Play The Field: advanced controls

In a previous post, I talked about the basic rules of the game and the fundamentals of the interface. This time I’ll go over some of the advanced controls that can help you further optimize your tactics.

First is the usage of swipes, by which I mean touching a point with your finger, moving that finger to another location, and then raising it. A swipe can be used to quickly place a series of units in a certain formation, for example to encircle a small number of enemy units. The swipe doesn’t have to be in any pre-defined shape (line, circle, etc.), as any arbitrary shape will work. I think you’ll find it tedious and time consuming to tap several times quickly when trying to overcome the opponent, and using swipes makes it so much faster and easier.

Another thing you can use swipes for is to select units. Begin the swipe by clicking one of your units and then move your finger across any other units you want to select. As your finger crosses each friendly unit it will become selected. That way you can then issue commands (like attack a specific unit or move to a specific location) with a group of units. If you want to select all of your units on the screen, you can do that quickly with a button on the top right of the screen. It has three green units, shown in a triangle formation.

There are two other commands which you can issue to one or more units and aren’t immediately obvious. The first of these is to quickly tap on one or more units that are already selected. This will cancel any actions they have been given (for example if they were told to attack a specific enemy unit), and they will revert to the default behavior of heading towards, and attacking the nearest enemy. This will also unselect those unit(s).

The other command is to cause one or more units to hold still (called ‘hold position’ in some RTS games). This is done simply by touching a unit that is already selected and holding for roughly a half of second or more. A red box will be drawn around units holding still, and they will not automatically head towards the nearest enemy. However they will still attack any enemies in range. This technique can be used at some of the later stages in order to avoid units going off by themselves and getting captured needlessly.