Suggestion: Formations

[Nakarai]

I suggest that you can set up out of battle formations for you and your Demons to follow. When auto exploring you would lose turns to maintain the formation, but you would have to manually pause occasionally if you were manually moving around to maintain it. There would be two general formation types, one for when you have certain Demons out, and a general purpose formation. The first formation type is very useful for setting up flanks, arcs for breath/ other AoE and for using ranged minions. The second type is particularly useful if you want your Summoner and Demons a certain distance away from eachother. For example with the first type you would be able to set a tanky Demon a few spaces in front of everything else when hes out to draw attention, or a ranged Demon a few spaces back. If the second formation type was also set the other Demons would follow that formation while the specific Demon follows his specific formation. This is to avoid it being too tedious and having to set formations for every Demon. Formations would be limited to a 5x5 area. Thoughts?

[Sandman25]

I love the idea (because I hate when healer like Faerie becomes front demon during autexplore so I have to press a button, dismiss it, summon it again into back position and resume autoexplore), not sure how easy it is to implement though.

[Ferret]

I'll have to think about this one a bit. As Sandman suggested, it would definitely be a big lift. That doesn't make it a bad idea, just an expensive one... and at this point in Demon's development there are still lots of other cheaper ideas that would probably have a bigger impact.

But, on the other hand, what might be more doable before then is trying to get demons to formation themselves at least a little better? I'll put investigating that on the "soon" list: I don't have an ETA for it, so I don't wanna tie to it a specific build just yet.

Thanks for the suggestion.

[Sandman25]

Another option is "solo-autoexplore": you put demons into formation, press autoexplore and all demons are instantly dismissed so you autoexplore alone. But they are instantly summoned back in the same formation whenever you meet enemy. It would solve issue with demons wasting time on dealing with obstacles/narrow corridors. Though it would need to have some protection from being gameable, like requiring full HP for all the demons and no enemy is closer than 10 tiles when activating it. As a bonus it would solve problem "My demon noticed something but I don't know what it is so I should dismiss my demon and summon it back immediately".

[Nakarai]

But, on the other hand, what might be more doable before then is trying to get demons to formation themselves at least a little better?

Yeah there are alot of different ways to get something like this to work. Getting Demons to position themselves better would fix alot of the problems involved for sure. I don't really have any idea how much work goes into implementing any of this, so feel free to design it the way you want. I'm just trying to say don't feel compelled to add stuff just because someone suggests it! The players rarely know what we want anyways

[Ferret]

Yeah, I'll probably come at this from some other direction once I go to tackling it. One of my general policies is to try and avoid making the player have to "fiddle" with the AI. I try to look for ways to diminish/solve AI related issues *without* just adding new AI controls and options. It saves a ton on UI development, and makes the game easier to play.