formations

[Ki-tat Chung]

i use formations on specific maps like on some ufo's, the only door in in the ditch, so i make every one go line abreast, crawl on the edge of the ditch, none of the enemy munitions hit you. and you get to toast them before they get out.

[Mazer Rakham]

I olnly used them in the first few missions, stopped bothering after that, they seemed to make very little difference.

[Gimli]

As in some sort of bonuses, there aren't any. I suppose you should create your own bonus, but the nature of the game means that I would constantly have to change the positions of my soldiers to avoid friendly fire and the like, which makes it too annoying to bother. Plus, the whole formation thing ruins the tension for me. I assume it has to do with the fact that it wasn't viable in the first two games, mainly because the aliens would tend to grenade you quickly.

[NKF]

There are only two group movement formation settings in Apocalypse, chequered formation and single file. Everyone uses chequered formation for moving the squad as a group - which is also the one that'll suffer the most from grenades. However it is the least bugged.

 

Single file formation is pretty much ignored by most of the community. I find that it's quite a good formation. I find it rather clever how the game dynamically chains the units together into a line no matter how chaotic your agents my be scattered at the time. Try it - it's quite fun to watch as they coordinate themselves into a line. The only crippling part about this formation is the utter weirdness with the walking speeds. Not only do they ignore your speed settings, they'll walk slowly or dash at random between stops and waypoints.

 

But check this out. Set up a chain any way you want until you can locate the leading agent in the line. Select that agent and start to give personal movement orders to that agent. Without your instructions, the other agents will start to follow everywhere this agent goes. If you were to select someone in the middle of the chain and give them different move orders, everyone that is behind this agent will start to follow. Now you have two single file formations being lead by different agents.

 

The whole re-linking up of the line only occurs when you issue a move order with the group selected. A bit depressing as it reminds me of linked lists...

 

Extend this to multiple teams. Say you have two teams of 3 agents each, and you want to manage team 1, but can't be bothered managing team 2. Make 3 mini single file formations by selecting one agent from team 1 and another from team 2 and making sure that the leading agents in each single file formation belong to team 1. Now you can then move team 1 about in whatever formation you want, and the agents in team 2 will follow automatically.

 

Useful, but the odd walking anomaly still presents a problem.

 

- NKF