You can see how "solid effect" of "stiffness" impact the boats in the video. You get super cool effects when there are a few ones, but a lot of them result in them taking a lot of time to settle. It's fine for boats as you rarely think of crowds of boats, and I just made a scene for this in the video to show that it works, and still look good for them. But if you have a crowd of infantry constantly wiggling and taking forever to settle, this would look very bad. Hence the spring.   Inertia and pushing aren't the same thing. But for navigating on open terrain, this wouldn't change much. However if you try to funnel "solid" physical bodies into a choke-point, they obviously take a while more to achieve the same movement. So if ever we wanted to make cavalry "solid bodies", with this PR it's only just one tweak in their template. But because big crowds of them cost more to simulate and that moving them around take longer if they are in high number, it should be accompanied by an increase of cost/population for example. The pros are that they will have much more realistic charge effects, like you see with elephants, but cavalry have less contact area and are moving much faster, the physic outcome would be different too (like a cavalry can trow fewer infantry units away but at higher velocity). So this is just a balancing change, out of scope. Even without proper "charge", -so just using the old pushing  pretty much as it was, the inertia improves physics for cavalry fighting at no additional cost. The cavalry can push away other spread units thanks to it's superior weight, and also push its target by a little - even if ideally it would be more, and the cavalry would be smart enough to take more advantage of it instead of stopping once in front of it's target. Screencast from 2026-09-22 18-44-41.webm  

0 A.D. 2026-09-22 22-30-22 - Trim.mp4    

Thanks for being upfront, that's useful context. I think the difference between us is one line: you make the civs differ in the data (units, techs) and the AI exploits it; I'm trying to make Petra play the vanilla civs differently, on the data everyone has. Both are valid, and if things like "charge" land in the base game they'll help my side too.  The whole idea rests on a table like this:

Appreciate you response @josue valencia. Juist so we are clear, I know very little about what I'm doing, AI is doing most of it for me I basically send replays/interesting log and send to chatGPT and then tell it what i see think should be improved and it writes the changes. Yes the AI is tied to Classical Warfare, so you would have to download the AI only and probably recode some of it. However, I think we are trying to be similar in ways that you might not be aware of.  In general we changed CWA so that the Civs were a little more different and represented their heroes/styles better.  For example greek hoplites are a little stronger than most spearman and the first melee attack tech is aviabile in p1 for greek city states.  So in the p1 rush for Greeks the AI is supposed to try and get that attack to give it an advantage.  There are still llots of little things that need cleaning up.  ANd I continue to work on it daily.  Would be great to bounce ideas off someone else, but yes I realize it is mainly tied into the changes we made to CWA and some, if not a lot of people may not want that.  Although some of those changes will probably be coming to newer versions of the base game, like "charge" type behavior and other things I think.

Hardly , just pointing out history, realism, and possible improvements, more so considering many have stated a preference for tactics and formations becoming more relevant, which units not going through each other would automatically provide, in good part   Sure, but it's a theory/practise issue. Shouldn't increasing the radial repulsion force at a given distance (in physical terms, the elastic constant k, or stiffness) of land units achieve a more "solid" effect? Would this be costlier to simulate? I wonder how your cavalry turning would look in that case, for example.