RoughFromMod effect on melee units is redundant

[Tekamthi]

promo table field 'RoughFromMod', when applied to a melee unit, appears to be same effect as applying RoughAttack and RoughDefense simultaneously for the same value. I'm only going off what I can see of how it works in-game, please verify this concern is accurately described.

This field would be more valuable for modding & game design if it were strictly concerned with the "from" portion of the combat -- no matter what kind of unit is involved, if the attack if originating "from" a rough plot, it should get the bonus -- from observation it appears to consider the defender plot only for melee combat, unless there's something taking place that I'm not seeing...

[azum4roll]

It's different for ranged attackers.

RoughFrom: attacking from rough terrain grants the bonus.

RoughAttack: attacking a unit on rough terrain grants the bonus. (vanilla column)

Personally, I think RoughAttack never makes any sense and should work like RoughFrom.

For melee, the combat always takes place on the target's tile (even though the animation may indicate otherwise for gun units and ships), so they're effectively the same.

[Tekamthi]

I get it, I don't disagree with the reasoning so much as what it leaves us with the in the toolbox ie a 2nd set of what's already available. For ranges it works as desired and creates two separate tools

Just will be more valuable if it's same on melee as ranged is now

[azum4roll]

It's simply thematically off to have melee units get extra strength from a tile they aren't fighting on.

[Tekamthi]

i'd requalify "thematically off" to "thematically unusual", but perhaps less unusual than rough attack on a ranged unit as discussed above. Further, it won't harm the desired effect for ranged, nor even melee, who can just take rough attack and defense if they want the current effect -- or split either one for greater customizability than this single column offers

just to recap, the value is 3-fold:

1. for consistency with how it works on ranged
2. the thematic exception where we want an 'ambush' unit
3. differentiating the effect from existing rough mods

For an example, i have it deployed in counter-recon mod on cf in tb2 promo -- tb1 gives attack in rough, the aim was to give a complementary attack bonus in tb2, but in effect i give the same thing with different name (and some defensive value). The units there are setup with a pre-combat invisibility, so the thematic exception case is strong for being able to ambush out of rough with greater strength

[azum4roll]

The only way we're doing this is to completely separate melee mods and ranged mods, at least on attack. And then we need to maintain vanilla behavior.

[Tekamthi]

Alternatively, if unitpromotions_features and terrains had AttackFrom (working as I've described rather than the existing frommod) to go along with the others, this would be good too, more customizable even, better for modder. Then we could have defend/attack in's and from's for any feature, in any combination