upgrading existing units

I agree.  I think Fallen Enchantress should allow upgradeable troops, even though War of Magic hasn't so far.

Best regards,
Steven.

i would love both maybe in 1.3? /crosses fingers

Would you be willing to pay the cost for each upgrade? I don't think that you could expect that all 50 of your spearmen would be upgraded just because you design a new upgrade. I could design my spearman with magic armor and throw in a mount which would likely cause a bit of an imbalance in the game. Maybe if your upgrades were limited by class and level then it would be practical but you would still have to pay a cost per unit. I would love to save the time it takes to build a new upgraded unit but as they say time is money.

by turn 100 or more you might have enough resources to actually afford the upgrades. Depends though... how many do you actually build? I usually only build one unit of each troop I make. I don't make any more troops then I have to unless I am at war and need more troops to defend my settlements.

i raise this topic almost every month, see here

https://forums.elementalgame.com/403887

it's reaching the point now where i'm starting to suspect some sort of minor conspiracy, or that stardock has something philosophically against upgrading units, since the feature never got (properly) implemented in galactic civilizations 2 either.

This topic and been raised multiple times by multiple people (including myself). It is continuously falling of deaf ears it would seem...

that or it has reached the ears of the devs but they put that on the to do list and it's quite far down on it. Developers do read the threads you know just sometimes they keep quiet and not comment.

i am making about 150 $ per turn as of now and usually have around 20000 in the treasury so i could definitely afford it. i would also like to see the ability to form teams and squads with old individual soldiers as well. its not like its impossible to learn to work in a unit of 3 men or 6 or 12 lol. it would save me a lot of time.

I'd love to form teams/units with individuals that I first built in the beginning of the first turns. Among the idea as well as being able to upgrade them to better improved and better equipped. It's just common sense, besides the nagging feeling not wanting to scrap units that have experience.

I vote to keep it simple and have a system that makes the city you disband in better at training troops for a time (pool some percent of XP, and reduce pool by some amount each turn till it returns to zero).

the mechanisms for upgrading troops is the complexity in this case and the simplest way would be for troops once in a city to have an upgrade command appear.

once selected the appropriate resources to create the extra equipment that the soldier does not already have should be deducted from the stores and the time to create the new equipment should be added to the unit queue. once all of the equipment to upgrade the unit has been created the unit should be upgraded.

as an additional optional the units obselete equipment should go into starage in the city armoury and be automatically used whenever the city trains someone to use that type of equipment deducting the cost of the equipment from the unit cost.

heroes should not be able to use said equipment.

An upgrade command is a good idea if you keep it simple. Keep the upgrade within the confines of your newly designed spearman or other unit type. When you suggest putting old equipment back in storage then you are really talking about a shop where you buy and sell equipment. I think others have suggested just allowing all units be able to go to a shop or different shops for regular units. You could expand the inventory for different unit types such as spears that add fire damage.

One thing that seems rather unique to this game is the ability to design your upgraded units. I don't recall anything like that in MOM or AOW. I love this design feature and it serves as a way to upgrade units. Maybe you could have the best of both worlds but how much this game engine can handle is questionable.

I totally agree that we should be able to upgrade units.  Now, you can keep it simple and do as suggested above (within city, cost resources required) and no recouping of obsolete equipment.  I would add to that that it does take time to re-equip and re-train.  In addition, your experience is not quite the same anymore (need to get use to new equipment), so maybe loose 10-20% of experience?

For formation of squads.  You just need to select 4/8/16 of the SAME type and if you have the proper tech it shows the 'Group' function.  To reduce complexity of adding 4/8/16 units with different level of XP, you just add the individual XP up and divid by number of unit within group and than apply the 10-20% loss (maybe even more for groups).    It would then just need X turn to complete (no need for extra resources as existing bodies and equipment) and the unit is not available to defend (disapear from map).