Sounds a great way to have regular units have experience and still be able to merge stacks.

Best regards,
Steven.

Not yet.

If groups worked normally, it would be basically impossible for this to have balance issues.

(and, at face value this assumes same-template soldiers)

See not sure I see it as bad as you.. because we all have same option to merge... so we all could create equally powerful units for weaker ones..seems fairly balanced to me in that respect..

however I do see your point, and I do like the three 5/2 soldiers vs 15/6 soldier as a better representation of whats happening.

dude. Three 5/2 soldiers should always be three 5/2 soldiers. Not some giant 15/6 soldier.

This is true, and giving merged soldiers some small bonus due to the "coordination" of working together as a unit would be good. But turning three 5/2s with 10 hp each into a single vastly superior ubersoldier, 15/6 with 30 hp, goes beyond any believable "coordination" bonus. Basically you pile enough guys with spears together and you get a dragon, i.e. a single unit with lethality and survivability that no regular* human could ever achieve, they don't behave at all like a bunch of guys doing individual damage that can be killed individually.

Edit: Not that I'm against merging units, this should definitely be in, UI permitting. Just that I disagree with the way any party/squadron/etc of soldiers functions, as discussed in this thread.

*Obviously sovereigns and champions are a different story, but remember here we're talking about peasants pulled from the general population and then given some equipment and training, not heroes or magic users.

There are alternatives ways to make parties squads and platoons worthwhile other than additiuve stat mashing.

1. Squad Equipment
2. Squad special attacks
3. Commanding Officers

Squad Equipment represents all the cool weapons and gear that an army uses that no individual solider could manage.  For Example:

• Ballistas, catapults and trebuchets for powerful long range attacks
• Wagons for increased strategic map movement
• Banners for increased morale or a magical bonus to any stat
• Wild pet monsters or animals like bears or trolls (like the troll that the orcs in Moria attackd the Fellowship with in LOTR!)

Squad Special Attacks- all the interesting alternative attack styles that we want armies to have to make tactical combat actually be tactical.  These have been detailed in other threads so I wont list them hear but would include things like, charge, sunder, cleave, knockback, whirlwind, shield wall, etc etc.

Generals - I am a bit fuzzy on how to implement this gameplay wise but I think armies should have Generals, squads should have Lieutenants etc.  The type of commanding officer you attach to a squad could give it special attacks or a passive bonus or something.

These do not need to be combined.  It is perfectly fine to have a squad "lose" individual models as it takes damage, but to automatically regain those models when it heals back to full strength.  This is the design I would favor.

So in once sense the hp pool is shared (the unit will heal back to full strength and numbers as long as it has even one hp left) but in another it is not shared.

We also don't need to change the movement/combat speed or anything like that; we don't need to model the individual "attacks" separately.

Its just, when a unit with 3 guys and attack 5 makes a single attack against an enemy, the game processes this as 3 separate attacks of strength each against the entire defense value of the defender.

All from a single right-click attack command.

[Another advantage of this; by a central limit theorem, the distribution of the result of 3 attacks of 1-5 will be much more weighted towards the mean than will the result of a single attack of 1-15.
So adopting this kind of system will also help make combat results more predictable.]