Standard Military Hierarchy and Formations.

Really? Mine always shove up to the front eventually:

The commanders are sentient, but the units are just mindless killing machines that do what they're told and nothing else.

A shark is also a mindless killing machine for the most part, but it still exhibits self preservation. Note I am talking about things like units automatically breaking close formation if they are under air attack, or closing in when faced with a large land assualt. Not anything like morale or auto-retreat system, which I agree, doesn't have much place in a game like this.

I would also like to note, that WW2 combat still used all the basic formations and concepts of 18th century combat, just with tanks, planes and machine guns added on. The formations are a lot more spread out, but the US, German, and Japanese still used massed attacks and line formations to control troop dispositions on the front lines. For example: The beachhead at Iwo was an example of a massed infantry assault supported by naval artillery, which managed to pierce the machine gun laden beaches right up into the center of the island. Generals may be in the habit of fighting the last war, but thats mostly because the next war will usually strongly resemble the last one, with some changes due to the progress of technology and the disrupting effect is has on current strategies.

Major shifts, like the recent shift to asymmetrical warfare and counterterrorism, are rare, and do not happen every time there is a new war. Indeed, the last major shift before this one, was the transition to and away from trench warfare. Before that it was the shift from pike formations to musket formations which was 400 years and several dozen wars prior to that. So fighting the last war is actually highly rational behavior on the part of war planners, and the ones who do it best while adapting to new circumstances are the ones who tend to win.

No it isn't. A shark is a predator, trust me I'm Australian. I punch sharks in the face every other day. I know sharks.

Good ol' Max Brooks knows where it's at.

Missing the point. Furthermore, you are using the wrong definition of "mindless". In the context I used it in, it means "without sapience and sentience".

That's nice and all but these robots don't really have anything else either.

Insects show self preservation behavior, and the behavior of the bots in game is as least as complex as insect behavior.

Stop comparing the biological results of natural selection to droids specifically designed and built for one sole purpose.

Do you think that natural selection and biology only apply to carbon based life forms? Designed things undergo natural selection, the designs better fit for their purposes are chosen over less fit designs. Note that artificial selection is a form of natural selection, so that argument doesn't work either. I mean, the premise of the game is "Post humanity robot armies struggle for survival." That sounds like a veritable laboratory of natural and artificial selection to me. I remember when air turrets that could hit ground based units were selected out of the robot pool.

The premise is actually "robots kill each other with what they have". Trust me when I say you do not want to start questioning the logic in the game.

Honestly, if we want to discuss this tangent further, we should do the rest of it in private, I created this thread for a discussion of a desired feature/possible mod, and I would like to focus on that.