Let's talk about unit formations!

Formations, a great feature yet can be... Painful for the moment. There are a couple changes I'd like see made to fomations, there are three I know of now.

1: Formations should be formed as units are walking/moving either that or have an option. This is especially needed for bombers/fighters or orbital transports.

2: Units should be spaced out a bit more, this is actually something that would make formations less useful but in doing so it'd help balance the issue of death balls. It doesn't need to be much, just realistically enough.

3: A dedicated custom formation tool, we need the old one back at the very least. If it were a birthday present, I'd ask for a spring-esque custom formation tool.

Thoughts? Any more requests for changes/iterations on formations?

Formations don't seem to hold when giving units an attack move. Having this toggle-able would be nice.

there is a mod which turns the old tool back on I believe...

There is, but I believe it should be a part of vanilla. Not to mention I'd still much prefer something similar to what spring does with custom formations.

SupCom formation move all the way.

Yeah some kind of formation function is a must. I hate it when my dox clump together basically acting as a nice target for the enemy's com ubercannon . Always have to manually assign different groups and manage them separately.

I've said this before: formation need at least have a maximum width. Right now they are a rectangle: the more units u put in the formation the rectangle grows proportionally. Problem is most unit in the back are out of range when the engagements begin and take too much time to get where the are needed. Formations need a maximum width so that the rectangle only grows in length once that width is reached, making sure u have maximum firepower when its most needed.

Good players will move front units back;back units up, to gain more oommff out of available units unless you code in a role that doesn't allow me to do this, I don't care how you manipulate formations, the player that uses formations will lose to the player that micro.

This is but the simplest of abusing formations micro.

A formation function/tool would be awesome to have. A lack of a tool like that for me usually ends up with my cluster of units creating the, as I like the call it, "Brittle Lance": When units form a long line which basically has units come up and die in single file; especially with dox. I'm sure all of you have experienced this before where the units just aren't at the front and instead decide to get in line.

-Nothing wrong with disciplining the units, but perhaps they were disciplined to stay in line a bit too much.
@squishypon3 I agree, the spring custom formations was one greatest things I had my the opportunity to lay my hands upon. The diversity those formations alone gave was awesome.

1) units already do this. Their turn rates and movement speeds etc are scaled down as they try to move in formation with other selected units in a specific radius. I'm pretty sure for example the flock behaviour is actually half the problem with air units taking forever to respond to move orders because they are all synchronising with each other first (turn rate).

2) Disagree. Default formation spacing should be conservative/natural to maximise player control - no arbitrary unit cushioning and spacing. I can certainly space my units out manually if that's what i want, but not the other way around. It's pretty dumb that the player needs to use assist commands to get proper unit spacings

If clumped units are too strong, then you have a unit interaction problem or an economic pacing/snowballing problem e.g. lack of aoe counters.

I just want to see how well Roman formations and tactics work with tanks and mechanical men.