Openra: Harvesters no longer continue to drop ore at teammate refinery after ordered

[anjew175]

Issue Summary

Currently if you wish to 'donate' a harvester, you have to continuously manage that its dropping the ore to ur teammate and not stealing their ore. Previously harvesters would continue to drop off ore at a teammates refinery after being given orders.

• Steps to reproduce
  
  
  
  1. Start a server with a bot teammate
  
  
  2. Try your very best to keep it dropping off ore at your teammates refinery
  
  

[pchote]

Likely caused by #16193.

[WhoCaresora]

I would like to argue in favor of fixing this. The dropping on a ref teammate is a useful and very appreciated. It is a cool feature allowing to solve economic crisis and I'm trying now with other player to create "build-orders" needing the "sharing/giving" of ore trucks.

In the mean time we can practice those build but with the limit of intense microing.

[tovl]

The problem with the previous behaviour is that it is completely implicit. There is nothing that indicates that sending a harvester to a refinery will permanently lock it to that refinery, nothing to indicate that a harvester is already locked to a specific refinery and there is also no way to revert the lock and make the harvester pick a refinery based on the harvester distribution logic again. It was changed in last release to be more like a temporary reservation mechanic (sort of like aircraft) rather than a permanent lock because of that.

I think we should add permanent locks back in—in addition to the temporary reservation—but only if it can be done via a clear and explicit UI element. There should be an indication of which refinery the harvester is locked to and a way to remove the lock without locking it to another refinery.

[WhoCaresora]

OFC, any way to make a behavior configurable in an explicit manner is always the best way to go. If i come with some practical suggestion i'll share it here.

Also i want to point out that the removing of "permanent lock" increased the ref shifting by a lot. Players noticed that ore trucks started to be a bit more dumb and swap ref for no reason (at least not one that makes sens in the player's head). Ore truck crossing the base to unload in another ref has been more common and annoying since that.

[tovl]

The intended behaviour is that harvesters try to balance between offloading at the nearest refinery to their current location and evenly distributing themselves over the available refineries. So if there is a free refinery, but that refinery is very far away, it might still prefer a refinery that is closer, even if that already has another harvester assigned to it.

The problem is that the harvester distribution logic is also bugged, so it doesn't do what it is supposed to do. This is a very old bug, but it had always been obscured by other bugs and implicit behaviours. With those removed, it has become more noticeable. see also https://github.com/OpenRA/OpenRA/pull/17100#issuecomment-550469399

[tovl]

My preliminary idea for what such an interface could look like:

• Clicking on the refinery with the harvester selected makes the harvester drop off at that refinery once, just like it does currently.
• Double clicking on the refinery makes the harvester permanently locked to that refinery.
• The lock would be indicated by a small chain link icon on the harvester.
• There would also be a dashed line shown between the harvester and the refinery when either the harvester or the refinery is selected.
• Double clicking on the refinery that is already linked to the selected harvester will remove the lock again.

Instead of double clicking we could also think of using the deploy interface, or a modifier key, etc.

[pchote]

Double clicking is an interesting idea because of #10967.

[pchote]

The force move or force attack modifiers could work in the default mods, but won't scale to other mods - force attack is already needed for harvesters that have weapons, and force-move for flying harvesters.

Another idea could be to make the link an action from the refinery on to harvesters, but this is probably too obscure to be discoverable.

[WhoCaresora]

The entire Idea of tovl works for me. Every aspect is nice, practical and intuitive. And as ore trucks are units you don't really use a lot in the game, all the "graphical" addition won't affect the rest of the gameplay.

This would not only solve the teamgame feature but also increasing control over your own economy by making sure ore truck stays on the ref of your choice with the flexibility to change your setup at any time with ease.

I can share this with other players if you need more feedback but i'm pretty sure everybody would agree.

[pchote]

There is nothing that indicates that sending a harvester to a refinery will permanently lock it to that refinery, nothing to indicate that a harvester is already locked to a specific refinery

We did actually have this at some point in the past - we drew grey target lines between the refinery and its linked harvesters. If we combined this with something like #16919 the links would be obvious.

and there is also no way to revert the lock and make the harvester pick a refinery based on the harvester distribution logic again.

There may be solutions for this that don't require new modifiers. For example, we could make an explicit unload order always link to that refinery, and an explicit harvest order always unlink. If players want to micro-manage harvesting specific cells while linked, they just need to remember to end the order chain with an unload order.

[WhoCaresora]

select harvester, click to unload on ref = locked on that ref.
select harvester, click on ore = untied.

This behavior would avoid most issues. The unload order is mostly non used as player let the ore truck unload itself once full. Main order on ore truck is "harvest ore tile". So even if someone lock on purpose or accident an ore truck on a ref, he will soon enough untie it. At least he can't eco transfert and keep its ore truck locked on a distant ref. Pulling ore truck out of fields would also not be an issue as you send them back to harvest by clicking on ore. If you wich your ore trucks to be locked again, you know what to do.

[pchote]

Bumping to Next + 2 so it doesn't unreasonably delay Next + 1.