What if every unit you created in an RTS game was automatically put into the equivalent of a ‘control group’? Let’s call that automatic group an ‘Army’.
And what if that Army was a core way you issued orders to your units? You select the Army, much in the same way you’d select a single unit, and tell it to go somewhere. The Army takes care of getting all of the individual vehicles, soldiers, etc. to a location near where you asked the army to go. It has a desired ‘formation’ in mind, so it’ll try to position each unit in a location that works with both the terrain, and, the formation.
If that Army encounters a hostile force, it has a degree of autonomy with which to defend itself. Units within the Army reposition themselves, under some constraints, to help out other units that fall under attack. So you don’t need to manually issue attack orders to fight a target that’s close, but, just out of weapons range. This makes your army capable of modest self-defense if you’re not focusing solely on it, but you can (and should!) still manually move units to tactically advantageous positions to get better odds of winning.
An Army Encounters Hostiles on Two Sides and Engages
So those are the basics of Armies, but how do they actually play out?
When the game starts, you (normally) have at least one army already; a recon army. You can choose to reinforce that army with additional units, or, create new armies as you see fit for different purposes. In practice, players often have a sort of recon / scout army full of mostly faster units, and a ‘frontline’ army filled with most of their heavy hitters, highly durable units, etc. Aerial armies, defensive armies, etc. also come into play, but you can create a lot of highly-specific armies, or a few more general ones. If you decide you need to split an army, or merge some together, you can do that at any point as well. That’s especially handy if you accidentally put the wrong units in an army, or, just decide you need to retreat some units out of a battle while the main army presses forward.
Splitting a Unit Out of an Army as it Moves
Other gameplay and control features make using Armies even easier. You can reinforce an existing army with more units, and when you do this, the units will automatically be recruited as a member of that army, AND move to rally with that army (wherever it is). This largely eliminates the need to setup production rally points, having to constantly re-select and re-group units into groups, etc. Constructing production buildings closer to your armies allows you to reinforce them faster as well. Check out Dev Journal 5 for a breakdown on how that works! Placing production buildings in key, frontline locations is a major part of winning battles of attrition, as you’ll be able to quickly replace any lost units.
A lot of the micromanagement needed to produce tons of units, and get them where you need to go, has some slick automation. This leaves you free to focus on your economy, strategy, and any ongoing battles!
Reinforcing an Existing Army with Additional Units
We’re working on tools to make Armies even more functional. Want an army that maintains a specific composition of 5 recon units, no more, no less? We hope to allow that automation such that the army will request reinforcements whenever they lose a unit. Handy when you have a purpose-built army that you need to maintain, but for which you don’t want to manage unit production (or accidentally over-recruit!).
While Armies existed in Ashes of the Singularity 1, a lot of the ideas we’ve discussed didn’t quite have the impact that was hoped. In Ashes 2, we hope to fully realize those aspirations, turning Armies into a core gameplay element, and embracing them in our quest for massive, epic battles!