Unit Formations

If you're surrounded like that, you're already in a bit of a mess, and a better solution would be to sound the retreat, with tanks leading to clear a path, arty/aa next, and tanks covering the rear. In any case, it's still more effective to use lines (perhaps a wedge) for the retreat formation, as you'll most effectively use your firepower.

But if, for some reason, you did need a square/circle formation, the custom formation system still makes it relatively trivial to implement. (One can even customize the unit positioning manually, if desired, by drawing 2 separate formations for the 2 types of units.)

Unless for example I wanted to punch a hole through a defensive line. In which case, protection on multiple sides may be required. Box is a strong formation for laying seige to defences or invading an base to take out a strategic target behind enemy lines. Wedge is useful for punching through enemy lines or dividing their forces. These formations, though defensive in nature are multi-purpose and may also be used in offense. Furthermore, I have no desire to micro my units into these formations when a simple instruction could be made available.

Modern military units use small squads organized into variations of the line because those formations are most effective at bringing cones of fire onto the expected target location with minimal possibility of friendly fire.

In this case the formations are much larger, laying out a line of 50 tanks is a bit impractical for long distance travel but once you get on target you want to break out into lines again. Massive columns of tanks can be chewed up by strafing runs or stationary defenses, but if the enemy is presented with a line across the horizon it is hard to switch between targets quickly enough to take them all out. Especially if units are spaced properly to allow for decreased aoe damage. Lots of formation variations like staggered lines, columns, boxes, wedges, etc are useful in many different situations.

That being said it would be nice for the unit AI to make those decisions for itself without me having to micro my squads. That's a job for the NCOs on the ground not a planetary or galactic commander. That's way below his pay grade.

Hmmm maybe, but that's not what I meant and if we took that POV on everything in the game we really wouldn't have much of a game left.

For the record; I want to be able to control what formations my units are in - I just don't want to have to tell each unit exactly where it needs to stand in order to accomplish that.

Have you tried out ZK's custom formation command, wolfdogg? It tends to be a lot quicker to set up than a rigid formation system, and it often works a lot better since you define the points and orientation of the formation. It's not perfect, but I find myself using it a lot more frequently than formations in any other RTS, including Supcom.

It sounds good, I just got zero K a couple days ago, how do you get formations?

Right click and drag.