Battalians

[Wesley]

If you're going to produce locked battalions from the barracks etc to reduce lag then embedding a priest, Archer or champion in the battalion is possible. 

For a basic battalions take your spear men (Or what ever) into blender clone them 10 times in two rows of five. Run the animation to check they look right. No clipping allowed. Add some loiter changes to one of the clones to add interest. 

Add a single hit box/ bounding box and center of rotation. Export as a new unit. Add a single damage bar. If it falls to 10% have that group unit despawn and spawn 3 or four lone spearmen. Who knows? They may still win. (Who are we kidding!)

For a mixed unit of melee/ ranged formations. Clone a row of guys with shields or pikes and a row of guys with ranged weapons behind them. Off set them so they are not shooting their shield bearer in the back of the head. Add the bounding box, hit box etc. 

For a self healing unit add a priest to the back row and require the temple as the prerequisite for the formation. When destroyed the priest is one of the surviving single units.  

I can think of a few other formation combinations but you get the idea. 
Instead of players and AI spamming an ant train of hundreds of single units it's ten compound units (same total cost) with more hits and damage or number of attacks. Some being elites with healers in them. 
 

For facing add a second hit box offset to the rear so melee units attacking from the front don't "reach it" and make that immune to ranged weapons. A flanking melee unit will be in hit box to hit box contact with the back box and that triggers extra damage and other responses. I.e. The battalion might take extra damage. and spawn three or four individual units fighting for their lives in the back. 
 

====================================================

Remember I can't see or read code so while I can see how to do it I can't code it.  Don't all shoot me at once. 

Edited March 13, 2017 by Wesley

[Wesley]

I can see a problem with group units on some terrain where the center unit is on the terrain but the guys on the ends are clipping into it or into trees but that can be fixed by jacking them up a little and adding a ground plain of dust, foot prints, etc under them. Draw always above the ground plane rule. In some cases that will look a little like a flying carpet but who cares. Getting the bounding box right will matter for tree clipping. 

Edited March 13, 2017 by Wesley

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

A battalion will actually still have individual entities within it, but they are just locked with pathfinding and other features together. Soldier within the formation can still path around rocks and stuff.