[Gameplay] Splitting Armies and Units Mid Battle (for TBS type system)

Sounds good, since having a feature like this would open up new strategical/tactical options on the battlefield.

Would Control groups work? Click and Drag any # of troops, either within a large group, or around 2-3 smaller ones, once selected, hit Ctrl + #1-0 and it is now a group selectable with the #1 key at anytime.

An RTS standard...

well so far in the game you can create singles, party, company, platoon etc.  i would assume that you control them based on the type.  if you create 10 singles you would control them as a single, if you create a company then you control them as a company.  i do think you should be able to split them if you wanted to.

You could still have any Single, Company or Platoon selection available. Simply pick any one Company member, you get the company etc.

If you were to have 10-20 combined Companies or Platoon strewn across the battlefield and need to move ALL of them quickly, simply select your pre generated Ctrl Group #3, and they ALL highlight and off you go.

I do like the split idea too...

I would think that would be the way it was done, but, in most games once soldiers are placed together as a "unit" you can't grab just one guy. So if I have 100 Foot Soldiers, and I select 1 of them, it auto-selects all 100. Think more "Total War" style and less "Starcraft".

In Starcraft you can select 1 individual unit, or double click that same unit and select All of That Type of unit on screen. Starcraft how-ever is a RTS, not a TBS. Even though "Total War" is a TBS with RTS battles, when you have a group or "unit" of Knights in your army you can't select just one Knight in your group of Knights. When you click on him it selects All the Knights he's grouped with as they are in a "unit" which is in formation.

I'm Hoping that Elemental will have or allow Formations to play a part in the strategy of battles. If it does, or if it doesn't, I still think it would be useful to be able to "Split Groups" or "Split Units" during a battle.

Example: I have 50 Knights riding towards my enemy in a Wedge Formation. I decide during the charge to grab all the Knights in the back line of the Wedge and have them break off to the right. My enemy is concerned with fighting the charging wedge and concentrates it's defenses at that point. This leaves the small group of 10 or so Knights I pulled from the back of the Wedge to ride around and attack the defenders from the rear, which they should logically take more damage from a rear assault. (Hurts more being stabbed in the back since your shield is facing your front)

That explanation wasn't really aimed at you, John. I know you understood. I was just giving further example so I could further explain exactly what it is in detail to limit further confusion or simplification of the idea.

Either way, if I can I'll mod something like this into place for the Dragonlance Mod as I think it would be incredibly useful in the middle of a fight. Most games out there that would allow you to have 2 of the same type of grouped unit on screen at once would only let you change "units" and "unit counts" either before or after a battle, during the "strategy" or "planning" part of the game. They would Never, EVER, let you change that in the middle of a fight though. I don't think I've ever played a turn based battle game before that would let me do that and I've played hundreds of TBS Games since the early 80's.

I don't always want a unit to be only one troop type.  I might want to make a unit of different troop types and have them arrange themselves not only in various formations but also various configurations (spearmen to the fore, swordsmen behind them and archers to the rear).  IIRC the old AoE2 did this.  It's a lot simpler to control one unit of this type than 3 units of individual types and can be more logical.

Configurations could change during battle -- for example the archers to the front as the enemy closes, and as the enemy nears archers move to the rear (spear/swords were spaced apart enough to allow archer passage) then the spear/swords tighten up their line.

I've played many games like that as well, Nick. Age of Empires 2 was a great game in it's day. Although, I don't think that limited type of system would fit into the turn-based X-Com style combat we're talking about for Elemental. I would hope very much it isn't as limiting as what you describe. While that was indeed a fun system for AoE2, Elemental makes Aoe2 look like "Pong" or "Checkers" when comparing depth and strategies and options like Magic and Monsters.

Sorry. How did he become a group leader of 10? We would maintain all produced group values, just combine those into larger combo groups, all totally disbandable with a click.

I have a question. I'm not particularly well-informed about memory usage. In Total War, there is a limit of 20 units on-screen at once because most people's computers couldn't handle more than that simultaneously, whether because of the memory issues of loading so many units at once, or because of the computing/graphical power needed to animate them all I dunno.

Does Elemental's combat now being turn-based (:() change things up at all? Will some of those hardware limitations be less restrictive now?

Also, memory limitations couldn't possibly be the reason for why we couldn't split up squads in TW during combat. Splitting up a squad of 40 soldiers into two squads of 20 soldiers, to be recombined at the end of combat, shouldn't take up more memory... I think it was just a matter of either keeping things simple, not enough time/resources to implement it, or a limitation of the engine.

In this instance "He" isn't a group leader. He's just one of the ten knights. In that example I was using the game mechanics from the Total War games. If you have a unit of 50 Knights in MedTW:2 on the field, and you zoom in and lick one knight out of the 50, you select all 50 of them because that is a unit. That number doesn't have to be 50 or 10. I want to say you can have up to 99 or 100 knights per-unit in Med2:TW. I don't feel like firing up the game right-this-second to tell you the exact number. Perhaps I didn't explain that too clearly, my bad.

The idea you mention of "disbanding with a click" sounds good though. I can see where that would be very useful.

I can "attempt" to answer this in part, Pigeon. I can't answer entirely as I'm not privy to the memory usage information specific to Elemental. As for the Total War games though...yeah, I've modded the hell out of them and can explain Lots.

Do you remember the Cinematic made with "In Game" footage that starts every time you start a game of "Med2: TW"? You see how it shows Thousands of units on screen at once? They unlocked the "unit-caps" to make that movie. They have at least 30 to 40 units on screen on one side during the siege of the castle. Just look at the amount of cavalry alone. easily a few hundred and that's not counting the "Footmen" and other unit types. Then clearly it shows another army coming to attack the besiegers.

The computers they used "In House" to make that opening video for the game would be considered a "Super-Computer" compared to what the average user has in their own home. Even my Quad Core computer with 6 Gigs of Ram and a $500 graphics card can't push THAT MANY units at once without some kind of lag. 20 Units per side is even HARD CODED into the game, last I knew anyway. Current Mods might have been able to change that, I don't know.

It's Hard Coded because of Memory Limitations exactly like you guessed. They didn't want the average user to have so many units on screen at once that it made the game look like it ran bad or slow. They added the unit cap so that people's machines didn't freeze up or become laggy every time they went into a tactical battle.

I don't know "why" exactly we couldn't split up units mid battle in the TW games. My guess would be simply because they didn't design it to be able to, and not a memory limitation. 40 Soldiers is 40 Soldiers and will use the same amount of memory either way. So they either just didn't think people would want to split a unit like that in the middle of a fight, or it was a limitation of the engine. I don't know that part for sure though, that's just a "educated guess".

Well yeah, but what I was wonder more specifically was whether the 20 unit limit in M2:TW is due to ram, or due to graphics and/or CPU? Or all three? I mean, I can see all of the above being relevant. The more units displayed the more ram required, but also the more intense the CPU and graphics requirements are. But in turn-based combat I'd imagine the CPU and graphics requirements would be lower as not everything is moving at once, nor in real time, nor do real time calculations have to be done to determine damage, etc.

Ahh, I see now. well, in my Hardware experience, I can put a PC together (Desktop, not laptop). I can build it piece by piece and install Every driver for every component and make it run.

In my Software experience, I'm what I would call "decent". I'm no coding god or anything of the such. I don't know enough about what they Hard Coded to tell you EXACTLY where the stress level is. My guess would be that the makers of the Total War series (Creative Assembly) understands that most people who have a PC don't have a Top-Of-The-Line graphics card so that would be the deciding factor.

In later games like "Empire:TW, you can adjust "Units Scale" as a pre-game option. You can have it show a partial amount of the number of men Actually there, or have it show less or more. They go from a scale of "Ultra" to "Small" I think. The game auto-detects the best setting for your system if you let it. I would guess though that Video Memory was the deciding factor for the Unit Cap. I don't know that %100 for a fact though.

Processor power is a big limiting factor as well. Most people I know, including my-self, can't afford to "keep up" every time a faster processor comes on the market. Especially since half the time here lately that means upgrading your Motherboard to fit the new processor and then upgrading your graphics card to fit the new motherboard. It gets really expensive even at whole-sale prices. I'm sure you know that already though.

Since we still don't know how the tactical combat / movement will work this might be invalid, but I can imagine some griefing/exploits that would be possible with this:

Since it is tilebased, you could split up you army into hundreds of single units that basically block all of the tiles between the enemy and your long range units or the border of the battlefield (if there is some kind of retreat-option).

With this, you seriously slow down a bigger army with a smaller amount of units. (If a unit has X actions per turn, and attacking a single unit is the same as attacking an army). If there is a turn limit you could use this to stall until reinforcements arrive, or, if they decide on a "winner takes all"-approach with a turn limit, win battles that you probably should have lost.

This is true...

But,

This has also been done plenty in Real Life. If the play Did make a "Wall" of small units to block somethings way, that something would just kill the troop in his way. By spreading out a unit or armies lines, you make that line Weak. 1 man isn't as strong as a line of men in ranks two files deep.

To me, that sounds like a viable Strategy, even knowing my wall of defending/blocking units will get wiped out.

A single unit might not be as strong, but IF you only get a limited number of attacks per turn and IF you only get a limited number of turns per battle, this could be abused.

See: Advance Wars, were basically the only tactic that was used in multiplayer was walls of the infantry + artillery behind it.

It should take some time to split a group of units into 2 groups. Just put a timer on it...perhaps 5-10 seconds would be ok. This way you couldn't exploit this system. -> Splitting 1 group of units into 100 new groups would take a lot of time.

I would "think" it would make sense to have the unit in questions Whole Turn to be used in doing a "Split Unit" command. Trained troops, under fire, can be trained to do formations. They did it revolutionary times constantly in the middle of a fight. Just look at Empire:TW. It should take at least one turn I think, just on principle.

Here is a question. How did the TW series handle combined troop types, if possible, in relation to Movement speeds? Did the whole group Move at the slowest units pace?

In Elemental, as we have seen, if my SOV is moving at 5 tiles per turn, then I pick up a Hero moving at 2, that stack now Moves at 2 max.

This would seem to present an issue when wanting to use combined troop type groups. Mixing Mounted and Foot Soldiers would seem pointless per say...

This is where the differences between "Units", "Formations", and "Armies" come in. I can explain exactly how this works in the TW game (minus speaking in code even ). Here goes.

For Tactical Battles, when on a battle map, each "unit" had it's own movement speed. Obviously cavalry was much faster then foot units. If moved independently they move at different speeds. If you group selected them WITHOUT being in "Formation" then they would move at their independent movement rates. If they ARE in "Formation" then all the units would slow down to the movement rate of the slowest unit. I.E. cavalry would walk along side the foot-soldiers.

There was a group of pre-set Formations you could use or unlock with research, but the best players custom make their own formations suited to their preferred tactics.

I hope that clears it up for you John. I think you'd really enjoy any of the Total War games. My recommendation would be to get Medieval 2:Total War or Rome: Total War. Empire:TW is good too, but to me the peak in game-play was in Rome and Med2.

For now, since I've picked up Napoleon:TW and haven't even had time to play it yet, I think I'll wait for WW2:TW. If they keep going forward in time they'll get there soon enough.

In closing, to keep this about Elemental, I think this whole "Splitting Units Mid Battle" could be really handy and add a lot of "possible depth" to even turn based combat, with just the addition of one little option. Just by implementing it you open up the door to a lot of deep strategic planning during combat. It's true it's not a huge issue if it's not there. As we've seen almost no game allows this because they just don't think to add it I guess. With all the other options and set-ups and combinations of armies, something as simple as a mechanic like this can be easily over-looked.

Agreed.