Annoying usability Detail - The auto-renaming of Armies

[Noctus]

Hello,

i want to ask if anybody else finds the mechanic which governs which name a unified army gets to wear hugely annoying. It has absolutly nothing to do with gamebalance, but with the usability of the game.

When you give an army a personal name, it means that you find the pregenerated names insufficient. And you want to keep that name, otherwise why bothergiving that army an individualised name, instead of the 400th gazillion of "Army of XXX" pregenerated naming.

But when you combine two armies it is essentially random which name will be kept, and which will be lost. EVEN if one is a player-generared name. This is annoying when you want to reabsorb little Siege-Stacks you had put out, and their armyname overwrites your playerchoosen naming.


In my opinion if two armies combine (in the broadest sense, if you can call adding 3k to a 30k stack combing) the playergiven name should ALWAYS have preference over a generic autonamed armyname!

I find it cool when you can recall that this army fought in this and this campaign, instead of loosing itself over and over again. Andmanually shuffling each regiment over to the army you want to keep is a tedious hassle.

 

[ringhloth]

I'm pretty sure that it's the first stack's name that gets used. But I don't use names, probably because the name disappears in the next war through constant merging and splitting.

 

[Chamboozer]

I'll be very happy when Paradox implements a system to link multiple stacks together. So for example you could have "Army A" subdivided into regiments, some of which may be in a different province, but visually linked to the main army by a line or something when selected. That way you could split an army into siege stacks without them becoming separated from the main part of the army in the interface. It'd be much easier to keep track of where everything is were it done that way.

 

[ringhloth]

I'll be very happy when Paradox implements a system to link multiple stacks together. So for example you could have "Army A" subdivided into regiments, some of which may be in a different province, but visually linked to the main army by a line or something when selected. That way you could split an army into siege stacks without them becoming separated from the main part of the army in the interface. It'd be much easier to keep track of where everything is were it done that way.

So Hearts of Iron 3 but with muskets?

 

[Chamboozer]

Idk how Hearts of Iron 3 does it, but any quick visual way to identify which stacks need to be re-grouped together after splitting would do the trick.

 

[ero_sk]

I support both ideas of Noctus and Chamboozer. Especially the auto changing of the army names is really ennoing sometimes. I like to have well sorted and well named armies. This is for easier managing as well as giving more feeling to the game when pick my own names for each army.

 

[Noctus]

I'll be very happy when Paradox implements a system to link multiple stacks together. So for example you could have "Army A" subdivided into regiments, some of which may be in a different province, but visually linked to the main army by a line or something when selected. That way you could split an army into siege stacks without them becoming separated from the main part of the army in the interface. It'd be much easier to keep track of where everything is were it done that way.

This sounds like a cool extra.

 

[Gotipe]

This renaming issue is something I hope gets fixed too, I don't remember having to constantly re-rename all "Imperial Army" units after splitting and re-merging them in EU3 so it quickly gets annoying indeed, if one is of that persuasion to utilise the ability to have custom names. Which I am, =(

 

[Xara]

Whichever army you selected first is the one that retains the name when merged

 

[Gotipe]

I experimented a little and first it seemed like the unit that was first in the province has name priority, but now it does seem totally random. But even if it's the former it would mean you have to rethink your gameplay abit in order to avoid constant re-renaming to keep your custom names, so I do hope they implement some custom name precedence like in EU3.

 

[TheBloke]

I had thought it was smart and did keep whatever name was customised - that was always how it worked for me, but of course it's possible that I simply always happened to select the customised one first.

If it based on "first selected" then that's not the end of the world - at least it's manageable. But yes it would be far better if it was smart and kept a note of whether either name was customised, and always used a customised name over a default name; then if both have customised names, first selected could apply.

And I fully support the notion of having "grouped units", i.e. joining several stacks into a "super stack" that operates like a single stack but is not merged. This would be especially useful for ships - when I go to war, I merge several of my Light Ship stacks so that they can still Protect Trade and earn money, but are better protected as they do so. That often means merging stacks from different Trade Nodes. It's a real pain afterwards, trying to remember how many ships I'd assigned to Node 1 versus 2 or 3.

If I can really be bothered, I give the new merged stack a custom name, like "Trade 10Lon 15Bord 20Ant" to remind me that it was 10 ships in London, 15 in Bordeaux, 20 in Antwerpen. But that's a lot of hassle, especially given the fairly short maximum length.

 

[unmerged(804580)]

During some peacetime I usually name my armies depending on where they are stationed for rebelhunting. So, when a war breaks out in Northern Germany, I just click 'Trier' army and get into action.

But I'd like some kind of a flag system similar to Chamboozer's suggestion because constant merging and dropping sieges screw everything and you'd have to re-organize everything. But let's say I flag two stacks as "Trier" and "Provence" with 30 regiments each. The war would take place, I'd merge and split armies and some "Trier" regiments would get mixed up with "Provence" regiments and so on. Chaos. But instead of having to reorganize everything, it'd be nice to have just a button to return to their rally points and having 30 regiments grouped in Trier and Provence: each regiment with the given flag and rally point will return there and automatically regroup. When you build a new army, the regiments will be initially untagged, and you can group and merge just like you do currently in the game, and you could assign them to the flagged armies or give a new flag. "Okay, three more cavs and two more canons to Trier. And all 8 infantries go to Provence." Just once. Micromanaging at individual regiment level for composition every time after a major war is too much of a chore. Maybe that's why I tend to say screw army composition as the game goes on.

Similarly, ships. I usually just name light ships after the node they're working on - "Sevilla" or "Chesapeake." Once a war is over, I need to reorganize the trade fleets. A simple button to make them return to their normal operation would save a lot of chore.

Not related to the naming, but I'd also love an option to tell ships to "dock at the nearest friendly port whenever a war breaks out." I don't worry about my main fleet - I usually just group heavy ships along with light ships for trade missions just to avoid getting trade ships getting trashed in the important nodes - but I keep small fleets in the backwater nodes just to prevent pirates from appearing. It's a plain annoyance when your 4 ships get destroyed near the Cape by the Spanish Armada. Do I really need to click through all the small fleets to dock up?... Honestly, it's something very forgettable when you're suddenly caught up in a major engagement.


AND while we're talking about usability... just a couple more. The constant requests for military access. Click the banner, click accept/refuse, click the banner again, etc. Can they group them up when there are several at once? Can we just keep a list of nations "allow military access to these guys whenever they ask" so the pop-up will show as "accept / refuse / always accept / always refuse", and some button from the diplo screen to open a new window to manage always accept/refuse lists.

And zoning of the rebel hunting. Say, combined with the above flagging of armies, just add a map mode with a screen with a list of named armies. Say, I can click "Trier" and assign them a bunch of northern provinces, and "Provence" to all southern France. Once a province is zoned for one army, they'd better be colored differently to prevent double-clicking. One army red, the other army green, etc. When I move "Trier" to do something else, the zone will be left unpatrolled until I assign them to rebel-hunting again - that way, when 48 flemish rebels rise up, I may choose to combine Trier and Provence manually, and setting them to rebel hunting again will make them go back to their respetive patrol areas. That way, once you conquer a new province, that area will be initially unpatrolled and we'd assign them to an existing rebel hunting zone or create a new one.

I hate when a rebel hunting army decides to go somewhere ridiculous - I was once fighting a war with the OE and had a rebel-hunting stack of 20k in West Africa. A rebel pops up in Italy. All my other non-hunting armies are busy in Greece and Anatolia. What does the African stack do? They decide to walk all the way up to Italy through the Ottoman territory because they can now walk across the Ottoman Empire since we're at war and have access. NO!

 

[Gotipe]

I agree that it would be nice, but just a mere EU3-style naming priority of custom names on fleets and armies would be satisfying enough for me. It's annoying to use such a function only to have it overridden nonstop by clicking the wrong unit in temporary splits and mergers with default-named mini armies. It's something you don't think of until it happens and then you notice it alot. =(

 

[Gotipe]

Pardon me for bumping this again, thought a new thread would be unnecessary.

I am glad that this issue seems to have been fixed, I have tried relentlessly to reproduce default names of armies/navies overwriting custom names through splits and merges but am glad to have failed and can finally enjoy the ensured continuity that EU3 gave.
But this is only in single player campaigns. It still happens regularly to me in multiplayer campaigns that default names overwrites custom names in various merger situations, not sure why only in multiplayer but I hope it can be covered in the future. =)