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« on: December 03, 2012, 04:01:04 pm »
I know this isn't directly related to your post, but just so you know aliens will appear throughout that map (+hills) in 2.5. Not just in the UFO. This should be the case for all maps in 2.5 (thanks to ShipIt).
In general, I am not in favour of a system like you propose because it encourages the player to play badly. It would be hard to implement it in a way that didn't imply that the developers thought the player ought to be using groups like this. But our battlefield is very tactical, which means grouping your soldiers in any standard orientation like historic melee-based games (line, circle) will only expose your soldiers in tactically vulnerable positions.
Winning on the battlefield is more about cover and concealment, and it would be nearly impossible to write a strong AI in which the game was able to choose appropriate cover positions for your soldiers on its own (games that have tried to do this -- the Ghost Recon or COD series, for instance -- often end up giving your NPC allies special survivability conditions to overcome their poor tactical positioning). As a player of several of these games, I can tell you that AAA studios have not yet come up with an AI smart enough not to expose itself in very stupid ways.
I appreciate that your proposal is more about moving lots of soldiers more easily when there is no risk to them (no aliens around, let me just get these guys across the battlefield). In this case, I would prefer to either fix the problem from the other end (like making sure maps don't have large useless areas) or implementing some kind of multi-turn command (like "go to this point as fast as possible, with automatic moving on subsequent turns until it reaches its destination").
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