@FtXCommando said:
it isn’t very difficult to give navy units collision like land units
okay, enlighten us .
There's a few myths here that do not align with my own understanding of the engine, let me add some info:
Submarines behave like underwater air units. This is because of their motion type as far as I am aware, maybe Balthazar knows better. That is why they can stack, because technically you can do the same with air units. @maudlin27 already mentioned this, especially gunships. Nobody does that though, because the average anti air gun of any significance has splash damage. In Steam FA, some tech 3 AA guns do not have splash damage. In FAForever, all tech 3 AA guns have splash damage. This is why.
The easiest solution to make stacking submarines less attractive is to give torpedo's splash damage too. Problem immediately solved, the micro would no longer be about stacking (which is hardly micro - it's just one hotkey) and more about keeping the submarines separated so that the splash damage (of torpedo's) doesn't hit multiple submarines. Keeping submarines separated feels like more interesting gameplay to me, both in terms of watching and in terms of playing. But who am I .
Normal move command obeys the collision box, subs aren’t any different
No move command obeys any collision box. Yes, while moving units can bump into each other for some motion types/layers. But that has to do with moving in general, not with the (type of) move command.
Regular move commands expect the selection to end up in some form of formation. The formation itself has the collision box of a unit as one of its parameters, in a loosely manner. The distribute order feature just sends all units to the same location, it does not attempt to make a formation. If you give a single unit a move command, it is equivalent to move command of the distribute orders feature. When there's just 1 unit, no formation logic is run and therefore no formation is made.
Do not confuse this with formation move. Formation move means the units also move in formation. There is, without using distribute orders, always a formation in play even with regular move commands: the formation where they end up at!
The only thing the distribute orders feature does is automate the task of assigning a move command to all the units in your selection as if you separately selected each unit and gave it a move command with just that unit in your selection.
Source: https://github.com/FAForever/fa/pull/5908, hours and hours of investigating how move commands and formations work and behave.
Not mentioned in this topic, but a similar myth: a large selection of naval units taking forever to respond to a (new) move command. This is intentional, as the formation logic has a 'delay' parameter where each row is delayed longer than the row before it. I think this is there to not deplete the pathfinding budget when you quickly issue many (move) orders, but I'm not sure. This is especially painful for naval units, since there's usually more rows since naval units are, uuhh - preeeeetty wide in the formation. Therefore there are more rows. And the more rows, the longer it takes for all units to start moving.
