EPThas scoured the world of the majestic Viking flowers,
with Spring comes rebirth! Rebirth of air units stacking proudly!
Stalwart fleets against the incursions of foreign powers!
Yet soon shall return the mighty Blizzard's wrath,
that inescapable extermination deemed once a pest;
So cherish these glorious beacons that guide your path
to Victory in war, until finally in peace, they rest.
In the recent patch, Blizzard removed the traditional 'Viking flower', a way to stack air units on top of each other. Just in case you don't know, this was done by spam right-clicking in the middle of the units to cluster them up, and then issuing a patrol command on that spot. This was removed by disallowing patrols that only goes a small distance. However, a few months ago, I found a different way to stack units, and it turns out that that method still works. In short, you can still make Viking flowers until Blizzard again patches out this trick.
The method is basically just as simple as the original. Select your air units, issue a patrol command that would cause them to stack up (by magic box rules), and then press shift+(stop) before they reach the patrol destination. All air units will go to that exact point and stop, never spreading out. This is actually a perfect stack (with some rounding errors), but it does lack the attractive spinning motion of the original flower.
To expand a bit more on the trick, after the patrol, you can use either shift+(stop) or shift+(hold position). In fact, even after they are clustered, you can switch between stop and hold. Of course, the only difference is how the AI behaves. Also, the trick does still work even if the units are in a magic box and hence will preserve formations, but it just doesn't have the stacking behavior. This is important because if you already stacked them, you don't have to worry about magic boxes and can patrol+shift+stop them to any other spot still stacked.
Here is a video I made demonstrating the trick. My apologies for any issues you may have with its quality.
Thanks for the finding!
