[Idea] Unit Temperament & Fire Control / Proximity

So the friendly-fire and Micro threads got me thinking. I am pretty sure I heard the DEV's mention your usual unit controls such as "Stop, Evade, Roam" etc. I've always enjoyed these controls to let you finesse more out of your units.

There seems to be some debate about Friendly-Fire and while most seem to support FF by default (of which I agree) Perhaps to a degree this can be a controlled by the Unit Temperaments and Fire Control. I feel that Temperament and Fire-Control are two different things really, but for the sake of simplicity perhaps we could combine them into a few options.

Say you have three settings,

Restrained: Units would exercise strong fire-control with friendly units nearby and tend to adopt a opportunistic approach to firing on the enemy while avoiding taking large damage and mostly engage inferior enemy's solo or armies with backup nearby.
Natural/Passive: Standard setting, Units half some regard for self preservation but will also engage the enemy, exhibits desire to damage/engage the enemy equally even if some friendly units would be affected by misses/AOE.
Aggressive: Very aggressive stance will seek out and engage with little backup, very little regard for self preservation or friendly fire. Will fire with maximum damage always regardless of weapon type or friendly proximity. Most useful on base invasion, unit hunting or when out-numbered.


This is a over simplification of course, but I am imagining some very exciting possibilities. Say imagine two armies passing nearby (say edge of line of sight) in formations. If both armies had been set to Passive, there would be lots of cheap-shots and some rockets/artillery, but by and large the armies would have minimal engagement and continue to they're location goals.

If both armies had been set to aggressive, nearly all units would aggressive engage and both armies very likely would be pulled into a massive battle.

If one army was set to aggressive and one was set to restrained, you would see massive formation breaks and units returning fire but generally avoiding the aggressive incoming forces.

Think of the game-play mechanics this could add. It could allow you to preserve a large amount of your forces while moving through enemy Territory or during a unexpected meeting with the enemy. It could allow you to 'drag' and potentially use aggressive enemy units to your advantage by baiting them into ambushes etc.

It could create wide range of possibilities that could deepen game-play, However for the casual player the standard setting would be a proper balance and not needing attention.

I imagine, Intelligent battles, with large enemy units, or strong enemy patrols attacking like sharks, and weaker/numerous smaller units defending themselves but swirling out of the way like large schools of small fish.

*EDIT: After thinking about this for a while, perhaps these settings would not require a substantial amount of AI training or immense coding. Perhaps they could simply be switches that trigger a different set of ratios in the numbers from the same AI training results. This could help keep the code tighter maybe?