I don't think a fixed priority order approach will work well. I for one in x-piratez, tend to pick my primary weapon as one of the last items equipped.
Only solution I can think of is that the first equipped weapon is primary, as there always won't be a secondary. Do note that right hand is only ever prioritized for quick-equip of a weapon. Other items are not placed there.
Instead of trying a one size fits all approach, what about a more adaptive method that looks at how the player has previously equipped soldiers and the saved templates (s)he created.
Building an intelligent quick-equip / autoequip would be a
larger huge task.
- It would try to learn based on your corrections, saved templates, previous loadouts, available equipment, armor and soldier attributes. That is a lot of variables.
- It would require some kind of AI/neural network.
- AIs always need very large data-sets and learn very slowly. Especially when there are lots of variables. Your play-style will probably evolve faster than any possible AI can learn, resulting in a feature even more useless than the current auto-equip.
I had an idea based on this, though.
- From previous loadouts, use the best matching for auto-equip. This "best match" cost function being somehow weighted with all relevant variables and limitations.
Problems with even this:
- Would be pretty hit-and-miss, even if your playstyle has clearly defined soldier roles.
- Preserving all previous at-combat-start-loadouts would be quite a bit of a size increase to the savefile.
- Defining a useful cost function would be very hard.
Auto-equip is hard. I think the only solution would be to hard code better logic than the current one. But as that wouldn't be vanilla and very subjective, it might not be something that Meridian would be prepared to merge.
As I said, everyone has different expectations, and I don't see why I would add a feature to cover specifically your expectation, no offense intended.
None taken. Vanilla quick-equip works according to your expectations?
I'm using this in my own custom build, but won't start releasing builds. I'm sharing changes here for the potential benefit to others.