Have your soldiers talk to one another when you leave them close by, change stance from time to time, scratch etc. However, when they are aware of the enemy or are in an exposed or critical part of the map they shut up, point their guns ahead of them and scan the landscape for danger.

An inexperienced soldier, on seeing a friend get shot, might try to be the hero by going to rescue him. Then you can hear his superior shouting ''get back here, soldier, that''s an order!''.

I don''t think many war games manage to make the soldiers seem sufficiently inexperienced - most of them probably will be - and that might help us relate to them.

Thanks on all the replies....lots of good ideas here

I think having lots of unique "profiles" (icons, .wav or animated .gif clips) are good ways of personalizing the units. I also like the concept of having to take care of your troops otherwise they may become less willing to fight, and conversely, a soldier who looks up to his commanding officer will be more willing to fight for him.

In some respects this is about morale, but I think it goes deeper than that. I remember hearing war stories in more ancient times of soldiers hearing the sounds of the wounded out on the battlefield slowly dying...and they''d just clamp on their ears so so they wouldn''t have to hear their friends dying on the battlefield. The superalitive medical evacuation system that the US has employed since Korea (we were the first to use helicopters as med evac units) gave a considerable morale boost to the soldiers.

Then there''s the concept of having Commanders that troops would go to hell and back with. While having morale is a pretty easy concept to get across personally (having as one person suggested, corpses or wounded on the battlefield for the player to witness) is pretty easy....but getting Commanders characterization down might be a bit harder.

In my single player campaign, I''m definitely going to have some Commanders play NPC like roles. They will be advisors as well as pivotal players in the single player campaign. So I think in my single player game, I can get the Commanders across as real live human beings fairly easily (I''ll probably come up with little movie clips or audio clips with their speeches). How to do this in a non-linear form though will not be as easy.

I''m definitely including unit persistence in my game. In fact, as another person suggested, I''m going to have military banners and standard bearers to represent each organized unit down to the "company" level. I''d like to have an option for players to come up with their own banners and standards and motto''s for each "regiment". I think this will help encourage a feeling of "esprit de corps" and the standards will showcase a list of every battle that the unit has fought in and any citations it has won.