@arma473 said in Add units to patrol?:
I watched replay #14775039, and my advice is you should just completely stop using patrol for anything except engineers.
You put land units on patrol, and they wander into enemy forces and die.
You put air units on patrol, and they fly into enemy anti-AA guns and die.
If you group up your units, and move them as a blob, you will get better results than if you put them on patrol so they run in 1 at a time into blobs of enemy tanks.
Sorry, I'm not at my computer, so I can't check, but I'm assuming that's my last game. I'll say two things: first, I'm a terrible video game player in general, and I'm particularly terrible at FAF. That's partly because of the second thing I'll say: not everybody plays a game to win; some people play a game because it gives them a platform to be creative in some way, so they can work out some idea they had, that might not even be about the game specifically. And so I play FAF not because I want to be the best FAF player ever, but because I'm just generally fascinated by war and the strategies and tactics of war and FAF is the best platform I know to explore those subjects. And so even though I know that some hard and fast truths about how to win this game have been developed over the years and have been roundly proven, those truths don't satisfy my desire to be creative and explore the concept of war the way I want to. And what I was doing with all those patrolling units was a concept I had been thinking of for a few days: "SCOUT / HARASS / ATTRIT". The only specific purpose of those units being out there is to have some cheap intel on the field. Otherwise, they're just out there to annoy the enemy, put some fire on his units and structures, and maybe force him to modify his strategy even just a bit because now he has to deal with this mess. All those units are, relatively speaking, dirt cheap, and it's because they are ultimately ineffective at what they do, but I was trying to come up with a way to use them in some kind of effective way, and honestly I think it achieved that, and until I think of some better way to do the same thing, it will likely be a standard thing for me to do going forward.
Having said that, I wouldn't associate too much the patrols I used in that game with what I'm talking about in terms of how patrols work in this thread. I'm just saying, in a very general sense, that you should be able to pull units off a patrol to achieve some specific purpose and then put them back on the same patrol so they can just continue being a nuisance, and I'm saying that the mechanic for doing that already exists with transports and how you can add them to existing ferry routes, without having to retrace the existing route. Doing that by having them assist a patrolling unit only works if that patrolling unit never dies, and at least the way I use patrols, that's not going to work because I put those units out there specifically to be a swarm of mosquitos that the enemy has to constantly kill. Their function IS to die, which would cause the assisting units to stop patrolling. And even if i wasn't using patrols in that manner, I think there's room for general improvements in how the game works. Even "engie-mod", which has become a standard part of FAF that you don't even have to apply as a mod anymore, could be rebuked by simply saying "no, you can just build a zillion T1 engineers". We all knew how to get the build capacity we needed, but someone came up with an idea that addressed the issue in a more sophisticated way and made the game better. That's all I'm trying to do. Being able to add units to a patrol isn't going to suddenly boost my 1v1 ranking into the mid-2000s. It's not the reason why I'm a bad player. There's no mod that will fix that 