Add a "Guard area" or "Combat Air Patrol" feature

Possible already, though buggy.
Set SlowdownDistance=0, CanPassiveAquire=yes, CanRetaliate=yes, DefaultToGuardArea=yes.

Will work, but the relevant aircraft cannot land on docking structures anymore, which makes this workaround rather buggy...

(Just a side note)
/Millennium

Lt Albrecht:
Yes, but it's buggy, all I want is for aircraft to accept the "Guard area" command and circle round it guarding, reloading when out of ammo.

I know it's a side note, don't worry ;) Just wondering whether it can be done in the EXE...

This COULD be done via an extra button on the command bar, sorta like generals.

Make it so there are 2 guard modes, guard air and guard land (and possibly a guard both?) to add to the depth & strategy.

LT Albrecht:
[quoteth]
This COULD be done via an extra button on the command bar, sorta like
generals.

Make it so there are 2 guard modes, guard air and guard land (and possibly
a guard both?) to add to the depth & strategy.
[/quoteth]

Too complicated, just get aircraft to use guard area and shoot what they can.
And I never got why gens needed both, too much micro if you ask me, they should just have had a "fly around here and blow up stuff" button. It would have been so much better.

Ok, very simple. I would like aircrat to be able to use the guard button. They circle and shoot, then go home when out of ammo, I don't care if I'd have to send them back after reload but evn if I did it'd still be awesome.

Highly in favor of this and have been wanting a similar feature myself for quite a while.

BTG but CBA to log in (sue me):
 This'd be really good, and should be easy shouldn´t it, since it was in vanilla RA2.

since when did guard area work for aircraft in RA2? I'd like to see what patch you're running.

Voted with Strong Support, this will make air combat very useful because of eliminating all the pesky time consuming micromanagement.

I strongly support this suggestion. Air-to-air combat can be extremely frustrating for the end-user, because of the speed required to successfully _target_ an enemy aircraft.

Being able to put a fighter at a specific location and just hover or circle around there and shoot at any incoming air units would be a godsend.

seems pretty useful
support!

Seems to me this has overwhelming support. Ant with it we'll have overwhelming close air support hehehe.

http://bugs.renegadeprojects.com/view.php?id=952

i think this request would help this, maybe waypoints can be coded to enable aircraft to patrol an area and search and destroy enemy aircraft that comes near its path

The MOST supported issue and not even confirmed?

come on Renegade, DCoder, pd, Alex, someone on the delopment team...

Just throw us a bone here.

Almost every active user on this bugtracker wants this feature implemented and you guys can't even grace us with a "We'll look into it"?

This would be good, but then it would aslo need a fuel code, becuse otherwise this would be unrealistic. What if no enemy come close to the guarded area, it will then keep flying forwever.

fuel? this is ridiculous.
Tanks and naval-units dont need fuel either.

you are allowed to select the aircraft, and press "S", or order them home. it's not going to keep them there forever.

There is no need for fuel. Assuming combat is in real time, an aircraft could realistically patrol an entire area for HOURS, not just the typical 30 minutes to 1-hour that a YR/YR mod skirmish will last.

@Worm: We acknowledge the vast support this issue has. Unfortunately, it's not as easy as pleaseCircleHere(); while many issues "just" require adding new variables and hooking into existing functions to make use of them, this will either require new state handling and/or pathfinding, or ad-hoc generation of circular waypoint loops (and, depending on the API, additional implementation of bug:952).

Both certainly possible, but complicated and work-intensive.

How about ya'll proceed to the next logical step, and find a consensus on which 3 major issues to kick out of which scheduled release to fit this in instead, or, alternatively, agree on an unscheduled revision to target this for?

Because it makes a vast difference whether you're all willing to sacrifice Chrono Prisons, Radar Jammers and generic Slaves, just to have Airborne Guard Area in 0.2, or if you all support it, but are fine with waiting until 0.7 or 0.8.

Strong Support, willing to wait on the other things. By the way, how about instead of clicking guard with non-VOTL aircraft, using move just sends them there and puts them in whatever guard mode you guys come up with?

I'd rather see them take off and attack enemys near the base when they have full ammo if that's not already in Ares (may be in stock RA2 for all I know, but the planes always seemed stupid to me). But even that I'd defer until Radar Jammers and "generics Slaves and Chrono Prisons". I may have to make a Google Custom Search Engine for finding topics more easily on this site. :p

P.S. If you just order a unit to go somewhere, is it a 1 point waypoint, or only a move order?

I'm willing to wait, it's a popular issue, no doubt, but it doesn't change gameplay as much as the stuff it would potentially replace, so do it whenever you can.

No wait, implant this in 0.5

I guess 0.5 works, along with UC improvements and such.

If you want this next to UC.DaMO, there won't be much else in 0.5, since they're both potentially pretty big issues.

well, does anyone have a problem with that...?

add it when you can for me, don't care when.

that also works, I suppose

I'll wait til 0.5 and in the meantime I'll just hold back on air to air.

How much easier would it be to re-enable waypoints on aircraft? I mean if that could be done easier I'd accept that as at the least a stopgap and at the most a partial solution, IIRC they could do it in vanilla RA2.

 Also, as to the generation of random waypoints, you only need a pair or a single refreshing one as unless you're using ROT=1 and a very high speed (which causes issues with landing...) a plane can loop back round to its original position infinitely. (I got bored in skirmish and played around with my fighters, ok?)

I don't see the urge behind Chrono Prison logic. Whe'd it be used? Personally I say kick the Prison logic back and replace it with this.

It's already been partially implemented.

There have been several mods that have included fakes of the chrono prison for years now. We can't NOT have this feature and there is undoubtedly many mods that would benefit from it.

And honestly, you can't jump into the middle of an already in-development issue and say "lets stop this where it's at, forget about it, and move on to an even more complicated and work-intensive issue."

Perhaps if you made this argument about 2 months ago you would have had a chance at getting Chrono Prison kicked back IF the community supported you on it. But it's too late now, about a month too late.

Is there a particular reason you're replying to two-months-old questions based on a completely different set of facts?

whoa, what the fuck?

This got bumped up to the top of the list, and I never saw this comment before, so I assumed it was new... Didn't read the date correctly >.<

Plus, BTG has been constantly nagging for the last 2 months to get chrono prison kicked out of the cycle and replaced with something else.

So let me get this straight...he made that comment two months ago. You say he's been making comments like that for two months. And yet, in the post before, you insinuate that his post "now" was too late, and he should have made it two months ago?

How can you, on one hand, complain he's been trying to get rid of Chrono Prisons for two months, but on the other hand pretend he didn't make that argument two months ago?

Either way, the "Issue History" link exists for a reason, as do timestamps.
The post was bumped five days ago, because I added the "dfd-winner-rnd-3" tag.

hm, it was at the top of the list yesterday.

But whatever, my mistake...

Survived DFD.

I'm setting this to invalid as I've converted it into a blueprint, which is the proper procedure for feature requests now. The blueprint is linked in the sidebar.