He's really clueless, it happens a lot with veterans in RTS games who are newbies in 0 AD.   Many things in 0AD are not intuitive. And they are very inconsistent.

[h1]Hybrid Total War + Rise and Fall Combat System[/h1]   I have been thinking about a possible hybrid system combining some of the large-scale control of Rise and Fall: Civilizations at War with the individual soldier behavior seen in Total War.   The main idea would be to separate strategic control, formation control, and individual combat.   [h2]1. Hierarchy[/h2]   A possible hierarchy could be:   ARMY | +-- BATTALION | | | +-- UNIT | | | +-- SOLDIERS | +-- BATTALION | +-- UNITS   The player would primarily control battalions or units, while the individual soldiers would remain autonomous enough to handle local movement and combat.   [h2]2. Movement and Pathfinding[/h2]   Instead of every soldier independently calculating a complete path, the formation could have a main path and each soldier would try to maintain a relative position inside the formation.   For example:   Formation path: A ---- B ---- C ---- D      |    +-- individual soldiers maintain formation positions     This could potentially reduce the amount of expensive pathfinding required when moving large armies.   [h2]3. Combat[/h2]   When two formations engage, the game could first determine the front/contact area between them.   For example:   ROMANS ████████████ ████████████ ████████████     ⚔   ████████████ ████████████ ████████████ ENEMY   The unit would have a general combat target, while soldiers in the contact area would look for appropriate nearby enemies.   This would allow the battle to look like individual soldiers fighting individually without requiring every soldier to make high-level strategic decisions.   [h2]4. Individual Combat[/h2]   Each soldier could still have:   []Individual position []Health []Target []Attack behavior []Animation []Local movement Collision avoidance   However, the UnitAI would remain responsible for the higher-level behavior:   []Attack []Advance []Hold position []Retreat []Pursue []Change target Change formation   The soldiers would execute those orders locally.   [h2]5. Casualties and Formation Deformation[/h2]   When soldiers die, the formation should not instantly rebuild itself into a perfect rectangle.   Instead, gaps could appear naturally:   ████████████ ████X███████ ████████████   Nearby soldiers could gradually adjust their positions, while rear ranks could move forward when space becomes available.   This would preserve the visual feeling of a large group of individual soldiers while keeping the formation as the main organizational structure.   [h2]6. Possible 0 A.D. Architecture[/h2]   Conceptually, this could fit into a hierarchy such as:   Army / Battalion | v FormationController | v UnitAI | v Individual soldier behavior | v Pathfinding / local movement   The important point would be to avoid making every soldier behave like a completely independent strategic agent.   Instead:   Army/Battalion: high-level orders   Formation: positioning and collective movement   UnitAI: unit-level behavior and combat state   Soldier: local movement and individual combat   [h2]7. Why this could be interesting[/h2]   This could potentially provide the visual and tactical feeling of Total War while retaining the faster group-level control of Rise and Fall.   It could also be interesting from a performance perspective.   Instead of:   1000 soldiers x 1000 independent high-level decisions x 1000 independent pathfinding operations   the system could operate more like:   1 army order | 10 formations | 100 unit-level decisions | 1000 individual combat/movement behaviors   The individual soldiers would still be visible and fight individually, but the expensive high-level decisions would be concentrated at the formation and unit levels.   I think the interesting question for 0 A.D. is not necessarily how to create a completely new "battalion entity", but whether the existing FormationController, UnitAI and pathfinding systems could eventually support this kind of hierarchical control.   This could give large armies a much stronger sense of organization without removing individual soldiers from the battlefield.   ##### This is an alternative idea. I have other ideas for the organization; this would only work in battle formation. ####  

His Spanish commentary is pretty fun. He constantly calls the so-called champion units "elite units", as they should be more accurately renamed. He likes the graphics and historical accuracy, and encounters the issues of lack of hotkeys to build and, often and annoyingly, units walking in column formation when not ordered to. There are some not that intuitive things he doesn't realise, like Docks being dropsites, dropping resources before fighting, or how to capture.   Comments showing yet again what people usually ask for: -"You know what I've always wanted from any RTS is the ability to build roads; that makes building cities more satisfying". -"There's a game that adds a lot of versatility to the game (even more) called Delenda Est. It introduces slave mechanics, new crops, money as an extra resource, prestige (which includes new sculptures and new recruitment systems)... I highly recommend it for greater replayability". -"One of the things that bothers me about this game is that soldiers start working when you're in the enemy base simply because you clicked the wrong tree. Also, that there are no default hotkeys or that they can be configured in the menu like in Age of Empires. And that some things are very simple or straightforward in terms of depth, but I think we already have that in Age". -"The only thing I find lacking about Age of Empires games is that they ignore logistics as a historically fundamental military concept. It would be awesome if they nerfed units when you move them away from urban centers, and allowed you to build roads or logistics nodes to compensate, or something like that. Penalties based on terrain type would be cool too". -"It's improved a lot. I played it about a year ago and it was still lacking, but now it's almost completely polished and super playable". -"The fact that the scale of the characters and buildings is in proportion, that alone convinced me". Indeed, same with ships

For a DE style wonder one of the palaces of the Neapolis could sort of potray a transition to a different cultural stage  (which is interesting if the wonder is supposed to unlock phase IV). I think those towns could at least be used for buildings like walls and towers if the Scythians have them (IMO nomad civs could still have access to defensive buildings if they used them, but perhaps later ingame and only through a technology)

It is kind of the case depending on how you look at it :  We could say that units aren't actually pushed, they just look at every neighbor that look too close to them, then they move away from them. Consuming all forces they calculated, tells them where they have to go for this turn. So it's them actually moving away.. Well since all that is a bit some abstraction of physical events probably there are as many way to phrase it as you want.  Edit : I meant is that the pushing range is already some kind of way to communicate to units to move away. But maybe if you wanted to add one that apply only to allies but further then the normal push one, it could be a good idea for example for rams where you want them to push allies but enemy can still block the way. It's a good idea. Edit 2: Now I have regret dropping my initial approach about a forward area in front of units used for charging, that would be maybe a few lines of codes to just make it possible to apply to allies only... I'm glad for the involvement, it shows that this is an interesting topic and that many things will sprout out of it.  In fact, a big highlight of this project is that it will be easy, even from a mod, to plug in forces into UnitMotion. Examples : weather, spells (attractions, repulsion)...