Grouping units

For the life of me I can't figure this out.
I have played every totalwar game since the first Shogun and I have not
had this much trouble.
All I want to do is pick lets say all my archers, hit ctrl + 1 or whatever
and right click on the group and position them.
I can do this but I can't stretch the formation to what I want.
It seems to be locked in a random shape that all I can do is rotate it.
I'm missing a step I guess but I don't know what.
I have looked at the video on here and I thought I was doing it right but
I still get the locked formation.
Any help would be appreciated.

Waynenh57

Once grouped, always grouped, I how I think of it.

That does not mean that you can not ungroup them, make changes and regroup; but as long as they are a designated group, they will behave as a group.

Select the units you want to be involved, position and stretch them to your desired configuration, and “then” group them.

They will stay as you assigned them until you ungroup them, and reassign their configuration.

Advantages to this are directional controls act the same on a group as they do on an individual unit.

And you can select an individual unit in a group and give it individual instructions, which it will follow.

Then later select the group again, maybe to move it to a new location, and the individual unit will rejoin the group in the original configuration.

It is different, but provides its own advantages

There are actually two modes when grouping units.

1) FIXED, where the units' relative positions are snapshot when the group is created. Note that the *original* snapshot is remembered even though you move a single unit away from its original relative position. This means that this mode might be useful for initial manouvering, but not very useful once your engaged with the enemy.

2) STRECHY, which is activated by assigning the group one of the group formations. This is the more useful mode when combining several similar units into a group.

Note that when moving units it's very important the correct units are selected. If you select only part of groups or multiple groups the result is very counter intuitive.

Beware of “stretchy” as it places a configuration form on the units.

Depending on what unit types are involved, and how many, you can get some very unexpected results.

You will be able to stretch them out, but not change the formation model until ungrouped again.

Experiment in Custom first :wink: