can't help but note that all of this AI assist would be kinda useless without some forethought on the part of the player to populate the various roles [designating frontline units, standby units, candidate bases, ...] - this kind of forethought should also be built into any autobuild capacity [that is the autobuild would, at the very least reserve some percentage of what it built such that thse reserves could ONLY be released as replacement units - simply as a good management discipline, and consistent with real-world doctrine: for instance, if you are playing as the U.S. you would be forced to have national guard units built in a certain proportion to all of your other units, which is basically how the U.S. provisions for rotation reserves. Other nations do it differently, but they all do it somehow]. This comment also draws on observation of many 'new-player commits overbuild - gets inflated' situations that are part of the learning curve and frustration characteristic of 2010. This is something I sort of think the goats are trying to eliminate in 2020, generally but I would like to think that 2020 will be more than just a streamlined version of 2010.

Going even a bit further - establishing more than one readiness threshhold would probably permit an automated recall-for-repair to avoid eroding your present lines into vulnerable fronts. Units that fall into the critically wounded category would be withdrawn first, units which have some capacity left AND which would have to wait for repair anyway [no point in putting them into 'deferred-repair-reserve' mode] would be left on-station, ... but then the triage engine would have to make some decisions about reinforcing weakened units with additional less-desirable but available units, or doubling up two incomplete units in one position, such as weakened arty or AA units that can fire simultaneously... All in all, this would probably be calibrated by Operations initiative, or another slider like that one... So the 'recall for repair' order would actually kick off an automated multiphase repair rotation with retrenchment.

Personally, I don't see myself using this very often. It would certainly accelerate game play, and minimize micromanagement, but at that point I have to ask myself if battalion scale is appropriate for fronts which frequently extend for thousands or even tens of thousands of kilometers. And overall, I just don't trust the AI to do much better at configuring forces than it has done in 2010.

If minimizing micromgmt is a priority, then perhaps readjusting the scale of the units [possibly up to regiment size units?] is probably a much more efficient way to achieve that goal - with possibly other sorts of technical advantages to be gained in that transition [such as map scroll performance, pathing, total unit count reduction, etc. etc.]. I know, I know, this is not in scope, but maybe it should be. Basically, a less 'micro' scale is inherently less micromanagment. Using a larger scale unit might also permit a mechanism for transparent replenishment in-field [for instance, a regiment at 66% strength would perform like two battalions - same relative strength but with a smaller zone of effectiveness, but it would also be regaining its missing third as a transparent replenishment... never mind.]

[Eric Larsen]

Don't forget a Repair All feature so that after the fighting we could just have one universal command that would tell all units with damage to repair.
Eric Larsen