New Mod: Selection Lock

[nine2]

UPDATE: This mod has been deprecated in favour of the UI Party Mod.

This mod automatically filters out units that are assisting, whereas UI Party filters out units that you explicitly tell it to by hitting a key.

The reason being the old mod was quite annoying sometimes and in every case where I wanted something to stay put I was consciously thinking that and it would be easy to hit a key to just lock it.

Original Post:

This mod prevents assisting units from being selected. So...

Assign one flak each to your expansions and acu and have them guarded for the rest of the game
Attach scouts to your tanks nicely
Basically anything you can already do, all this does is stops you from accidently overriding your own orders

However there are some things you wouldn't expect straight away.

Land facs - For example in a normal game I have two land factories ... my engie one and my 'mother' one that makes units. The subsequent factories assist the mother. Interestingly a side effect of the mod is if you double click on a land factory, only the engie and mother factory are selected because the rest are assisting. This lets you focus on the factories in the game that count.

Air units - another common scenario is I send a jester out and assist it with my air units. Then some new air units get built and I see a bomber. I use my hotkey to select all inties and attack it. Before this mod all inties would be selected but with the mod enabled, only the non-assisting inties get selected so my jester is still protected. This could be a good or bad thing but it's definitely something to be aware of.

Engineers - often I have one ''boss" engie with a few assistants. It can often be annoying trying to find the boss. Just double click any engie and only the non-assisters will be selected.

So all in all I think this mod helps you by a) preventing you from overriding your own orders and b) highlighting the units that count

How it works - It doesn't matter how you select the unit, if you drag a box over them or use a shortcut key (for example select all land units) ... if the unit is assisting anything then it will be 'locked' and removed from the selection.

One unit rule - If there is only one unit in the selection then it wont be locked. So if you click directly on an assisting unit it will still work, if you use the 'select nearest engineer' hotkey, that will still work even if the engie is assisting.

Hotkey - There is hotkey to turn this feature on and off under the "Mods" category. Which is handy because sometimes you want to just select everything in a panic. The hotkey is unbound so I recommend fixing that straight away. I use capslock.

Configuration - You can change the mod to a) be disabled by default, b) only apply to certain units, c) disable the one unit rule - described above. To do any of this edit the modules\SelectionLock.lua file. If you need help with that let me know. For example you could limit the locking behavior to stealth units, scouts, shield, flak.

Thanks - Sir Prize, yorick's, Resin, CodingSquirrel, Crotalus

It's in the vault.

v2.0 - Fix hotkey bug

v3.0 - Implemented some of CodingSquirrels ideas

v4.0 - Engineers are never locked, because it was too annoying

Holding shift will bypass the mod and select everything as normal. So shift-drag will select everything including assisters.
Using the select-all-inties shortcut will select non-assister inties. If you hold shift it will select those inties too.

Double clicking an assister will select all units of same type that are assisting same thing.
So if you doubleclick one engie who is assisting air fac, all engies (of same faction and tech level) that are assisting that air factory will be selected. Other engies will not be.
If you double click an engie that isn't assisting anything, all engies will be selected, excluding assisters.

If you have different land facs assisting each other, doubleclicking one slave will select all slaves to that master. (But not other masters or slaves to other masters)

[Legion Darrath]

Moved to mods.

[CodingSquirrel]

Some suggestions:

• If the unit you double-click on is assisting something then the behavior is the opposite, and you get all other units with the same assist order
• If a drag select selects all units assisting the same thing then the selection is unchanged
• 'Shift' should disable the selection adjustments and select everything as normal

[nine2]

v2.0 released with fix for hotkey which didnt work always

[nine2]

Interesting suggestions CS but I'm not sure I agree... makes it too easy to select the wrong thing

[CodingSquirrel]

I think having protections against clicking assisting units accidentally is important, but they should still be easily accessible under the right circumstances. I think the mod might have gone too far in making them difficult to select. Some use cases where I think those changes would be important.

Double-click. It's a pretty deliberate act, you have to complete the action on a very specific unit.

• Setting your air force to assist a unit, then needing to have them break off so that you can micro them, or to abandon it to its doom. If you accidentally double-click the wrong unit and instead wanted to double-click whatever they're assisting, or something else in the area it would be very obvious if you clicked the wrong thing. All of a sudden the entire airforce which should be assisting lights up unexpectedly. Also, units set to assist will generally be centered over the assisted unit, so just by position you can tell them vs the rest.
• Pausing all assisting engineers

Drag-select. Again, by position it should be hard to screw this one up, in most cases you'd end up selecting the assisted unit or some other unit that isn't assisting first, in which case it would behave exactly as the mod currently does.

• Breaking off a few assisting engineers to work on something else
• Pausing a subset of engineers
• Moving a subset of ASFs off of assist

Shift. Shift+selection is like the ultimate "just give me everything" override. If you're shift+dragging then you're going to be getting buildings and walls and everything along with those units. At that point you clearly don't care about selection priorities.

[Morax]

You do realize you can simply hold down the shift key and see the assist symbol(s) pointing to the "master engie."

Another example: DON'T drag-select an entire wing of inties; just grab one or two if you need to take out a bomber - they're well-capable of doing so - and you don't have to worry about your jester getting left alone.

[codepants]

You do realize you can simply hold down the shift key and see the assist symbol(s) pointing to the "master engie."

Yes, but holding shift, finding that engie, and clicking him takes precious seconds compared to dragging a box around all your engies.

I also really, really like the idea of having flak follow my ACU indefinitely... I have wasted so much time shift+unclicking my flak. And yes, you can use attack groups, but they change over time...

'Shift' should disable the selection adjustments and select everything as normal

This needs to happen -- or do it the other way around, leave selection as normal but have ctrl+drag ignore assisting units.

Amazeballs. Thank you.

[ZeRen]

this is awesome, I was suggesting something similar, but for T3 mobile arty, you select your whole army, but you actually select only army without T3 MA(T3 MA stay unselected), becouse they cant move and fire and they stay safe in back line, would this be possible?

[nine2]

yes you can do those things