Aussie_Lurker said:
At the least though, stack combat WILL be completely automated-which is a great thing.
But how this automation is good thing?
I mean if you still make a stack of doom an example AI doesn't know how to handle such thing (which problem Commander Bello adresses little) it will still go to the point that you gather around strong units and form stack of doom.
I think it should be players decisions to choose with what units to attack (if it's not simultaneous stack attack) because otherwise we are lacking strategic options or are planning that idiots can win the battle just because they have large and powerful stack of doom? And if in attack AI (again if it cannot handle the concept) chooses wrong units to the attack it will cause massive disturbance to the human player rather than able to pick units to attack himself.
The question of course is that whether put more weight on the issue of constructing an army in opposed to be using the army in actual chains of battle.
I think the whole point of getting promotions and different bonuses to the unit is that player have to decide which bonuses to pick and then choose how to use them in the best possible way whether it's single attack or stack attack and so emphasize the whole idea of "combined arms"-concept along with whether to spread units or not (possible timing is the key => first go move along through roads closer, spread your units so artillery won't hurt you badly, send some forces to attack so artillery units will attack them, join the forces and make stack attack to actual target tile example to a city)
I could go as far that during opponent turns while they are attacking your troops the human player could pick with which units in that stack to defend. It would offer much more challenge than now. Especially if it would offer such option that defending with same unit in the same turn would give that unit slight penalty a defending again (they are fatigued) or facing attacks from different tiles than last one (flanking) would also give penalty, it would create a good challenge for human player (Player have to choose whether use the elite powerful unit that gets penalty or use fresh unit that is weaker in overall but can be possible be sacrificed so the elite unit will survive)
What I think is there lies a huge problem if whole point of the current game system is just take all kinds of units, try to keep them alive long time and gather promotions and then just go on fury.
I would rather see more tactical choices (and more strategical realistic rules affecting them) rather than "build you army" and win type of thing. Which in fact in my opinion is very much the same thing as the stack of doom, only difference being that the stack of doom was made from same kind of units and in the current system it would be done from different flavours of units. But it's still the same thing.
One of the options of course would be limit the amount of units able to be in the same tile example to 3. This would be actually quite realistic in a way that even though units in real world could be in amount of terrain single tile represents in a game they still would have hard time attacking and defending even in the real world as they are preventing each other from free and efficient movement (traffic). In cities there could be of course more than 3 units and possible this could be way to give extra value to things like fortresses, castles and even military leaders that could give units the ability to have more than the restricted amount of units in same tile by "organising" them. There could be such promotion possibility. Because of experience and training (drills) the forces could be in the same tile as they would have knowledge how to move without creating traffic jam.
But there are many things we don't know about current system and I was surprised that they took "promotions" into the game maybe there are more surprises to follow.
Edit: Some editing
