Tank Behavior

[Black Relic]

Alright so I spent the last two day trying to figure out how to make this Dawn of War 2 Retribution less off a headache in terms or pathing and what not.

I made a couple of squad plans for tank when they are idle and when they are attacking a unit. Granted i haven't made it where the tank wont change targets, To my experience the tanks will still do this. However not as much.

So what i changed were the following. When a tank is idle, it will stay that way period. It will not move/turn or ANYTHING! Which is awesome since sometimes a tank would randomly turn around after the enemy left when the tank is idle. Idk is it has happened to anyone but me but i experience it alot when i play this game.

With the exception of the Fire Prism, Tanks will now be able to attack a unit without randomly moving (it was trying to get into cover) and they will not ride up to melee range on an enemy unit. Instead the tank will drive up to a target with the minimum distance between the two being 30 (rather than 10). The only time a tank will move is the Following:
1. The Enemy unit is not in max range. This is what tanks do atm however they randomly ram into another unit at times.
2. If you Target s unit that is within the range of 30, the Tank will automatically reverse.

Now The Fire Prisms plan is to ALWAYS attack at max range. So rangers will be extremely useful here. When you target a unit with the fire prism it will attempt to get itself to max range and keep itself at max range. So it will move forward if the target is further than max range. Or move backward if the target it closer than max range.
Example would be: So Nobs are chasing the Fire Prism and they are 40 distance apart. The Fire Prism will automatically reverse until its max range and continue to fire of course. The if the Nobs are more the the max range of the fire prism it will of course move forward.

On a side note I also change how much an infantry squad moves when idle after an enemy retreats. It was annoying with playing guard.

I made going in reverse a bit better and easier for the game to recognize. I added a turning plan of a three point turn. And the delay for a tank to carry out a move order is a bit faster when turning. Turn around a slight curse is a tad smoother. And around a sharp turn a lot cleaner, rather than a sharp stop I sometimes see.

I enabled orient_to_terrain (on a units ebs .rbf) and it seemed to have had a slight difference in how infantry reacts to a tank moving passed them. Although players can still use pathing to make enemy infantry move.

Anyway I want to know if there is anything in particular someone would like to have as a plan or behavior. Or if anyone has some test benches i could perform so I could smooth this out. If you have any questions let me know caz i wouldnt mind giving this to the elite mod if its works well.

[Dark Riku]

Reversing automatically would be awful. You won't need to micro the tank.
And when you are trying to chase something, you will back up? Yeah, no thx

No random movements and other core improvements are welcome.

[Crewfinity]

It seems like having a tank attempting to go to max range would be more annoying than anything else. opponents could back up out of that and since you're already at max range, your tank would be likely to misfire, no?

[Asmon]

Plus it's not like tanks fire every second. You can learn the move-and-fire pattern quickly enough with some practice. People merely tend to command attack then move, when it's the reverse that should be done.

[Dark Riku]

Problem is the turret turning to targets you don't want it firing on

[Jes]

Yeah, vehicles in DoW2 are pretty hilarious bad in terms of behavior, which is rather inexcusable on Relic's part seeing CoH1 did it so much better.

Between the "must face first weapon to preferred target", preferred target being NEAREST and not at all related to any ideal versus value in the damage family/type and/or tuning table, forgetting old targets on new orders and the clearly subpar pathing, it's a wonder vehicles remain useful at all.