One of the largest existing franchises in RTS today is Total War. It operates on a similar scale to Planetary Annihilation. When skirmishes begin, individuals number into the hundreds, as will armies in PA. However, Total War makes a very profound gameplay assumption: Individuals should act cohesively as a unit, these units should be demarcated by type, and population should be both uniform and even much like real military units. Supreme Commander 2 made the one-third step, allowing the player to simply give an order to any number of selected units to automatically group them, with an icon and a population number, without consuming a 1-9 hotkey grouping. I'd like to see the two-thirds step from PA. Individual units should obviously be controllable as they are now, large units selections continue to work as-is, etc. What I'm proposing is a new option that would allow the UI to take a factory pumping out a specific unit type and automatically group the produced units into uniform groups (Of 10, 20, 25? Should be discussed.) that can be ordered as in Total War or as with those implied SupCom2 groups. Those groups will have single consolidated icons, will operate with flow-fields as in SupCom2 (Mavor and co are still working on flow-field groups, right?), and individual units will be easily separable. As a personal qualifier, I've found that having mixed-unit groups by pooling a variety of units from different factories in TA, SupCom, and SupCom2 leads to me taking this mega-group and attack-moving around the map. It's dumb and makes me feel like I'm not playing the game to its fullest. I feel like demarcating groups as in Total War would allow players like me to much more smartly take advantage of unit types that are being produced en masse, and maneuver them using actual strategic thinking.
