Allied Movement Points

[Chazar]

It would speed up team games if team partners could inspect the remaining movement points on allied units.

We're constantly asking ourselves in the game chat which allied units can reach which location, then delaying the turn until we have the answer, etc. (This is furthermore complicated by the absence of coordinates or searching cities by name.)

Options: (d is best, but a might be easiest to implement?)

a)
It would be splendid if one could right-click allied stacks similar to enemy stacks, having their remaining move range shown with blue tinted squares.

b)
However, this should be allowed to work for all units of a stack, not only the topmost unit. If this is too complicated, it would already be helpful if within the pop-up that appears when clicking on an allied stack, the mouse-over would show the remaining movement points in addition to the strength as is currently shown.

c)
Another helpful option to implement my wish would be tiny icons similar to the current "Defend" icon, which would be displayed for allied stacks that have less than half of their total move remaining. It would not be very accurate, but useful enough and really easy to glance.

d)
I guess the best option would be to allow a player to normally select allied stacks. Units of an allied stack should behave like in Observer-Mode, i.e. a player cannot move the unit, but can set a path. Clicking would then allow to judge the range for the current turn (and even subsequent turns for Gold-Members as normal already). However, any changed path for allied units should be ignored by the server, i.e. a team partner should not be able to alter a stack's set path.

[SnotlinG]

Its all good suggestions!
The problem codewise is that the gameengine reads the units move-points at gameload. But then in case the units are moved while you are logged in, your client is only updated with the allied units movement, i.e.it doesnt tell you how many movepoints is spent.

So I have 2 options:
1. The sync-messages that send out the information about the units moving should also sendout how much movepoints they have left
2. Or calculate movecosts etc for the friendly unit while it is moving.

Neither of these are that easy to just add. I will have to think things through and see what makes most sense.

[Chazar]

...but that is only a problem if two or more allied players are playing simultaneously, isn't it?

Requiring a client reload to update the displayed movement points might not be a big deal in those instances for the time being.

[SnotlinG]

Yes true. But how would you know if your ally had moved a unit a little bit while you are in the game. Then the displayed movepoints wouldnt be correct anymore. I.e. even then I would have to modify some code But yea that might be the easiest solution to start with... Will have a look when Im done with Tournamentcode + some more urgent bugfixes