I keep seeing this sort of grouping suggested, but it really doesn't make sense to me to do it this way... It seems rather unlikely that the player would want a uniform group of 200 lancers and another group of 4 doom stars as two seaprate independent units. More likely, they'd want 4 groups of 1 doomstar and 50 lancers each, with each such group operating as an independent battle unit in which the doomstars do scary stuff, and the lancers protect the doomstars and don't stray far from it.Aquitaine wrote: Hull Max # Per Unit
---- -----------------
Lancer 200
Frigate 120
Corvette 90
Cruiser 60
Battleship 30
Titan 15
Doom Star 4
Presumably we want the different sizes of ship have different strengths and weaknesses such that their in-battle purpose is actually different. If groups are all homogenous and treated the same way as roughly-equivalent self-contained combat units like total units, then really there is no strategic difference between the 4 doomstars and the 200 lancers... in which case I have to wonder what the point of making the distinction between ship sizes is to begin with.
(The 200 lancers and 4 doomstars grouping could make sense if we wanted to have a rock-paper-scissors balancing system based on ship size like homeworld... but I think we can have a much more interseting such system based on weapon and defence types.)
That all said, I'm a bit unsure as to the intended nature and purpose of these groups. In total war it sounds like these units of X troops are preconfigured at the start of the battle, and that the groups are pretty difficult to split up and reconfigure during the battle. I don't see why we should think in this way.
Why not instead have the in-battle grouping be completely dynamic... like standard real-time strategy game control groups? If the player wanted to have a group of 4 doomstars and another group of 200 lancers (presumably because their weapons were strategically different, not just their size) then they could make up such groups. Or they could make a group of 50 lancers, and give it orders to provide close-protection for these two doomstars, after which the doomstars could be ordered around and the 50 lancers protecting them would automatically follow in formation. At some point later, (some of) the lancers could be disengaged from the doomstars and make into a smaller task force and sent off to do intercept some fleeing damaged enemy ships or somesuch.
Conversely, if the player had 2 missile doomstars and 100 missile lancers, as well as 2 laser doomstars and 100 laser lancers, s/he might make two groups each consisting of 2 doomstars and 100 lancers, with the groups separated by weapon type. The groups would then be used as though they were a homogenous group / single unit, like units in total war. (There would then be no separate orders for subsets of the ships in the groups as in the above lancer-protect-the-doomstars-while-doomstars-attack example... though there would be no reason the player couldn't pick off any homogenous or heterogenous subset of the ships in a group and make a new group, or give them special orders w.r.t. the group as a whole if s/he was so inclined.)