New Concept For Troops and Fighters

[Atrocities]

I have this idea.

What I propose is a simple system for Troops. Right now we like to break them down into sub-catagories, Light Infantry, Medium Infantry, and Heavy Infantry. Light Armor, Medium Armor, Heavy Armor. Light Air Support, Medium Air Support, and Heavy Air Support.

Currently to design an Troop, in an unmodded game, one must select either small, medium, or large troop. Then manually add all the weapons and other components manually to creat ONE single unit type.

Mods however break the Troops into the above mentioned unit groups so that a player can have a semblence of true Infantry, Armor, and Air units.

What I propose is kids simple, based upon the model used in Rise Of Nations. Instead of designing a single infantry unit, you would design an Infantry Group. These groups would be unit sizes such as Squad, platoon, regiment, division, and say corp/army.

For the Infantry Group "squad" the playe would simply choose between many differant single infantry components. These components would not be weapons as they are now, but rather single troop images that have specific weapons abiities. The Riflemen Component would be a basic short range less damage component, the Heavy Machine Gunner would be more powerful, the missile/anti trooper would be another one. A communication specialist (multi tracking, ecm, etc), an engineer (a shield / armor ability, etc) and so on.

A player would simply choose their Groupings, which would be a specific KT size, and add the infantry components as desired. For say a Squad size Group or Unit, the KT size would be 12. The play could had 6 riflemen components at 2kt each, or mix an match them. 4 rifelmen and 2 bazooka men. The larger the Infantry Group, Platoon for instance, the more types and number of infantry components can be added.

In combat they would be shown as a single unit or as a group of say three (Kinda like Combat Group). Each individual group, be it a squad or platoon, or greater, would have its one distinct look. This way you know at a glace that you have a six 12 kt squads and 1 200kt regiment deployed.

The same thing can be done for mechinzed or armored vehicles, and air units.

As to fighters the concept would be about the same except that instead of squads it would be air unit types like wings, air wings, and such.

In Empires At War each X-wing Group has 12 x-wings. In this case to serve our purposes, an Wing Group could consist of 12 seperate fighter components. Attack Fighter Components, Defense Fighter Components, Support fighter components, and tactical fighter components, coupled with support craft to make up one wing group.

Plants would be defeneded by 1 group which could = 12 fighters (By current standards that would be one fighter with 12 guns.) By mixing and matching these wing groups, a player could add say 6 fighter components, 2 bomber components (They would basically be anti ship missiles) and 1 support craft that offers shielding, To Hit, and other bonuses.

I am working a model of this system for use in an SE IV mod that have been working on, but think that it would also work well for SE V.

Instead of individual fighter images in combat, the traditional fighter image would be replaced by say a small group of 3 fighters. Larger groupings would have more fighters or other distingishing markers to denote large groups of fighters within a single unit.