Official SEOW

Hello Shades,

After 4 years of great SE campaigns, I'm thinking about to give you our support for building up a light version of the Mission Planner.
While running big campaigns, the bottleneck is the slowness of the planning phase. Ordering each unit and waiting the map reloading time for so long becomes boring and time hard-demanding to the planners.

So the idea is having the MP option to give a mass planning order for the ground/ship units as "go to that sector", "attack that area" etc.
For instance, figure to be able to select a target type & location: the MP could select the nearest units around in a scrolling list where you can pick up the units you want to move, press commit and create all those ground mission all in a once.
Reloading the map, you can see the mission plotted as usual being able to edit or delete and remake them.
Under the simulation point of view, it's like a strategic approach instead of a tactical one.

Flights should be excluded from this feature, since the planning is fast enough. Maybe we could consider to plot more than one mission before saving the data, so that the map would be reloaded less times.

With this option enables, I think the big SE campaigns would be much easier to handle and attracting/involving more planners.
I'm talking with 1SMV_Arden about this, he could be interested to give his code support, but I would like to hear from you what is your thought about.

I'm sorry to barge in on this but it is a very interesting topic and one which I have wondered about on occassion.

Perhaps as an alternative to what you propose Diego, consider a mechanism where you can move units without actually committing them and thus forcing a reload. Only when you have done several, or all, of your movements, do you commit all the previously planned mission at once. In effect only reloading once.

The danger here would be doing many movements and than having a crash and thus losing everything.

Another danger would be conflicting orders but I hope that could be resolved during the commit phase as is done now.

This is just a thought but it has a benfit over the mechanism you propose in that there would be no need of an AI to make intelligent decisions for you. This in my opinion is the big danger, the AI must be intelligent enough to do a decent job. If that is achieved, more often than not, human intelligence will do a better job so for control freaks, this might be difficult to accept.

Great initiative though!
Cheers,
Petr

It would be an alternative way, of course. Would be an easier way and the results would not be so accurate as by human intervention, but on the other hand during war strategical orders are not always followed as in the commander intentions.

Caching the missions step by step is something the current way can benefit anyway.

Not a bad idea, but could be difficult to get right for the many situations commanders encounter.

An alternative is to write the mission registration function and scheduled missions loader as an Ajax service, so the browser only has to write the mission plan to the DB and refresh the scheduled missions list (without re-loading all units and the map etc).

When I designed the MP it was 2003, I was inexperienced and Ajax callbacks were pretty new so I stayed with methods that I understood well. Now, in 2011, things are different. There is nothing preventing us from building callbacks into the MP... In fact the radar tool is all Ajax.

Cheers,
4Shades

This could be a great improvement and it's what we need.

I pointed out the big campaigns circumstance because it's there we have to front those kind of stresses. Around 80 players means 20 flight planning at least. 50/100 ground movements allowed for side... when you have not enough time to plan everything you still end up being more and more inaccurate.

Nevertheless, in perspective, if a macro ground war planning decreases accuracy, it would allow new planners to approach Scorched Earth expanding the number of players in the end.

Thank you Shades for your feedback.