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    Air units should have the "idle" tag

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    airsuggestionkeybinds
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    • gabrilendG
      gabrilend
      last edited by

      There should be a way to select the nearest idle air unit of a certain type. I'm thinking it could be implemented similarly to how engineers can be "idle" and selected with a keybind.

      Need scouting? Select the nearest scout plane and send it forward.

      See a radar station? Select the nearest bomber and blow it up.

      Enemy bomber on the way? Select ~three interceptors to patrol near where it's headed.

      I think this would make the air game a lot more approachable and flexible for new players. Sure they'd have to learn keybinds, but I think that's a good thing overall. It's much easier to apply land pressure because all you have to do is move some waypoints and your units will queue near the front - with air, currently it's more difficult to make precise gestures because your units are either way back in the base (meaning you need to scroll over and manually select however many you need) or they're patrolling above your base and it's difficult to select them without accidentally grabbing some land units underneath.

      In addition it'll allow for more precision. Need to bomb something specific? With the "idle" keybind, you can select a single bomber. Right now you can select all bombers, but what if you already had orders queued up for some of them? What if you don't want to send them all into enemy AA? What if you want to attack multiple places at once? There's many reasons why you might want to quickly select 1-5 air units of a certain type without selecting all your air units.

      A workaround currently is to have at least three air factories producing units. One for scouts, one for interceptors, and one for bombers. Give them each a separate waypoint and you'll have three different "piles" of units that you can easily click on. But still it feels a little wasteful because it requires you to remember where you put each waypoint (is there enough room on the map?) and it can be fiddly and precise when you need air support asap. Plus if you want to select more than one you'll need to shift+click, and that can be prone to errors since it might select buildings on accident.

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      • BlossomedB
        Blossomed
        last edited by

        Scouts already have idle tag, correct? You can select idle scout, probably even nearest.

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        • gabrilendG
          gabrilend
          last edited by

          Oh neat, probably should have looked through the keybinds before I suggested that. WELL the "select idle bomber/gunship/interceptor" request still seems valid

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