"I still think that people think of icons as individual units, and this in turn creates a different mode of thinking"

That''s what I meant. The smallest unit is just that, one unit. It don''t matter what you call it.

Think of it like ratios. I hope your game does have a large scale and I''m not downing your game, but that''s my problem with strategy games, sure the smallest unit is a company, but how many companies are gonna be in battle at the same time?

As I was only looking on the back cover I won''t say the game sucks, but this game had the words ''Starfleet'' and "Fleet" in the title. Let me just say I did not see a couple hundred ships in the screenshot and that is what bugs me.

Some missions would better be served by having a FPS view and intelligent allies they involve so few units.

anonymous-
Ideally I''d like to have my game at the operational level of warfare, so I was thinking Divisional level, possibly on the order of Corps. So roughly about 10,000-40,000 troops (possibly more). Which I imagine would equate to about 100-400 icons on the screen at a time for one side. So for both sides, most battles will probably average about 300+ icons. When you consider that each icon will have it''s own AI, this will amount to a huge amount of dedicated AI resource hogging!! But I think it can be done.

I want a sense of grandeur and grandness that is lacking in RTS games. Have you ever felt like you were in the middle of a huge earth shattering battle in an RTS game?

All hail the great and gloriuos Dauntless, good luck to you in making that grandeur come alive. I''m doing the same thing(a little bigger perhaps) but my game started out turn-based but more importantly, my vision of the game was turn-based and all the rules are oriented toward turn-based so there''s no changing. I can''t wait to see it in real time though.