Good Lords, Fair Ladies!
Remember us mentioning that the Formation Management toolset is getting an upgrade? Well, today we are ready to tell and even to show you exactly what it is all about.
To begin with, a separate tab will appear in the UI for managing Formations. It gives access to the sort of editor, that allows you to turn your combat tactics literally upside down.
The formation has 9 lines. In the first line, there are icons of troop types from the vanguard, in the ninth - from the rearguard. Basically, the line number determines the positioning priority of your troops within the same formation. By default, Healers from the sixth line will take their place in front of Catapults from the seventh line, but behind Hammerguys from the third. Yet we want the formation management to become another space for experimentation.
The easiest thing you can do is to change the order of the lines. Want your Catapults on the frontline? Pull the slider on the right and drag the line with the Catapults icon to the top of the list. Apart from dragging lines, you'll also get an opportunity to swap lines with each other.
You'll be able to perform similar operations with each troop type separately: swap them with each other or move them to other lines that don't have any limit to the number of troops in them, by the way. So, feel free to mix your troops and lines. But what's the point in changing the place of troop type in the same line, you might ask. Here is an illustrative answer. Let's say you have a squad of Spearmen and Swordsmen.
When several troops are placed in the same row, you may want to use the button that changes the line width.
There are two types of lines: normal and stretched. The stretched one is needed to expand the width of a line of troop types from one row to the maximum value represented in that row. We think this is an extremely useful feature, allowing you to cover war machines with infantry, whose formation is usually narrower due to the smaller size of troops.
We understand that you may need to quickly change the formation settings. There are four presets in the box for this purpose. Not only you can customize each of them individually, but also duplicate the settings of the current formation into another preset for further editing. All edits made to the formation are saved automatically, and your squads will change their combat setup according to the new settings once they receive the next order.
If at some point you get confused with presets, lines, and icons of troop types - don't worry, you can always return the formation to the default settings by pressing the "reset" button.
We really hope that the upcoming improvements, together with the already-known tool for adjusting Formation density and width, will bring the army management to the next level.
Thank you for being with us!
Yours, the Door 407 dev team