Quote Originally Posted by blacksnail
Incidentally, it would be very interesting to me to see a campaign map system where you gave every army a destination as part of movement, as well as engagement parameters ("pursue and attack all enemies encountered/pursue and attack half strength enemies encountered/actively avoid all enemies if possible/force march/defend location X and the nearby vicinity from any enemy spotted"). When you hit "start the clock" every army on the map would advance to where they had been ordered by the player or the AI and battles would occur during an abstracted length of time (week/month/year) until you got back to the strategic approach again. However, the AI required to maintain a consistent grand strategy for dozens of enemy factions would be potentially crippling to code, if not confusing as hell for the player without some abstraction, so that's on my wishlist for stuff I hope to see in 10 years or so.
Couldn't a very similar effect be achieved today by the use of "phases" within a turn? In the first phase, building/recruiting/taxing gets done for the turn, all armies/units get movement orders (but don't move yet) and the end turn button gets pressed. Now every army/unit moves one map square, simultaneously, and fow gets recomputed. If a new enemy unit is revealed, the movement pauses while the player or AI decides on new orders for that unit. Combat gets resolved if two armies end up on the same square in the same phase (possible strategic evasion!) As armies units ran out of move points, the phases would go faster until no one had any moves left and a new turn would begin.