C14

The game is so detailed that you can see individual spears of spear-throwers hit and miss and do damage accordingly and then you want to hard-code the benefit of formations with speed and armor bonuses? I think this is the wrong way and the benefit of formations should come out as emergent feature from the basic rules of the game. As for the speed issue: I think its perfectly realistic that formations move slower than individuals and not a problem gameplay-wise. When moving units to the enemy, units should march in a loosely coupled formation more like a snake than a fixed column. The effect on speed would then be negligible. When really attacking the enemy, the speed is not very important anymore and it even adds strategic depth not to be able to change the formation in a matter of seconds because one hat to think a little before attacking. The benefit of formations in real world comes from covered flanks and higher morale if you have your own troops around you. I think the first point can be perfectly simulated by lowering armor/guard by quite some amount for every but the first attacker or making it direction dependent. This would make it important that units don't get encircled and only face a single enemy at a time. (of course, this works only if units have a collision box / unit stacking is not allowed) If you merely give bonuses according to in which formation the group is, you are missing a lot of emergent behavior, like what do you do when the formation is starting to break up because a part was destroyed? Who gets the bonus now?

Hello, I've tested this game yesterday when I saw it on sourceforge. Great work, congratulations! Beautiful graphics, epic music and good sound! Here are some suggestions from my side: - Forum: You should have different categories (subforums or threads) for suggestions here in this forum such as content, user interface, graphics, AI and so on since a single thread with 95 pages is too hard to read. - User Interface: It would be great to have some of the user interface features that spring / supreme commander have and that make the overview over the game in these games so great: - Zoom: Apart from the strategic zoom with units turning into strategic icons which perhaps does not fit in the age of empires style, it would be good if one could zoom out a litte bit more, but if the camera angle increases as you zoom out, i.e. the view turns to a more top-down view for a better overview. - Command Queue: The waypoints of units should be shown visually when pressing shift or some other command modifier key. The individual waypoints should be deletable and draggable. Also, it should be possible to queue up attack commands (didn't work for me) and build commands. - Patrol - Content: - When moving in formation, and changing formation/direction, some units move much faster to get to their new position in the formation. However, it seems like there is no way to order units to move that fast on their own. I don't think you should use this 'speed hack' for keeping up formations but rather slow the other units down.