Fight and Attack: Having Our Cake And Eating It Too

Some History

About three years ago TheEloIsALie made an offhand suggestion to swap Fight and Attack, for the following reason:

quote: the controls were very strange at first for me … If you're used to attack-move your units, it's extremely annoying if they attack the ground you clicked instead of enemies on their way.

GoogleFrog implemented the suggestion right away without any public discussion beforehand. It came out in the v1.1.1.1 update, and was discussed quite a bit after the fact. Some liked the change, some didn't. The change was reverted shortly afterwards, not because of the player complaints, but rather:

quote: [GoogleFrog] Firstly the manuals need updating and nobody knows the extent/can't be bothered. But more importantly the ingame menu messes some things around such that changing uikey.txt causes problems. [Licho] Reasons were technical - keybindings were switching randomly in the middle of game for some people.

It came up again about two years ago when a webcast-for-charity played Zero-K. The casters, who had no experience with Zero-K, attacked ground when they wanted to attack-move. jseah commented on it, GoogleFrog commented on it, and nothing happened. Then a while after that Firestorm_01 brought it up as an issue in the Steam Greenlight thread. There was a little bit of discussion and then nothing happened.

Last week Firestorm_01 mentioned it again in the What Would You Change thread, and this time GoogleFrog decided to try it again.

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Pros and Cons

Points that have been raised in favor of this change:

* Attack-move on A is standard.
* New players expect attack-move on A.
* New players will have a hard time getting used to the different controls in Zero-K.
* Having Zero-K's attack on A leads new players to fire at ground when they mean to attack-move.

quote: [GoogleFrog] Here is the reason for the change: People used to pressing A then clicking as their standard move order will not have stupid units. The change affects absolutely nobody else. quote: Do you think they turn down from the game because with "a" a unit attacks the ground, thinking they could not attack other units properly? [GoogleFrog] Yes.

Points that have been raised in opposition to this change:

* The manuals need updating.

* There are other games where A attacks ground instead of doing attack-move.
* There are other games where attack-move is bound to a key other than A.
* We should not try to model ourselves after other games, because other games are different from each other.

* Not all new players coming from Starcraft have a hard time getting used to the different controls in Zero-K.
* Some new players don't even use attack, fight, or attack-move at all, they just move their units. This works in Zero-K because units will fire while moving. This also works in other games for the same reason.
* It's easy to discover that Attack targets ground.
* It's easy to discover that Move lets your units fire at the enemy.

* The "attack" key should let you select targets, whether individuals or via area commands.
* Having Fight on F helps makes it clear that Fight is not just attack-move from other games.
* Fight as a term is unique to Zero-K, as are the mechanics and behavior of Fight (auto-skirm, etc).
* Zero-K's Fight command is not the same as attack-move. It is semantically and functionally different.
* Zero-K's Attack command is not the same as other games' force-fire command. It is semantically and functionally different.
* Renaming Fight and Attack to Attack-Move and Force Fire is an increase in semantic complexity that obscures the true behaviour of fight and attack in ZK.

quote: [satowar]This game Zero-K is a work of art and should not change its essence so slightly to please a few or many who come from other RTS games. The theme is identity, current followers Zero-K are long accustomed to the old way, change the style to try to be like other RTS mean losing one's character.

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My Opinion

I agree with GoogleFrog. We should swap A and F so that new players don't shoot themselves in the foot when they try to attack-move. However, what we call these commands matters, and I disagree with changing their names to "attack-move" and "force fire". As Anarchid put it:

quote: It is about the unnecessary and thus harmful increase in semantic complexity of this new nomenclature that obscures the true behaviour of fight and attack in ZK. At best, it is useless, at worst, you have the increased clutter of useless alien terminology actively obstructing your attempts to explain the game.

I propose to go ahead and swap the hotkeys, but leave the names the same, while making the tooltips more explanatory:

A - Fight: Units move and attack at will; builders assist construction, repair, and reclaim

F - Attack: Move towards and fire at a target; can target units or ground

Proponents such as GoogleFrog, TheEloIsALie, and Firestorm_01 are worried about newbies hitting A and trying to attack-move. The hotkey swap fixes that. But we can keep the terminology! The terminology will be displayed on the tooltip (and in the manuals, and on the forum, and in tutorial videos). If a new player is paying enough attention to the tooltip to read the name of the command, then they can also discover via the tooltip that Attack targets ground and Fight does an attack-move! We only have to worry about players who blindly A-click. Everyone else can learn how Zero-K actually works, and using the original nomenclature (with better tooltips) will help them do exactly that.

The only odd thing is that A will be bound to something called "Fight" and F will be bound to something called "Attack". For players such as TheEloIsALie, that's actually fine - he's said many times that he had difficulty adjusting to Zero-K, but with the keys swapped players like him will be right at home, no matter what the commands are called. A-click will still work like the A-click that they're used to; they won't have to fight their muscle memory. For anyone else, including veterans, they can easily rebind keys to make the keys match the initials of the names of the commands. Or any other scheme that strikes their fancy.

In other words: Let's give new players a safety net by putting Fight on A. But let's expect that they can and will learn how to play Zero-K correctly. Let's help them build the conceptual models that Zero-K relies upon; let's keep the terminology and semantics as they are today.

uhm @_Shaman I think he meant only swapping key for new players. the manual and semantic can be naturally phased out over time

and yes it was a problem to me when I first start.

I see no problem if we can implement the swap without incident. Never care about semantic anyway.

Attack (n): take aggressive military action against (a place or enemy forces) with weapons or armed force.

My current position is that "attack-move" as a word is unnecesary. The Fight behaviour can simply be called Attack, though.

This is really a tempest in a teapot. You want to move your units and let them attack what comes? They just do right-click FFS

Attack-move should be bound to A key as it is closer to the group keys, veteran players who don't want to change their habit scan change their hotkeys by themselves. Most games use A and I don't think it's clever over complicating things

In ZK having fight and attack as different keys and commands makes life easier: With some units, you may want to just rush in and fight whereas with others you may want to kite the enemy.


Also, can we not set custom keybinds anymore? And Force fire is a good idea, especially for trolling (heheheh ultra com blast)

quote: if all your hotkeys are equal to the first letter of the action, they'll be picked up really fast. I learned the constructor hotkeys in a little over a week. It took so long because it was based on location on the command card (which is harder to imagine than if they were given a key based on their first letter or something meaningful).

Building tabs are generally sorted by cost (units have some exceptions). Factories are of equal cost so they can use any ordering. So:
Tank D → T
Amph F → A
Spider A → S
Gunship T → G
(Also Jumpy S → D and Ship G → F because else they collide)

A for a-move is not just starcraft, it's every RTS except spring ones

It could be interesting to crowdfund a series of money zk tournaments.

To me the most traditional/consistent approach that would still celebrate ZK's flexibility would to have Attack Move and Attack Units on the A key, and Fire At Ground and SetTarget/Cleartarget (Fire At Units) on the F-key. Not perfect, but it would be clear to old Starcraft players which are a huge chunk of the audience.

Problem is that Line-Attack Move and Attack All Units In Area and Attack Distributed To All Units In Area would be tricky to distinguish.