New Concept to the Total War Series: Individuality and Duties?

[Metz]

In all Total War games up to date, one can only move groups of soldiers together to fight or to defend. They all do the same thing when you order them to get a enemy... They charge or shoot arrows.... Even in siege they all go up the ladders or the siege towers...etc...

For example how would a Total War game be if you could assign a particular unit to do a "duty" instead of an action... when you besiege a settlement, you decide to build a trench around an area of the settlement... In battle you could see the soldiers of a unit just walking around the trench patrolling it, putting up defenses, scouting out, etc... Perhaps you could even zoom in on how the siege is going like how in RTW you could check out your cities and its people walking around without having to be in a battle.

This would add another aspect to the game.. It would be entertaining to see all your soldiers build something together and dig holes or trenches.. The cavalry would patrol around the area while the defendant's units would watch from the towers... Etc...

In a Medieval Total War game one could either assign a whole unit to fight normally or assign to a duty like after penetrating a castle gate, they are assigned to spread out and find a enemy to fight...

Battles would be more of a brawl with units mixed up all over the place instead of a "one-side-shoving-the-other-side-fight"..

Perhaps duties would suit more the gunpowder age Total Wars or defense positions... But some offensive maneuvers could have duties too.

Also.. Future Total War game should have units raising their shield whenever arrows are about to fall on them...

Perhaps more physics where spontaneously calculated actions based on the units skill could decide how an individual soldiers kills an enemy in a fight and where good soldiers go on a slicing spree taking out the enemies their allies are fighting.

Maybe in the far future too... There could be the ability to control a single unit in the battle with the click of a button... Something like Mount and Blade: Warband... perhaps even add a RPG element to it like promotions... From a peasant soldier up to a faction leader and having your own family and provinces..

[Theedge634]

I really like it... I've been going about ideas for a ww1 total war in the thread for it... And feel like it would be PERFECT for that time period.... Machine gun duties in the trench... Assigning men to what wave they will be... So they position themselves correctly before going "over the top".... It would also be nice to incorporate certain duties base on levels of experience... A very experienced infantry unit has the ability to deploy snipers and such... Very cool idea...

[Metz]

That could make a WW1 Total War possible... The ability to send units to perform duties or to be controlled as a whole and fight as a group (early WW1 battles).

Perhaps another duty as well is to send a unit into a group of trees and set skirmish mode on... This would make the unit take cover behind trees and shoot. To make things even more complex maybe guard mode could be that the unit stays together and having it off would make individual units go back to get more ammo when they have depleted their ammunition.