Large amount of unit control

[Cataclysm]

Hi all,

I was just wondering what the best method is for a large amount of unit control?

I had a game last night where, when trying to move my land army forward to attack simply using the basic move command, only some seemed to move while others sat at the back, letting the front of my army get destroyed. I then tried formation-move, which seemed even worse as some of my units went back to 'get in formation' with the others and I eventually settled on attack-move as that gave them the most consistent movement, is attack-move the best way to control units or am I missing something?

[Wesmania]

You can use shift-g to split the move/attack order between individual units.

[ZLO_RD]

Select parts of the army, if front is coming to soon tell them to stop or reverse or go to side. And let sides catch up.
Use wider formations so all units come in battle together. Send back units 1rst and then shift+g everyone forward (set move order at the back of enemy army, do your units don't clump up in front of enemy army inteerupting each other and being vuneranle to splash damage.
I think general advice is to just manually controll all units
Edit: or preemptively set a concave so there are no such thing as "units at the back"

[PhilipJFry]

the reason why armies (especially big ones) tend to move back instead of forward is mostly because of people having UI lag (yes i know) and a right click with the mouse being registered as a command to move in a formation (which causes the army to form somewhere in the back before moving to the destination)
easy way to avoid this is to not have ui lag (lower grafix settings, don't use range rings all the time, avoid UI mods that impact your game) or just use the move command instead of the right mouse button or the solutions presented before

[Cataclysm]

the reason why armies (especially big ones) tend to move back instead of forward is mostly because of people having UI lag (yes i know) and a right click with the mouse being registered as a command to move in a formation (which causes the army to form somewhere in the back before moving to the destination)
easy way to avoid this is to not have ui lag (lower grafix settings, don't use range rings all the time, avoid UI mods that impact your game) or just use the move command instead of the right mouse button or the solutions presented before

I don't use any mods and don't seem to suffer from UI lag- my computer is pretty decent and is marked at 174 on the FAF CPU rating, I will try the separating my army and split-attack commands to see if they help.

I thought clicking right-mouse button on the ground is the 'move command'?

[JoonasTo]

Philip was adressing the issue that if you are lagging, you might have accidentally made a formation move. It only applies if you see your units start moving back to gather in a formation even if you didn't give a formation move. Manually specifying a movement order by using hotkeys or the command card makes prevents this. If that is not happening, feel free to ignore it.

As to what comes to your issue of units not moving in unison the fact is that this game is optimised very badly for large amount of ground/naval units. When you select a unit group and give them an order it will first clear the old order(stop all the units), then it will figure out where the units need to go since they're in a formation(even without formation move) and after that it will start sending out movement commands for the units. Now this is all fine and fast if you have only a small amount of units but when you get to larger armies/navies the processing time gets longer and longer until at some point your units will just stop and stand there looking stupid waiting for the commands to come through, then the commands will only get to some of the units and those will start moving and little by little all the rest will too.

There is only one solution and that's the one ZLO mentioned, just control smaller groups of units individually and avoid large group orders.

You can treat this as a command cap like in older games where you would only be able to select 9/12/50 units at a time but instead of a hard cap that refuses your selection, it's a soft cap that just makes your actions less efficient.

[ZLO_RD]

the reason why armies (especially big ones) tend to move back instead of forward is mostly because of people having UI lag (yes i know) and a right click with the mouse being registered as a command to move in a formation (which causes the army to form somewhere in the back before moving to the destination)
easy way to avoid this is to not have ui lag (lower grafix settings, don't use range rings all the time, avoid UI mods that impact your game) or just use the move command instead of the right mouse button or the solutions presented before

I don't use any mods and don't seem to suffer from UI lag- my computer is pretty decent and is marked at 174 on the FAF CPU rating, I will try the separating my army and split-attack commands to see if they help.

I thought clicking right-mouse button on the ground is the 'move command'?

if you hold right click to long, or game thinks that you are holding it (never happened to me), then it will turn into formation move, and if you selected your army and reinforcement that are in your base then all of selected units will move in between your base and current army position and re-assemble there to form a formation. that is a known problem and i don't think there is a fix for that.
Yea you need to use formation move carefully
abd yes, you can use formation move to split army in two wide armies to avoid pathfinding problems and angle them in right direction is easy with formation move

Edit: also!!! when units stand still the distance between them is small, but when they start moveing distance will increase, that is maybe why units at the back refused to move. they behave almost like cars in real life
also formation move is not sutable for attacking unless you have range advantage or not need to charge in quickly. units in formation always move slower, or at the speed of slowest unit in mix

[Cataclysm]

Philip was adressing the issue that if you are lagging, you might have accidentally made a formation move. It only applies if you see your units start moving back to gather in a formation even if you didn't give a formation move. Manually specifying a movement order by using hotkeys or the command card makes prevents this. If that is not happening, feel free to ignore it.

As to what comes to your issue of units not moving in unison the fact is that this game is optimised very badly for large amount of ground/naval units. When you select a unit group and give them an order it will first clear the old order(stop all the units), then it will figure out where the units need to go since they're in a formation(even without formation move) and after that it will start sending out movement commands for the units. Now this is all fine and fast if you have only a small amount of units but when you get to larger armies/navies the processing time gets longer and longer until at some point your units will just stop and stand there looking stupid waiting for the commands to come through, then the commands will only get to some of the units and those will start moving and little by little all the rest will too.

There is only one solution and that's the one ZLO mentioned, just control smaller groups of units individually and avoid large group orders.

You can treat this as a command cap like in older games where you would only be able to select 9/12/50 units at a time but instead of a hard cap that refuses your selection, it's a soft cap that just makes your actions less efficient.

Ah, thank you, I see what Philip meant now, when the game slows down it may think I'm holding the mouse button down a second too long therefore issuing a formation move- thank you all for the information, I will have to get used to using smaller groups- I adore FAF

[keyser]

When i've big army i split them in several little army, i try to get the best angle of attack (half circle for example) and when i launch the attack, i give each group a move order. I tend to not use shift g that much because i'm too worried of losing lot of unit against some aoe weapon.
you might want to use hotkey for each army, but you can do it without the hotkey.