First, I have to start with 'thank you'. Ten thousand 'thank you's to all of the Project Magma people. I run Myth on a PPC w/ 10.5 and without your care in maintaining Myth,extending it to OSX and KEEPING backwards compatibility in this day when the majors are doing everything they can to thwart that, is beyond anything I could ask or deserve. I have a clear picture of how much work and skill that requires and it delights me every single time I start a game.
I do have a request for 1.8.1. This might not make the cut or it might I don't know. I've been thinking about this for a long time. There are so many things about Myth that are ostensibly 'wrong' but are actually part of its essential character. One of the most obvious being it's pathfinding algorithms. To me, these are as essential to Myth as the Knights two forward and one over is to Chess.
Persistant Formations.
In tournament play, they cannot be used.
In coop play, in many circumstance, they are very useful.
But even in coop play, there are many common circumstance in which they are unusable.
The problem being that generally speaking the implementation causes every movement order - each click - to be accompanied by units crossing paths.
At the moment, the only way to change this setting is in the prefs, which means you have to quit out of anything that you are doing in order to switch. That is what I would like changed.
In the interface we have the verb 'Scatter' also 'Retreat'. These verbs tell whole groups of units to disperse in a timely manner. To me the preferable implementation of persistent forms would be to provide a verb that is the inverse of these, 'Form up'. That is the existing direction of persistent forms, but the current implementation makes it unusable in too many instances.
My request is this.. make an option that allows shift-click, as a movement order - which is currently assigned to creating way points - to a click that applies the last assigned formation for the group. I have never - not one single time - ever used way points. I realize that this will elicit howls and it will turn out that every single MWC was won only due to the use of way points, but what I am suggesting is that it be made a pref which would not interfere with anyone else's preferences. If this cannot or will not be done, I would request that the application of the persistent form verb be assigned to a Caps Lock toggle like the display of Health bars.
Much obliged,
Scary Monster.