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[sonerohi]

To me, it has never made sense that marksdwarves will aimlessly fire into a crowd, or that fighters will thrash around and merely kill whatever is closest. In reality, a marksman would be shooting down enemy marksmen and a soldier would be attacking the biggest threat also. Be it trying to take out a cavalrymen charging your archers or what. We should be able to tell a squad what it's targeting priorities are so that you can have your archers up on a wall firing into their archers and not a mountain goat on the fringe of the battle.

[eerr]

support.

[chucks]

This is a classical problem of automatic battlefield situational awareness.  Many times, this stuff is hardcoded in games (ie, quick, kill the mage casting a heal spell!), but sometimes there's more to it.

Perhaps some sort of situational awareness evaluation can be added to combat logic.  Individuals can evaluate which units a) pose the most direct danger to them, b) pose the most direct danger to their combat unit, c) pose the most direct danger to any friendly units not in their combat unit, d) are the easiest to kill with their current equipment, e) are the most difficult to kill with their current equipment, f) other stuffs.

I support it, but I also recognize that this is extremely difficult to code and potentially high CPU cycle cost.

[Footkerchief]

^^^ It sounds like that's been implemented for the next version already.  There are a lot of new combat skills and we probably haven't heard about them all yet.

Yeah, I don't really have anything for stuff like "paying attention" aside from the vague Spatial Sense att and Situational Awareness skill.  Sort of a matter of which splits are needed again.  I don't feel uncomfortable having a lot of things under those umbrellas though.  Splitting the senses might be good, and that might lead to something like the aforementioned custom atts depending on which senses the creature has.

Back to the main suggestion: judging from today's dev log entry, the new specific squad orders will let you give them better priorities yourself -- you'll be able to order them to attack specific enemies, etc.  Granted, it would still be nice if they were (sometimes) smart enough to make those decisions without player input.

[sonerohi]

I was thinking in the lines of a toggleable option, like the orders for where a squad sleeps.

Just a thing like: target archers, target mounts, target infantry.