A somewhat cool feature would be to give small groups (Solo/Party) the ability to enter borders without right of passage the same way explorers and kayaks can. This would represent a weak invasion army and would mostly be used for reconnaissance and as an ineffective way of getting an army through a foreign border.
I can see one way to achieve this. We'd need a 'smuggler' unit that can load land units that have very small cargo volumes. The smuggler himself would be a hidden nationality unit. The only problem with this is the same problem I was presented when I suggested rogues be able to develop this type of ability so they could sneak out captives - the AI would be horrifyingly complex to develop for it. So perhaps eventually I can address this but it won't be soon.
Additionally, there could be a small percentage for the units to be kicked outside the border every turn for trespassing without consent, plus some other penalty for getting caught (relation penalty?).
Alternatively they could be turned into hidden units that get kicked out if seen by a unit that can see camouflaged units like trained dogs but not rouges and ambushers (they would rather kill their prey).
They should also not get kicked outside borders if war erupts as they are there without the enemies knowledge.
These are similar functions to what I'm going to need to develop for Law Enforcement vs Criminals (hiding in the city). It's not terribly difficult but it would be a very exact type of rule set that may not be more generically useful in the game so it's going to take a bit of a low priority for now. At the moment, similar things apply to spies and I'll leave it to them for the time being. After the combat mod main body is complete I had some plans to deepen espionage issues and maybe some of these ideas could be implemented there.
My suggestion for group volume names (isn't 10 enough, there's really no need for a number of how many there are in each volume)
1 - Few . . . . . . | Solo - 1
2 - Several . . . . | Team - 2
3 - Pack . . . . . . | Squad - 3
4 - Lots . . . . . . . | platoon - 4
5 - Crowd . . . . . . | Company - 5
6 - Horde . . . . . . . | Battalion - 6
7 - Throng . . . . . . . | Brigade - 7
8 - Swarm . . . . . . . . | Division - 8
9 - Multitude . . . . . . .| Corps/Army - 9
10 - Legions . . . . . . . . | Legions/Theater - 10
Column 1 is for those inclined to ambiguous magnitude words and the second column for those who like army expressions. Hope it helps in some ways TB.
I decided on names quickly but if the rest of the team agrees they need to be adjusted I'm not fixed on anything in particular. I wanted to give the numbers so that we had a clear concept of what was being represented even if it was somewhat fuzzy.
Found a bug: If you perform a merge while having all three units selected as a group you can effectively duplicate units. I made 3 squads turn into 9 squads in as little as 5 minutes doing this (took me some time to figure out what made it happen).
There is a trick to it though, First off you must select them all, lets call them unit 1,2 and 3. Then you initiate the merge and when prompted about who to merge unit 1 with (it chooses the one with it's picture furthest to the left over the unit action panel as the one to merge with first), the first choice doesn't matter but on the second one you can choose to merge him with himself (unit 1 merges with [2 || 3] && 1). After that, the third unit that never got involved in the merge, prompts you who to merge him with but as there is only one choice (the result from the last merge) the process cancels after the first choice. The third unit and the merge of the two other units stands there in the stack that used to be three units big.
This happened to me the first time I tried the merging function so I would say it's a critical bug.
The thought occurred to me that there could be some funny processing if a group of units was sent to merge at once. I'm not sure how to stop this from being possible... I'll have to ask AIAndy or Koshling on that one I think... or really search the code to see how that can be impaired from being done.
The size up and down promotion need some mainstreaming, they should be called "Size Up I, II .. etc." and "Size Down I, II .. etc." This way the hover over panel can tell you that they give/take 20%/40%/60% strength and the same for the other modifiers. I realize this might not be easy as they also have to contain combat class tag removal/adding, but could the combat tag be handled outside the promotion in any way. A tag iteration script that is called when the unit gets the promotion that make the correct tag modification based on what tag the unit had.
This is not so simple as it may seem. Trust me... I agree this would be nicer but would be hellishly complex to achieve. It's already complex enough that trying to explain how it currently works is enough to split my skull. Taking it to this next level would finish the job and I'd be in the mental hospital. In a sense, they already are 'mainstreamed' as the suggestion you have has some hard to rationalize logical problems. The basis of this added complexity stems from needing to maintain continuity when units change type and the fact that the size is not derived from a tracked level on the unit itself (though that too IS tracked for some purposes and checks) but rather comes from a mechanism that replaces the unitcombat. The size is subservient to the unitcombat, not the unitcombat subservient to the size. Wrap your head around that and you may see why you can't just have Size Up I, II, III. Additionally, there's good reason to make the size subservient to the unitcombat rather than the other way around. Anyhow... this is the long answer way to say...
Sorry man... it'd take an entire restructuring of the logic from the ground up to achieve what you've suggested there and would entail other very deep consequences even if it was completely restructured so that it could work this way.
I don't like that smaller groups heal faster, this somewhat destroys the purpose of terrain damage as you can explore the poles and deserts with any units without the terrain promotions, it removes natural barriers and the usefulness of said promotions.
hmm... interesting. You do realize units don't heal if they have moved in a round right? (It DOES still work this way doesn't it?) So they still have to stop moving and heal before they die. However, the percentage of damage on those SHOULD probably be adjusted by size factor. Still, if your units are so split up you can heal faster than the damage then surely they're in grave danger of other polar threats aren't they?
I also think that the damage should increase with greater intensity zones like 15% in tundra, 20% in permafrost and 25% in ice etc... That could balance that factor out a bit more for those who do use terrain damage.
