@ThomasHiatt said in Very long post about spread attack, UI mods and why improving player's controls and UI is apparently and wrongly considered a bad thing in FAF, also balance:
no UI mods should be allowed that give units "AI" aka allow translations of sentences like "if this then this else this" or "in case of this, this" into orders, but only "this, then this, then this". There can be no decision making that unit itself does (aka giving commands on its own without player), but any order queue of any orders that player wants to give them or manipulate, they should be able to do effortlessly and is fine.
Great, this means that disperse move, spread move, spread attack, and whatever else are all cheating because when you give an order to an entire group of units they give themselves new individual orders based on some decision-making code in the UI mod.
obviously there is decision making in code itself, otherwise, what would code even do? the decision making Im talking about isnt an if statement in lua, its the unit deciding on its own what to do, issuing orders to itself after player long left that unit alone, and based on something that player didnt specifically state to it
In mods you listed, this code is static, unit never changes its behavior depending on anything, there is no if, there is no in case of this, there is no decision making, there is only rigid "every unit gets these orders according to this specific unchanging algorithm every single time" (algorithm also stops running the moment players leaves the unit alone, because it only lets player give those orders easier), no unit decides what to do on its own or depending on circumstances, only doing what you specifically told it do, and there is no post-control giving of orders by the mod itself without player interaction (like ecomanager), for disperse move for example, every unit gets the closest order to itself (whilst keeping even distribution between those orders) from exact queue of orders you, the player, manually gave and then you, the player, manually told them to rearrange so, and then its done, it just has that order, it follows that order like it follows any other order, no decision making, no unit "AI", you just gave it that order more easily and faster instead of wasting your time doing a hundred pointless clicks for telling it to do something as simple as "split between these positions". You could use this argument for any control in game that already exists that could be more manual and thus increase "micro and skill" according to you. When does it end? When you have only vanilla controls and all UI mods are banned?