Volley Fire: Jerome please help!

I know I have brought this question up on other forums but I am still without a definitive answer.

Jerome, if you are out there, somewhere, perhaps you can answer this yes or no question:

Can volley fire be implemented effectively?

The deeper question (once you really get to thinking about it) is can a soldier's animation sequences and individual animations be made dependent on the shape and depth of the formation, specifically, how many men are behind him.

Why do I ask?

From what I have been told, the two biggest barriers to a working volley fire system are:

1. How a soldier in the 2nd, 3rd, 4th etc rank can be made to move forward once the front ranks have fired and retired to the back.

2. How a the distance back that a soldier has to move be made dependent on the depth of the formation.

Both of these things require the soldier to have situational awareness... can this be done? Jerome? :help:

If CA would help with this it would sure as hell be a big help to the modding community.

I suspect it would be something they would have to hard code, like phalanx units. That is the only other unit that seems to have that sort of seperate rank animation that I can think of at the moment. And it is hardcoded.

Testudo also has different animations for different ranks. Needless to say, that's also hardcoded.

-Simetrical

Seems like it could be done (by CA) as a "symbiotic" formation. Essentially represent each rank as a unit, but tied together in some sort of script so that the animations react in a structured way relative to one another. Deeper ranks would be in default line formations and lumped as one. As the forward lines were depleted, these supporting troups would be pulled into fill gaps.

This could also work for composite units: shield bearers for archers, camel/horses with two riders (a more ancient practice typically.) It might even work for doing cavalry dismout, or chariot dismount.

It would be nice I suppose if archers behaved this way. The current method is for very deep formation firing. Limiting fire to some number of forward ranks (and not penalizing with respect to range for these forward ranks) sounds more realistic to me.