So, while we've seen lots of cool infantry units in this game so far, it would be odd if those infantry had to travel around the world entirely on foot. I expect there to be some way to transport units in this game, but I don't think there's a clear way to implement it in the AOW engine.
The naive way to do this would be to have a separate transport unit that could deploy the infantry mid battle like a combat summon, with each unit taking one slot in a stack. The problem comes when trying to get the unit into the transport-this is after all, a game where the devs don't even want to let us deploy units pre-battle. The pre-battle micromanagement to get the troops you want into the transports you want would be out of the question.
A slightly unsatisfying way forward would be to assume that all units disembark before combat, so all transports do is improve the movement of an infantry unit in the same stack on the strategic map. This cuts out the micromanagement load, as it shouldn't be that hard to automate assigning transports to units.
We could take this a step further, and abstract transports out of the game entirely-just have an empire upgrade "Motorized infantry" which makes infantry move farther on the strategic map, and assume that transports aren't suited to combat. The you could also implement a range of airlift operations to fly units around.
These would work, but not being able to fly troops to a crucial piece of cover in the middle of a battle is a little unsatisfying. You could maybe make a transport take up an upgrade slot, but balancing even a very weak transport against other upgrades seems dubious-that's still another 30ish hp and an extra three ap to attack with. Jetpacks don't compare. Another option would be to have a dedicated mechanized unit-say an elite infantry squad and a fancy transport helicopter together as a t3 unit, where neither half is really t3 quality, but you still have two of them. The main problem I can see with this is figuring out what happens when one half dies? Do they just re-spawn with low hp at end of turn?
Does anyone have any thoughts on how to implement infantry transports within the age of wonders framework?
The naive way to do this would be to have a separate transport unit that could deploy the infantry mid battle like a combat summon, with each unit taking one slot in a stack. The problem comes when trying to get the unit into the transport-this is after all, a game where the devs don't even want to let us deploy units pre-battle. The pre-battle micromanagement to get the troops you want into the transports you want would be out of the question.
A slightly unsatisfying way forward would be to assume that all units disembark before combat, so all transports do is improve the movement of an infantry unit in the same stack on the strategic map. This cuts out the micromanagement load, as it shouldn't be that hard to automate assigning transports to units.
We could take this a step further, and abstract transports out of the game entirely-just have an empire upgrade "Motorized infantry" which makes infantry move farther on the strategic map, and assume that transports aren't suited to combat. The you could also implement a range of airlift operations to fly units around.
These would work, but not being able to fly troops to a crucial piece of cover in the middle of a battle is a little unsatisfying. You could maybe make a transport take up an upgrade slot, but balancing even a very weak transport against other upgrades seems dubious-that's still another 30ish hp and an extra three ap to attack with. Jetpacks don't compare. Another option would be to have a dedicated mechanized unit-say an elite infantry squad and a fancy transport helicopter together as a t3 unit, where neither half is really t3 quality, but you still have two of them. The main problem I can see with this is figuring out what happens when one half dies? Do they just re-spawn with low hp at end of turn?
Does anyone have any thoughts on how to implement infantry transports within the age of wonders framework?
