I like the idea in principle, bit I think it would lead to some undesirable consequences.

Say you had 2 cruisers, one L1 and one L2 in a stack. They'd be separate units, so would get 50/50 damage distribution and so might be able to beat 2 L2 cruisers in a straight fight. That would be wrong.

It would only work if CoN adopted the damage system from Call of War, where a stack doesn't start losing units until it's below 50%Hp for the whole stack.

If Dorado wanted to (and could realistically implement) a system that tracked not only individual units' types, but their unique levels, and if they could somehow illustrate that elegantly enough in both CoN's PC and mobile user interfaces; would you really want them to spend their time on that change instead of you/them adopting one of the alternate responses to the situation you described?

One alternative is for you (and me) to simply deploy our forces more carefully and/or congratulate an opponent who is clever enough still outflank us after we make our more careful deployments.

Another alternative would be to create some new cheap and (quick to build) meatshield unit types that would stay cheap and easy (and weak) for the whole game. However, if they did create those meatshields, they would probably also want to consider giving their deaths a big effect on their owner's morale, and maybe also alter the rules so that strong enough opposing forces could plow through the meatshields without stopping, if the attacker's advantage was really large.

I'm guessing that if you suggest introducing cheap & quickly produced meatshield units your suggestion will have a better chance of becoming adopted.

KFG

I don't think that's a big problem, to be honest. It already effectively exists in the WW2 version of this game and could probably just be ported over.

As for cheap meat shield units, I always thought that was what National guard was for

Apparently @Gambler42 wants something that can be produced faster and more cheaply than Tech-Level-N NG. I can see his point.

For what the result would look like in a mobile phone, in my mind's eye I'm imagining either a visual mess, or clean visuals that put a big burden on me to remember what's in each stack, and to remember the skins of all doctrines I and my opponents are using.

However, if you say it can be done well, I'll believe you. Can you post a couple of screen shots to clear up any lingering doubts?

Why do you suppose Dorado didn't port that WW2 game's individual-unit-levels implementation when they started CoN? My *wild guess* would be that they left that out of CoN precisely because they didn't want to have to continue dealing with the software and GUI hassles of keeping track of individual units' tech levels.

KFG

Well, what Call of War does is force the player to manually upgrade units (if and when they want) once they've researched a new level. This means that you can upgrade some, but not all, of your existing units of a particular type, if you so choose. And you can still put these same-type-different-level units into the same stack. They just have a different 'chevron' symbol to denote which level they are.

What CoW doesn't let you do is what @Gambler42 is suggesting - you can't build 'outdated' unit levels once you've researched a higher one - but it's something that I've seen requested for that game. And I kind of agree, to be honest. I don't see what harm it'd do.

Another thing CoW does differently is its mobilization system. Mobilization times are generally a lot shorter anyway, but they depend on the level of the unit and the level of the requisite building. So you can, say, build a level 1 Light Tank from a Level 1 Tank Plant in X number of hours, but you can reduce the time by updating the building. If you level up to level 6 Light Tanks and your Track Plant is still level 1, it's going to take about 3 days to build one, whereas it'll be less than a day if you keep your Tank Plant upgraded as well.

Anyway, the result of that that's relevant here is with Militia units (CoW equivalent to National Guard). If you leave them at level 1 and you upgrade the Barracks, you can actually recruit them every 45 minutes! This means you really can use them as emergency lumps of HP to slow down an enemy advance - but you will run out of Manpower and Food (equivalent of CoN's "Supply" resource) pretty quickly doing this.

I don't know why Dorado chose not to adopt that system for CoN. Personally, I think I prefer it, but I do remember there being a lot of opposition to it as well, and calls from some people for the 'old' system (which CoN still does use) to be reintroduced.

Hi,

Well I am not sure about more realistix. I mean no one is recuiting outdated meatshields in real life. Its the other way around, it takes ages to fit out every soldier with the latest gun models and you are stuck with 20 year old tanks where replacement parts a scarce and cost a Fortune on ebay.

Look at your use case and why you want to do this. You want to build units fast because you got surprised. Well build tank destroyer and national guard. This is their purpose as they have short construction times.

But if you really get surprise you dont habe 7h for national guard(at least when i surpise you) show is over in 12h and national guard just ends up on my kill statistic. In this case and we can call it business case dorado is calculating that you put in some real money to make up for you lack of planning and reconaissance.